MFA program ranked No. 8 overall and No. 4 among public institutions

U.S. News & World Report

The Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego rose two spots, now tied with Stanford and Rutgers universities. The MFA program prepares students to pursue a career in the contemporary art field, including all aspects of art making, criticism, theory and curating. Students may also choose a PhD path in art history, theory and criticism that includes a concentration in art practice — a unique offering among U.S. universities.

UC San Diego Today Article

COMING UP

UG student Nora Hagkull exhibition Circular Stories

Reception: April 8, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.

April 8 - April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.

Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Circular Stories is an exhibition of pieces that explore the enduring, yet constantly shifting nature of our world. I am interested in the many cycles that we see around us. The life cycle, for example, moves in a constant loop of birth, life, death, decomposition, and birth once again.

Outer Limits Exhibition Closing Reception and Panel Presentations

April 10, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.

SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UCSD

The liminal expands across a spatio-temporal divide, limning demarcations between inside and outside, now and then, here and there, and us and them. Reaching for it, we might bump up against, and sometime erode, boundaries between the known and the unfamiliar. Yet, working through liminality engages not only with phenomenological experience but with processes and enactments.

Outer Limits Conference

April 11, 11:00 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla

The University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), is honored to convene the inaugural Art History Graduate Symposium. This landmark event establishes a vital forum for scholarly exchange, assembling a North American cohort of emerging historians and practitioners to examine the evolving methodologies of visual culture.

UG student Tessa Chan exhibition Stories Untold

Reception: April 13, 2:00 - 4:00 p.m.

April 14, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.; April 15, 1:00 - 3:00 p.m.

Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego

Stories Untold is a collection of narrative-driven works shaped by a love of nature, fantasy, and storytelling. Drawing on cultural influences, these pieces explore vivid moments, imagined places, and fragments of larger worlds. I rarely show my art or writing but with this exhibit, I hope to begin sharing them more openly, hence the name Stories Untold.

erika roos MFA thesis exhibition choreographies of becoming ( a film )

Reception: April 17, 4:00 - 6:00 p.m.

April 14 - April 17, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m. or by appointment

Performance Space, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

choreographies of becoming ( a film ) is a site-sensitive installation and durational performance with 16mm film. Through the interwoven, looping bodies of projector, film, screen, light,and shadow, this installation contends with how we hold memory: in movement, in muscle, in celluloid, in textile, in our relationships with one another.

Izzai Martinez Angulo MFA thesis exhibition ¿Quién Dijo Miedo, Muchachos? Si Para Morir Nacimos

Reception: April 17, 6:00 - 9:00 p.m.

April 14 - April 16, 12:00 - 6:00 p.m. by appointment only

Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego

This body of work explores the fluidity of my gendered identity through photography, staging and performance, particularly influenced by my mother and the American wrestler Shawn Michaels. In addition, this writing covers the relationship I possess with my family and the way their cisgendered bodies negotiate my androgyny.

Walker Hewitt MFA thesis exhibition Every Step Is Moving Me Up

Reception: April 17, 5:00 - 9:00 p.m.

April 17 - May 1, 2026

SME Gallery, Structural & Materials Engineering, UCSD

MFA student Charles Glaubitz in Permanent Damage Comics Show

April 19, 12:00 - 8:00 p.m.

Permanent Records Roadhouse, Los Angeles, CA

L.A.’s notorious comics happening is back. Graphic Novels, Original Art, Prints, T-shirts, $1 comics, beers, booze and BANDS! Featuring 20+ freak champions of contemporary cartoonists with their comics, graphic novels, original art, prints, tees, zines, and more!

BA alum Sev Ohanian, Producer of Sinners, talks about Dept. of Visual Arts

Fox 5 San Diego

UC San Diego '08 alumnus Sev Ohanian is a key producer behind the supernatural thriller "Sinners," which made history with a record 16 Academy Award nominations. In this interview he discusses how the experimental nature of UC San Diego's Visual Arts, Media, major influenced his career.

 

UG students Katelyn Ramirez & Mariana Mercado online exhibition Roots and Borders

Kamil Gallery Online

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.

MFA student Nube Hawk Cruz in Why We Look: Questioning the World Before Us

March 6 - April 26, 2026

Vermont Photography Center, Brattleboro, VT

This year’s juried exhibition invited photographers to look outward—questioning the social, political, and environmental forces that shape our world. The selected works confront how we see, what we overlook, and the truths that demand our attention in a time of cultural and ecological reckoning. Juried by Marvin Heiferman.

ONGOING ON CAMPUS

Professor Emerita Faith Ringgold exhibition Full Circle–The Teachings and Her Legacy

February 28 - May 1, 2026

Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego

Curated by Mashonda Tifrere, the exhibition is framed conceptually through Ringgold’s relationship to UC San Diego, where she served as professor of visual arts from 1984 to 2002. This institutional affiliation provides a lens for understanding how her academic philosophy materialized throughout her practice and impacted not only those she mentored at UC San Diego, but generations of artists around the world.

Faith Ringgold’s Radical Imagination Returns to La Jolla

San Diego Magazine

Ringgold’s expansive vision and vibrant canon has found a temporary home in La Jolla, where ArtLeadHER’s Mashonda Tifrere has curated an exhibition of Ringgold’s work at Mandeville Art Gallery on the UC San Diego campus. The exhibition isn’t just a retrospective, it’s another kind of homecoming.

CLOSING SOON

MFA alum Victor Castañeda H in exhibition Designing the Infinite

December 6, 2025 - April 12, 2026

California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido, CA

Worldbuilding has long served as a tool for understanding identity, community, and our place within the universe, from creation stories and cosmologies to medieval illuminated manuscripts, speculative fiction, and early experimental cinema. Designing the Infinite extends this lineage further into the digital age, bringing together artists from across the globe who use technology to construct new worlds.

MFA alumni Kirstyn Hom, Yasmine Kasem in M(other) Tongue

January 31 - April 18, 2026

Judith Harris Art Gallery, San Diego Public Library

M(other) Tongue brings together artists who use textile to examine the interconnected experiences of migration, displacement, and cultural inheritance. Drawing on textile traditions rooted in women’s domestic and communal practices, the works approach stitching, weaving, and dyeing as forms of mark making; methods of carrying ancestral stories across borders and generations.

BA alum Francesca Hummler in exhibition East Meets West

March 14 – April 18, 2026

TECHNE, Oceanside, CA

Across works that juxtapose Eastern philosophy with Western expression, the exhibition treats photography as a living language — a space where cultural boundaries blur, merge, and generate new forms of visual understanding. This is a deliberate experiment in Dialogue · Fusion · Rebirth: artists invite us to reframe perception rather than confirm familiar binaries.

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