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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.

Summer 2024


a handful of fogposter

MFA Graduating Cohort Exhibition

Reception: July 20, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.
July 20 - July 27, 2024, by appointment
Elliott Hundley Studio, Los Angeles, CA

a handful of fog is work from six artists who make up the 2024 graduating class of the MFA program at University of California, San Diego. a handful of fog invokes the attempt of grasping at something nearly impossible to capture, continually escaping containment or comprehension. Yet, even with this slippage, we yearn for an understanding that feels unobtainable. In a slippage of their own, these artists grasp for histories that feel far away, tracing memories and steps, chasing desire, and archiving personal narratives situated within larger ones.

Exhibiting Artists: Deanna Barahona, JAX, Jun!yi Min, naomi nadreau, Chanell Stone, Nathan Storey

Curated by: Coralys Carter and Cat Gunn


Recent Publications


The Revolution Takes Formbook cover

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 #26Field Journal logo

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 Selfbook cover

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 Selfbook cover

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.

 


AutodriveAutodrive book cover

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 Lodgebook cover

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 Blocksbook cover

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 Blackphoto of the book cover

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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GRAD Exhibitions

GRAD EXHIBITIONS ONLINE

This site includes documentation of solo thesis shows from graduating MFA students as well as First Year Reviews. Past exhibitions include the 2022 & 2021 Open Studios and the 2021 & 2020 graduating MFA exhibitions.

visarts.ucsd.edu/gradexhibitions

Kamil Gallery

KAMIL GALLERY ONLINE

The Adam D. Kamil Gallery is now also online. This gallery is a site for undergraduate art shows and hosts the annual reception and exhibition for students that participate in the 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. Past online exhibitions remain viewable with the artists' permission.

visarts.ucsd.edu/kamilgallery

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.

Mandeville Art Gallery