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!
Winter 2026
Travesti Politics
Xelestial Moreno-Luz 2nd Year MFA exhibition
Reception: January 9, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Xelestial Moreno-Luz presents her Second Year MFA show at the University of Califoria, San Diego. The show's primary medium is photography. The instillation depicts trans/travesti resistance in photographs, as well an excerpt of a short film on two-spirit youth in Abya Yala.
Sheddings;
Janice Chanmi Kang UG student exhibition
Reception: January 14, 12:00 - 2:30 p.m.
January 13 - January 15, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Janice Chanmi Kang is a sculpture artist at UC San Diego, inspired by the emotional presence embedded in objects forgotten and left behind. Her exhibition, Sheddings; explores the reluctance to move on from one’s past, examining what remains of forlorn passions, habits, and people lingering in memory.
To Hold is To Be Held
MFA Thesis Preview Exhibition
Reception: January 15, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
January 15 - February 14, 2026
Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego
The group exhibition features UC San Diego Visual Arts MFA students in their final year. Participating artists: Jamil Baldwin, Rahul Basu, Sophia Cleary, Walker Hewitt, Izzai Martinez Angulo, Aambr Newsome, erika roos, and Andrew Wharton.
Defense Sites
James M Dailey 2nd Year MFA exhibition
Reception: January 16, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Main Gallery + Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
Along with collaborators Jeniffer Lopez and Edwin Alvarez Loza, James M Dailey presents a Second Year MFA show at the University of Califoria, San Diego.
Ecdysis: the process of shedding an outer layer.
Nube Cruz 2nd Year MFA exhibition
January 19 - January 23, 2026
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
New photographic and sculptural works tracing transformation, family ghost stories, and metamorphosis. These pieces think through haunted materials where flesh holds memory, and erasure leaves residue. Fragments surface: myth, migration, the alien body, inherited photographs. What remains after the skin is gone.
Canine Psychosomatic
Marissa Morales UG student exhibition
Reception: January 20, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
January 19 - January 23, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
An exhibition dedicated to the love and loss of dogs, and the memories that linger afterwards.
Surface Tension
Ava Kam UG student exhibition
Reception: January 26, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
January 27 - January 30, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
In this body of work, I study the ocean as a place where stillness and pressure coexist, capturing moments that hold both calm and power. The work reflects on the surface of the water as a fragile boundary, one that contains immense force beneath it.
임시방편; ADHOC
Ryan Oh 2nd Year MFA exhibition
January 27 - January 31, 2026
11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Provisional methods and temporary structures shape a photographic process guided by necessity, adaptation, and incomplete solutions. Making remains open and responsive, always on the verge of becoming something else.
Hasta La Raíz
Amber Urena UG student exhibition
Reception: February 2, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
February 3 - February 5, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Hasta La Raíz explores the intersection of textile, pattern, and cultural identity through portraiture as living carriers of cultural memory. The work reflects on Mexican-American identity, navigating the space between two cultures while resisting the erasure that can accompany acculturation.
Seaweeds
Michelle Sui 2nd Year MFA exhibition
Performance: February 3, 5:00 p.m.
Gallery Hours: February 2 - February 6, 2026, by appointment: msui@ucsd.edu
Experimental Theater, Conrad Prebys Music Center, UC San Diego
Moving image installation with live score by Michelle Sui, performed live by the first year DMA/PhD cohort of the UCSD Department of Music.
La Cura
Screening with Steve Fagin, Professor Emeritus
February 4, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego
Steve Fagin is an American artist and former professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has produced a series of feature length videos, including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People, and TropiCola (the latter produced in collaboration with some of the most important theatre actors and producers in Havana).
Roots and Borders
Katelyn Ramirez & Mariana Mercado UG student exhibition
Reception: February 24, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
February 24 - February 26, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Roots and Borders explores Mexican-American cultural identity through themes of ancestry, immigration, and resilience. The exhibition reflects both historical and current experiences of the community, highlighting the connection between cultural roots and lived realities.
Joey Terrill
Russell Lecture with MCASD
March 12, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Jacobs Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
Since the 1970s, Joey Terrill, a Los Angeles based Chicano artist, has explored the intersection of his Latino and gay male identities in his art. A native Angeleno, he studied at Immaculate Heart Collage and California State University, Los Angeles. Living with HIV for 45 years, his art career has paralleled and documented his four decades as an AIDS activist.
Recent Publications
Field Journal #31
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.
The Revolution Takes Form
By Assistant Professor Jordan Marc Rose
During the French Revolution of 1830, insurgents raised some four thousand barricades. Afterward, lithographs of the street fighting flowed from the presses, creating the barricade’s first imagery. This book documents the changing political valence of the revolutionary ideals associated with the barricade in France from 1830 to 1852.
Beyond the Sovereign Self
By Professor Grant Kester
In Beyond the Sovereign Self Grant H. Kester continues the critique of aesthetic autonomy begun in The Sovereign Self, showing how socially engaged art provides an alternative aesthetic with greater possibilities for critical practice. Instead of grounding art in its distance from the social, Kester shows how socially engaged art, developed in conjunction with forms of social or political resistance, encourages the creative capacity required for collective political transformation.
The Sovereign Self
By Professor Grant Kester
In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society.
Autodrive
By Professor Jordan Crandall
Autodrive is a work of literary fiction that melds techno-scientific inquiry and storytelling, critical theory and comedy, speculative fiction and satire. It is a road novel of sorts, an odyssey along the highways at a time when a new form of superintelligence has emerged.
Royal Book Lodge
By Professor John C. Welchman
A study and a guidance device, the first book on the Royal Book Lodge (RBL) is the culmination a three-year exploration by art historian and cultural commentator John C. Welchman. It examines the contribution of the RBL to an array of art, film and performance practices including photography, ceramics, writing, and publishing—centered on the creation of artist books and the powerful and wide-ranging dialogue and material experimentations they engender.
Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks
By Professor Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman
With these thirty short, manifesto-like texts—building blocks for a new kind of architecture—Spatializing Justice offers a practical handbook for confronting social and economic inequality and uneven urban growth in architectural and planning practice, urging practitioners to adopt approaches that range from redefining infrastructure to retrofitting McMansions.
Michael in Black
By Associate Professor Nicole Miller
This first monograph on artist and filmmaker Nicole Miller focuses on a single sculpture by the artist: Michael in Black (2018). This book brings together a cohort of writers and other artists through newly commissioned texts and works for the page, as well as republished texts and images that exist as their own whole.
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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. *