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! Submit items for the newsletter by completing the Submission Form.

Spring 2025

Mendi + Keith Obadike

Artist Talk on occasion of their exhibition The Skeuomorph opening at Gallery QI

April 3, 2025
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Gallery QI, Atkinson Hall Auditorium, UC San Diego

Mendi + Keith Obadike are artists, composers, and writers. Their works sit at the intersection of art, music, and language and draw upon histories of experimental media art and performance. Rooted in African-American freedom struggles and Igbo cosmology, The Skeuomorph unfolds as a poetic meditation on technological agency and the myths we encode in our machines.

Mary Mattingly

Remote Artist Talk

April 3, 2025
1:00 - 2:30 p.m.
YouTube Livestream

Mary Mattingly (b. 1978) is an interdisciplinary artist who cares deeply about water and believes in the power of public art. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a public barge in New York City. Recent public art projects include Limnal Lacrimosa in Glacier National Park, Public Water with +More Art in New York, Vanishing Point with Metal Southend and Focal Point Gallery in the UK.

Winter 2025

DILATION( )/INTERSTITIUM

erika roos 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 5:00 p.m.
January 13 - January 17, 2025
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

DILATION( )/INTERSTITIUM is a durational sub/merging of light movement, & image.

in this study, dancer & mfa candidate erika roos considers how the fluidity & disintegration of time shape the in-betweenness of bodily forms.

Alongside

Walker Hewitt 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 5:00 p.m.
January 13 - January 17, 2025
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Multimedia work considering the spaces we occupy, move through, and share, what it means to be a neighbor and the materials that build our environments.

Life in Resonance

UG students Noah Harvey, Malika Charles, Amanda Salatino Exhibition

Reception: January 16, 4:00 - 6:30 p.m.
January 14 - January 16, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Life in Resonance is a cumulation of our works focusing primarily on exploring themes of universal connections, spirituality, and human expression. Through a variety of traditional and digital media, we explored the intersections between these topics through abstract representational depictions.

Chimera

Andrew Wharton 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: January 30, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
January 27 - 31, 2025, by appointment
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Chimera is an exhibition using AI and surveillance to explore Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Trailcam Imagery, and the potential to reverse the gaze in predator/prey and creator/creation relationships.

The Sun From Both Sides

UG student Nicole Johnson Exhibition

Reception: February 3, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
February 4 - February 7, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Gallery exhibition of artworks by Nicole Johnson. Nicole's work aims to capture sentimental and often poignant moments with the use of black and white values in her charcoal drawings. She uses feminine subjects to convey ideas of nostalgia, vulnerability, and care for those represented in her works. 

Carmen Winant

Visiting Artist Talk

February 10, 2025
5:00 - 6:20 p.m.
B-202 Mandeville Center, UC San Diego

Carmen Winant is a Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University, where she is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art, and an affiliated faculty member in Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. Winant’s work poses a challenge to the ways that we understand women’s power, pleasure, labor, healing, and liberation to function, querying the aesthetic and political legacy of second-wave feminism.

More About: Emotions Left Behind the Window

UG student Youngmi Bombach Exhibition

Reception: February 11, 6:30 - 8:00 p.m.
February 11 - February 14, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

In our lives, we form relationships in various ways, and these connections, whether positive or negative, inevitably affect each of us. Through this exhibition, I aim to explore the emotional complexities, setbacks, and growth that emerge from the family dynamic.

Lantern Festival

UG student Kylie Yang Exhibition

Reception: February 17, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
February 17 - February 21, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Lanterns are inanimate objects yet can tell their own story from how it is made and its design. In my Chinese and Vietnamese culture they are a symbol of unity and guidance to people because of their functional and traditional purposes. There is a unique story told behind every person, a story to tell and shine similarly to lanterns.

Table Read

Sophia Cleary 2nd Year MFA Exhibition

Reception: February 20, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
February 18 - February 21, by appointment
Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

For her second-year show, Sophia Cleary presents a series of charcoal and graphite drawings of two de-commissioned medical exam tables that she sourced from UCSD Surplus Sales. Drawn on-site at the VAF Performance Space, Cleary employs the protocols of a figure drawing class as her script, but instead of a nude model and circle of artists rendering a figure, all roles are re-cast in this counter-examination of absence, remnant, and perversion.

Pattern of Being

UG student Sheeva Davari Exhibition

Reception: February 24, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
February 25 - February 28, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Sheeva Davari is a first-generation Iranian American artist who uses repetitive Persian carpet motifs and old family photographs to capture sentimental moments from childhood. “Pattern of Being” highlights Sheeva’s experimentation of layering feminine floral motifs juxtaposing ideas of racial prejudice between the Middle East and the United States and of feeling distanced from her family across the world. 

DOCTORAL RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

Keynote: Dr. Tamara Kneese

February 28, 2025
4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

The Doctoral Research Colloquium features talks by PhD students who have recently advanced to candidacy along with a keynote lecture by a speaker who has influenced their practice. The colloquium is a public forum where the excitement and energy of newly launched dissertation projects are shared with the broader local community through sustained dialog with a senior scholar in the field.

GRADUATE OPEN STUDIOS

March 1, 2025
2:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Visual Arts Facility and SME Gallery, UC San Diego

This is our opportunity to share with you and the San Diego community our research, scholarship, and artistic practices. Open Studios will feature over 25 MFA & PhD artists' open studios, exhibitions, screenings, and publications produced in the Department of Visual Arts. The artists will be present in their studios throughout the afternoon and excited to talk about and share their work with you.

Hamza Walker

Visiting Speaker

March 3, 2025
6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

This curator's talk focuses on Walker's forthcoming MONUMENTS exhibition at The Brick, which reflects on the histories and legacies of post-Civil War America as they continue to resonate today by bringing together a selection of decommissioned Confederate statues with contemporary artworks borrowed and commissioned for the occasion.

Veil & Vessel

VIS 105C class exhibition

Reception: March 5, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Open March 6, 1:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Alia Campos, Tessa Chan, Jacqueline Chang, Adela Day-Rodriguez, KristiLynn Effle, Kalie Elston, Dayton Garrett, Milan Guardado, Kelsey Hemphill, Natalia Hernandez, Mason Higgins-Goodell, Kelly Lau, Sarah Obregon, Natalia Robles, Marlan Shamilian, Annie Smith, Kylie Yang

Open Studios

Undergraduate Studio Honors

March 11, 12:30 - 3:30 p.m.
Mandeville 201B (upstairs), UC San Diego

Angelo Aguila, Julia Bushman, Gissela Castillo, Malika Charles, Sheeva Davari, Natalia Hernandez, Jaime Leynes, David Lovell, Armando Merino, Sarah Obregon, Lauren Reed, Trish Stockton, William Ung. STUDIO HONORS is a two consecutive quarter sequence for advanced students focusing on developing a self-directed studio practice and producing a Thesis Project. Students have open access to a communal studio space providing the opportunity to work in a sustained way with a close cohort of peers.

Land Embodied

VIS 169A class exhibition

March 11-12, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
March 13, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

This art exhibition explores the intersection of human presence and the landscapes we inhabit. Through photography and mixed media, the show displays portraits, movement, terrains, and the spaces in between, capturing the tension and harmony of lived experience. It delves into the freedom of those experiences and the raw curiosity that shapes us. We encourage you to stop by during the opening or anytime throughout the week to immerse yourself in this inspiring gallery.

Math Bass

Russell Lecture with MCASD

March 13, 2025
5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

This program is free for MCASD Members and UC San Diego faculty, staff, and students; $5 for other students and seniors; and $15 for non-members. Contact nlesley@ucsd.edu from your @ucsd.edu email to get the code for free tickets.

Eventual Vectors: Systems + Networks @ Scale

VIS 161 class exhibition

Reception: March 17, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
March 18 - March 20, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Juliana Amaya, Amara Bhatia, Kaylee Bradshaw, Chanta Chea, Sarah Chung, Emma Denton, Sonia Klein, Audrey Legaspi, Kieli Leon, Sydney Nunnemaker, So Rivera, Rania Shamji, Ember Sierra, Isabella Vargas, Shruthi Venkatesh, Ajjon Zimmerman

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VIS 141A class exhibition

March 19, 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Mandeville B-114 and B-116, UC San Diego

Animation and Data Visualization Showcase of VIS 141A work Winter 2025. The course introduces external APIs currently of interest in the arts, extending a common programming language such as C, C++, Python, or Java, and the basics of TCP/IP networking. Students gain API fluency through planning and coding software or software mediated art projects.

Embodied Pacific

Getty PST ART Exhibition

Ongoing in certain locations

Embodied Pacific is a platform of multisited exhibitions and events organized through a Getty PST ART: Art and Science Collide supported partnership between UC San Diego Visual Arts and Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, featuring projects by more than thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in SoCal and the Pacific Islands. Exhibitions, workshops, and programs at our six venues are designed to invite immersive engagement in sensory oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft.

Recent Publications

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.

Field Journal #26

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.

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.

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.

visarts.ucsd.edu/gradexhibitions

KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE

The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards. Visual Arts majors and minors at the junior or senior level are eligible to submit a proposal to show in the Kamil Gallery for one week during the academic school year. The online gallery is available to students throughout the year and can be used to share documentation of gallery exhibitions, or exclusively online exhibitions. All videos submitted for the Kamil Media Awards are viewable in the online gallery. Past online exhibitions remain viewable with the artists' permission.

visarts.ucsd.edu/kamilgallery