News & Events
This is an outline of events produced by the Department for the current quarter. Sign up for our Weekly Newsletter to keep up-to-date with these and other events from our Students, Faculty, and Alumni!
Spring 2026
Grit
Jon Picinich UG student exhibition
Reception: March 30, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m. with Performance: 5:00 - 6:00 p.m.
March 31 & April 1, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.; April 2, 2:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
To have "Grit" is to persevere, to endure, to revel in the feelings of physical pain and discomfort. Jon Picinich's exploration of this idea lends itself to a physical approach to mark-making, performance, and material. The work deals with physical expression as a vessel for finding identity while grappling with what it means to be masculine and how that is constantly questioned.
Deep Roles
Sophia Cleary MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 2, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 1 - April 4, 2026
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Deep Roles investigates performance as both subject and inheritance. At its center is A Doll's House, an experimental documentary short that explores the legacy of growing up in a family of performers, where the theater served as a pathway to both create and avoid intimacy. An accompanying suite of drawings tucked away in the projection booth depicts heavy curtains and tomatoes — a meditation on the associative tropes that haunt an actor’s performance. Through drawing, installation, and film, Deep Roles asks what it means to perform for, with, and against the people that came before you.
Circular Stories
Nora Hagkull UG student exhibition
Reception: April 8, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 8 - April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Circular Stories is an exhibition of pieces that explore the enduring, yet constantly shifting nature of our world. I am interested in the many cycles that we see around us. The life cycle, for example, moves in a constant loop of birth, life, death, decomposition, and birth once again.
Outer Limits Exhibition
Closing Reception and Panel Presentations
April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
The liminal expands across a spatio-temporal divide, limning demarcations between inside and outside, now and then, here and there, and us and them. Reaching for it, we might bump up against, and sometime erode, boundaries between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, working through liminality engages not only with phenomenological experience but with processes and enactments.
Outer Limits Conference
April 11, 11:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla
The University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), is honored to convene the inaugural Art History Graduate Symposium. This landmark event establishes a vital forum for scholarly exchange, assembling a North American cohort of emerging historians and practitioners to examine the evolving methodologies of visual culture.
Stories Untold
Tessa Chan UG student exhibition
Reception: April 13, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
April 14, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.; April 15, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Stories Untold is a collection of narrative-driven works shaped by a love of nature, fantasy, and storytelling. Drawing on cultural influences, these pieces explore vivid moments, imagined places, and fragments of larger worlds. I rarely show my art or writing but with this exhibit, I hope to begin sharing them more openly, hence the name Stories Untold.
choreographies of becoming (a film)
erika roos MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 17, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
April 14 - April 17, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. or by appointment
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
choreographies of becoming ( a film ) is a site-sensitive installation and durational performance with 16mm film. Through the interwoven, looping bodies of projector, film, screen, light,and shadow, this installation contends with how we hold memory: in movement, in muscle, in celluloid, in textile, in our relationships with one another.
¿Quién Dijo Miedo, Muchachos? Si Para Morir Nacimos
Izzai Martinez Angulo MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 17, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.
April 14 - April 16, 12:00 - 6:00 p.m. by appointment only
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
This body of work explores the fluidity of my gendered identity through photography, staging and performance, particularly influenced by my mother and the American wrestler Shawn Michaels. In addition, this writing covers the relationship I possess with my family and the way their cisgendered bodies negotiate my androgyny.
Every Step Is Moving Me Up
Walker Hewitt MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: April 17, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.
April 17 - May 1, 2026
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
In Every Step Is Moving Me Up, Hewitt is exploring themes of walking, queer gathering, commitment, and what it means to be a neighbor. Through painted, ceramic and installative works, Hewitt reflects on how we construct and delineate space, how we articulate boundaries, and what it means to make a barrier more permeable.
Rabbit
Sophie Zhang UG student exhibition
Reception: April 20, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
April 20 - April 23, 2026, click link to see detailed hours
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Why select a rabbit? Somehow all the forces inherent to us as humans are so similarly projected onto a rabbit - a compelling but nonexistent innocence, survival constructed by our inherent natural gifts - body and limb and brain. Rabbits and we are both vessels through which power and violence move like shadows. Therefore, is Rabbit to Us as We are to Earth, or to the universe?
Solidarity in Diaspora
Eleanora Ginsborg UG student exhibition
Reception: April 30, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.
April 28, 2:15 - 4:00 p.m.; April 29, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Solidarity in Diaspora is an interdisciplinary, ethnographical attempt at weaving anti-zionist, Jewish university student stories & continued solidarity with the Palestinian people from across the United States. In making this series I thought and asked other students about the aspects of Judaism and of the community we are around that ground us in continued resistance and resilience.
Primordial Pneuma
Aambr Newsome MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: May 1, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 27 - April 30, 2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
This thesis exhibition explores ancestral veneration as it manifests through the body, the object, and image-making. Rooted in the artist’s engagement with myth, ritual, and sacred objects, the work considers how animacy is transmitted—through acts of making, through the repetition of everyday gestures, and through the enduring presence of familial spirits.
Auto-Insectification
Andrew Wharton MFA thesis exhibition
Reception: May 1, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 27 - May 1, 2026, click link to see detailed hours
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Auto-Insectification traces the development of the archetype of the homunculus: the inhuman, human-made intelligence through which the human being reflects and reflexively constructs itself. Auto-Insectification denies the homunculus, searching for a new model of intelligence and humanity in the figure of the insect.
Soft Spot
Nicole Johnson UG student exhibition
Reception: May 4, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
May 5 - May 8, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
My work focuses on the practice and display of care for the subject. Often in powerless positions, my subjects are vulnerable to the gaze of the viewer. I aim to encourage the viewer to examine their attitude toward the powerless subject. I want to explore the concept of trust and how it is given or received, and when.
16th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards
Awards Ceremony: May 15, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
SME Gallery & Theater, Structural & Materials Engineering, UCSD
Exhibition: May 14 - May 20, 2026
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, Mandeville Center, UC San Diego
Applications due April 24th: 2026 Application Form PDF
The Kamil family, Department of Visual Arts, and School of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego invite you to the 16th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards Ceremony. Please join us for an evening of film and creativity to honor the memory of Adam Douglas Kamil and showcase the talent of undergraduate UC San Diego students.
Recent Publications
Field Journal #32
Founded & Edited by Professor Grant Kester
We are living through a singular cultural moment in which the conventional relationship between art and the social world, and between artist and viewer, is being questioned and renegotiated. FIELD responds to the remarkable proliferation of new artistic practices devoted to forms of political, social and cultural transformation.
Homing In, Sharing Knowledge: Notes and essays on HISK laureates, 2016-23
By Professor John C. Welchman
The texts offer amplified meditations on the possibilities—but also defaults and limits—of the studio visit and on how this scene of encounter sets engagements with work that are dialogical and critically robust; respectful but also challenging; full of seeing into and through; and tactically combustible, in the sense of sparking future allusions.
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Learn about events produced by the Department and other news from our Students, Faculty, and Alumni!
GRAD EXHIBITIONS ONLINE
This site hosts online representations for the annual Graduate Open Studios. Documentation of gallery exhibitions and the screening program are viewable, along with links to each participating artist's studio page. Past Open Studios and MFA Thesis exhibitions are also viewable.
KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE
The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards. The online gallery is available to students throughout the year and can be used to share documentation of gallery exhibitions, or exclusively online exhibitions.
The Mandeville Art Gallery is an institute for transformative contemporary art.
Previously known as the University Art Gallery, the Mandeville Art Gallery is a long-standing fixture on the UC San Diego campus with a five-decade history of presenting innovative art in the context of a major research university. *