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.

RATTLEBONE

Coralys Carter MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 4, 5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
April 7 - April 11, 2025 by appointment
Main Gallery + Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

In RATTLEBONE, Coralys Carter lends flesh to memory. Through sculpture, etchings, and textiles, Carter contends with the places memories reside: in our objects, in our homes, and in ourselves. Carter’s work sinks into the many meanings of objects, their uses, and places within and outside of the body where memory is made. The Midwest, its landscapes, its objects, and its people are central to the memory-scape that Carter takes up in RATTLEBONE.

Nelwat

Moe Penders Ramos MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 4, 5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Performance: April 10, 7:00 - 7:30 p.m.
April 4 - April 18, 2025
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Please join Moe Penders Ramos at their thesis show opening on April 4th from 5:00 pm to. 7:30 pm. Nelwat (root in nahuat) is a culmination of work pertaining to themes of cuirness, migration, and translation. Join us for a sound performance on April 10th from 7:00 pm to 7:30 pm as a part of Moe's exploration of maps as graphic scores. Guest musicians performing include Lyra Montoya, Emir Chacra, and Ana Luisa Díaz.

There Are Cathedrals Everywhere For Those With Eyes To See

UG student Jaime Leynes exhibition

Reception: April 7, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 7 - April 11, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

These works aim to explore and uplift the very intrinsic nature of existence and connectedness, through pieces which delve into explorations of a Filipino identity, a religious upbringing, subcultural affiliations, as well as friends and family.

Mar y Monarcas

UG students Natalia Hernandez & James-Keith Chiswell exhibition

Reception: April 14, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
April 15 - April 18, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Mar y Monarcas is an interdisciplinary joint exhibition of works by Natalia Hernandez and James-Keith Chiswell, including video installation, sculpture, painting, photography, and more. Though we have very separate stories and experiences, we connect through the depth of our emotion, the way we love ourselves and those around us, and how we channel all of that into the art we create.

Trace

Gustavo Martinez MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: April 25, 5:00 - 7:30 p.m.
April 21 - April 25, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m., by appointment after 5 p.m.
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

TRACE is an exhibition by Gustavo Martinez that explores vacant and abandoned spaces as sites of cultural and social transformation in Inglewood and South Los Angeles. Through aerial, digital, and film photography, the work traces how these landscapes hold stories of belonging and preservation, even as communities navigate the city’s notion of progress and development. This body of work reflects on how physical erasure challenges and disrupts the community’s ability to remain present.

Mary Mattingly

Remote Artist Talk

April 25, 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.

Growing Pains (exploring nostalgia)

UG student Madelynne Nguyen exhibition

Reception: April 29, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
April 28 & 30, May 1 & 2; 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

In this exhibition, I explore the profound intersection of nostalgia, childhood, mourning, and loss. Through this journey, I invite viewers to reflect on their own lived experiences in escaping consuming nostalgia in order to newly contextualize their relationships with themselves and loved ones.

Set You Free

Nykelle DeVivo MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: May 3, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
May 5 - May 10, 2025 by Appointment
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

Set You Free explores the embodiment of Anarkata, a spiritual and political force rooted in Black anarchist traditions, as a catalyst for liberation. Channeling ancestral rage, resistance, and love, the work combines video, sculpture, and photographic works to dismantle oppressive structures, advocating for violence as a transformative act of futurity. By invoking Afrofuturist and anarchist methodologies, the project envisions a world beyond empire, centering Black trans joy and resilience as revolutionary blueprints for our collective freedom.

Search Term

Maddie Butler MFA thesis exhibition

Reception: May 3, 12:00 - 4:00 p.m.
May 3 - May 17, 2025
SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UC San Diego

Search Term shines light on the interface. Through installation, sculpture, video and collage, Maddie Butler brings attention to the technologies of mediation that govern daily life. The exhibition tests the porosity of barriers like the screen and the window, interfering with their structure in order to clarify their function. Employing methods like framing, reflection, dis- and re-assembly, Butler redirects the gaze inwards. The result is a mise-en-abyme of the apparatus itself.

Shirley Tse

Remote Artist Talk

May 7, 2025
5:00 - 6:30 p.m.
YouTube Livestream TBD

Los Angeles-based artist Shirley Tse (b.1968) works in sculpture, installation, photography, and text. She deconstructs our world of synthetic objects that carry paradoxical meanings and constructs different models in which differences might come together. Various strategies of visualising heterogeneity are used: conflating different scales, fusing the organic with the industrial, crossing between the literal and the metaphorical, merging different narratives, and collapsing the subject and object relationship.

Ombligo a la Tierra

UG student Maya Rosado exhibition

Reception: May 9, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Ombligo a la Tierra is a photographic series that explores the body as a sacred site, where the womb holds memory, spirit, and the power of creation. Rooted in the teachings of Indigenous elder women from my community of North and Central American ancestry, this work moves through lived experiences with the womb—its pain, resilience, and the site where healthcare becomes a sacred ritual. Told through both personal and collective narratives, this auto-ethnographic work traces the intimate intersections of the body as a ceremony, serving as an archive that holds space for ancestral knowledge.

15th Annual Adam D. Kamil Media Awards

Ceremony: May 16, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Exhibition: May 15 - May 22, 2025
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, Mandeville Center, UC San Diego

The Kamil family, Department of Visual Arts, and School of Arts and Humanities at UC San Diego invite you to the 15th 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. The awards ceremony will be followed by the annual Adam D. Kamil Guest Lecture at the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts at 7:30 p.m.!

Daniel Scheinert

Annual Adam D. Kamil Guest Lecture

May 16, 2025
7:30 - 9:00 p.m.
The Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, UC San Diego

Daniel Scheinert, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, is one-half of the filmmaking duo Daniels. He’s the kind of director who asks, "What if a corpse farted?"—and then goes on to make Swiss Army Man (2016). He followed that up with The Death of Dick Long (2019), a darkly hilarious film set in his hometown. Then came Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022), an award-winning, mind-bending journey through the multiverse that cemented Daniels’ commitment for blending the surreal with the profound.

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