Arts Division Newsletter

Senior art student Ariel Barish has already explored her craft around the world. Along with studying at Idyllwild Art Academy, an international art boarding school near Riverside, Barish went to Korea in 2022 and Japan in 2023 to study printmaking. Growing up in Southern California, where her dad works as a physics professor at UC Riverside, Barish was often encouraged to pursue STEM. However, she always preferred reading and drawing.

Maggie Wander has been offered a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Art History at Santa Clara University. Maggie will graduate from the Visual Studies Ph.D. program in UCSC's department of History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) this summer and will begin her new position in September. Maggie's research and teaching focuses on the contemporary and historical arts of Oceania (the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea) and she will continue to serve as co-executive editor of the journal Pacific Arts with Stacy Kamehiro, associate professor in HAVC.

Rizzo-Martinez is looking forward to the publication of the paperback edition of his book, We are not Animals (University of Nebraska Press, 2022). “It's basically a history of indigenous peoples of Santa Cruz, and it traces back from before the arrival of the Spanish missions,” he says. “It follows how the indigenous peoples navigate and find ways to survive through consecutive colonial eras: the missionary era, and then the Spanish or the Mexican National Era, and into the American era.”

One of the many impressive things about Michael Lindsey, the graduate programs coordinator in Film and Digital Media (FDM), is that he can speak six languages including English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Farsi, and Pashto. Lindsey began his life at UC Santa Cruz as a Ph.D. student in the Music Department.

Inspired by the work of M.C. Escher and drawing on her heritage as a mixed person of Hawaiian descent, Claire June Apana started making giant origami structures. IMPRESSIONS is an “American scale” installation that was shown at University of California, Santa Cruz’s Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery just before Apana’s graduation from the university in 2022. She has since created similar work that has been exhibited elsewhere such as the Weldon Color Lab in Los Angeles.

On the heels of Julien’s major survey exhibition at the Tate Modern in London last year, “What Freedom Means to Me,” and its current presentation at Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, Netherlands, Julien is an exciting get. Given his noted abilities to immerse audiences with his multiscreen works, he’s also an interesting choice for Art Bash, where the atmosphere is intended to go beyond decor and become its own distinct work of art. – Tony Bravo, San Francisco Chronicle Datebook. Professor Julien will also have an exhibition at San Francisco’s de Young Museum opening in spring 2025. And Julien’s Lessons of the Hour (2019) recently opened at MoMA and runs through September 28, 2024.

Curated by History of Consciousness Ph.D. Gabriel Saloman Mindel, Of Love and Revelation: Learning From the Land is an exhibition of contemporary photographic experiments that explores our entanglements with landscape, the power of arts pedagogy, and the trouble of settler colonialism. Alongside photographs by Ansel Adams and Binh Danh, the exhibition also includes work by Professor Emeritus Norman Locks, Associate Professor Karolina Karlic, former Sesnon Gallery curator Shelby Graham, and Edgar Cruz (BFA '20). (image: Norman Locks, Floating Pole, 20230

Jay Shepherd, 3rd year Film and Digital Media (FDM) major is part of a committee that's planning Santa Cruz's first Queer Film Festival, which will be held on UCSC's campus on June 7th. The Santa Cruz Queer Film Festival will give Santa Cruz amateur queer filmmakers a chance to find community, show off their work, and bring representation into their media. The festival is accepting short film submissions until May 24th.

Diana Eicher, who graduated from UCSC with a degree in Art in 1988, has a solo show entitled Time Travels: An Exhibition of Artwork from Across the Years through May 28 at boréal Art Loft in St. Paul, MN. She’s been Director of the Printmaking and Paper Studios at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design since 2003.

Three Arts Division students were recently awarded The Humanities Institute Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures. This award includes a $1,000 prize generously made possible by UC Santa Cruz alumni James Gunderson and Peter Coha (pictured). The Coha-Gunderson Prize in Speculative Futures, is an annual competition made possible by UCSC alumni Peter Coha (Kresge ’78, Mathematics) and James Gunderson (Rachel Carson ’77, Philosophy, and UCSC Foundation Board Trustee). Previous prizewinning submissions have ranged from poetry to film to interactive science projects and a virtual reality experience.

This spring, the History of Art and Visual Culture department gathered for a full day retreat to discuss Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion within our curriculum and teaching. With generous funding support from the Arts Dean, HAVC faculty and staff worked collaboratively to address achievement gaps in the undergraduate curriculum, recruitment and retention, the first year experience, Program Learning Outcome design and assessments, professional development, and graduate advising and mentoring. Presentations and workshops were facilitated by Robin Dunkin and Noori Chai from the Teaching and Learning Center, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Suzanne Alonzo, and Anna Sher from the Assessment for Learning Excellence and Equity Center. The day was a great opportunity to explore pedagogical and professional pathways to address DEI and student success within the department, and was a joyful time to connect and think creatively together.

micha cárdenas, an associate professor in Performance, Play and Design and Critical Race and Ethic Studies, recently announced a new chapter to her book Ecogames Playful Perspectives on the Climate Crisis. The book brings together chapters by a diverse group of established and emerging authors to develop a growing body of scholarship that explores the shape, impact, and cultural context of ecogames. The book comprises four thematic sections, Today’s Challenges: Games for Change, Future Worlds: New Imaginaries, The Nonhuman Turn, and Critical Metagaming Practices.

Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) alumna and lecturer at Film and Digital Media (FDM) Livia Perez’s film, M is for Mothers (2023), was awarded Best Documentary at the 39th Lovers Film Festival in Turin, Italy. M is for Mothers is a touching and intimate portrait of queer motherhood. According to the jury Livia’s feature documentary deserved the award for its ability to start from the everyday context of a journey toward parenthood to explore more profound and more multifaceted issues; for its delicate yet visceral mise-en-scène; for its strength in affirming the female gaze and experience in the contemporary scenario both politically and cinematically.

In a May 5th Santa Cruz Museum of Art History (MAH) program called Spatial Illusions as Radical Mindscapes: A Conversation About the Work of Richard Mayhew, composer-pianist James Gordon Williams, assistant professor of composition at UCSC, performed an improvisation inspired by Mayhew’s landscape paintings rooted in Mayhew's concept of creative sensibility. Mayhew, who recently turned 100 years old on April 3rd, was present at the event and gave a short speech on how the relationship between optics and sound shapes his paintings. Artists Nashormeh N.R. Lindo and Kajahl led the panel on Mayhew’s work. Williams states “I was thrilled to honor Mr. Mayhew with my sonic canvas.”

Professor of Art, Beth Stephens and her partner Annie Sprinkle will talk about how San Francisco’s BIPOC, Queer artists, activists and their allies, changed the narrative from exclusion to empowerment. This local arts history tells the untold stories of how some underdog outsider visionaries transformed the climate for arts funding during the 1960s through to the 1990s. Hosted by grant writing legend, Jeff Jones, with artist archivists, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, there will be a slide show, discussion and a panel of artists whose archives are part of this important, fun and fascinating evolution.

On Spring Equinox this year (March 20th) Balakrishnan Raghavan, 3rd year, PhD, Music Department and Alex Wand, 5th year, DMA, Music Department, released their debut single, Tanjore Lullaby. This piece is a musical improvisation for voice and resonator guitar, based on a traditional lullaby from Tanjore, a city in India close to where Bala's grandmother is from. The track was recorded in one uninterrupted take during the summer of 2023. The track draws inspiration from a 100-year-old lullaby field recording on the cylinder, a 200-year-old Telugu composition, and Alex and Bala's musical soundscapes and life worlds in Santa Cruz.

Art Professor Karolina Karlic’s research initiative, Unseen California, is launching Language Has No Weather: Field Notes from Unseen California, a collaborative artist book published by theretherenow. Language Has No Weather: Field Notes from Unseen California is a limited-edition artists’ book featuring works by five women artists—Mercedes Dorame, Karolina Karlic, Tarrah Krajnak, Dionne Lee, and Aspen Mays—the inaugural research cohort of Unseen California (2021–23). The book features the artists’ explorations in progress—their field notes—across media, generated from site work and ongoing dialogues.

Daniel Munoz, lecturer in music, is a guitarist in the bands Guilty Strangers, Crow Jane, and Diva Destruction, and bassist for 45 Grave and Lucas Lanthier and Several of His Esteemed Colleagues, and he continues to have a busy performance schedule. Diva Destruction is set to play the largest goth rock festival in the world, Wave Gotik Treffen, in Leipzig, Germany. Munoz teaches Music Scenes and Subcultures, and Music, Politics, and Protest in the UCSC Music Department.