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Due January 31, 2026
visartssymposiumucsd@gmail.com
For the inaugural Symposium and Exhibition presented through UCSD’s Art and Media History, Theory and Criticism department, we invite contributions that expand between fields and disciplines to consider liminality experientially, methodologically, and/or critically, and which present as zones of both vulnerability and possibility.
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January 19 - January 23, 2026
Main Gallery, Visual Arts Facility, UC San Diego
New photographic and sculptural works tracing transformation, family ghost stories, and metamorphosis. These pieces think through haunted materials where flesh holds memory, and erasure leaves residue. Fragments surface: myth, migration, the alien body, inherited photographs. What remains after the skin is gone.
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January 19 - January 23, 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
An exhibition dedicated to the love and loss of dogs, and the memories that linger afterwards.
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January 29, 5:00 - 7:00 p.m.
Atkinson Hall, CALIT2 Theater, UC San Diego
Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS series opens its new season with BFF: A Dog Walk by Jesse R Fleming & Robert Twomey, an interactive walk and talk with two robot dogs through a guided landscape examining the nature of LLMs, AI alignment, and frontiers of machine intimacy.
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January 31, 2:30 - 5:00 p.m.
Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, UC San Diego
All are invited to the 2026 Suraj Israni Memorial Lecture, featuring Emmy-winning producer, studio builder, and UC San Diego Visual Arts MFA alumna Marge Dean. As Head of the Studio at Skybound Entertainment, Dean leads the development and production of original animated content and is building a new production facility behind major properties including Invincible for Amazon Prime.
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Reception: February 2, 5:00 - 8:00 p.m.
February 3 - February 5, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m.
Adam D. Kamil Gallery, UC San Diego
Hasta La Raíz explores the intersection of textile, pattern, and cultural identity through portraiture as living carriers of cultural memory. The work reflects on Mexican-American identity, navigating the space between two cultures while resisting the erasure that can accompany acculturation.
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February 4, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
SME 149, Structural & Materials Engineering, UCSD
Steve Fagin is an American artist and former professor of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He has produced a series of feature length videos, including The Amazing Voyage of Gustave Flaubert and Raymond Roussel, The Machine That Killed Bad People, and TropiCola (the latter produced in collaboration with some of the most important theatre actors and producers in Havana).
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UC San Diego Today
What does it take to cultivate a multi-decade career in the animation field? For Marge Dean – a UC San Diego visual arts alumna who has spent over 30 years in the industry – it’s a mixture of passion and perseverance. Her passion builds collaborative creative teams that experiment with new forms of storytelling, which is grounded in a tenacious commitment to uplifting unsung voices.
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January 14 - February 28, 2026
Quint ONE, San Diego, CA
Known for a growing cast of anonymous individuals concealed in patterned, form-fitting fabrics, Chapin paints ambiguous scenes of them languorously existing in a manufactured mid-century purgatory. In this ongoing practice informed by both modern advertising and contemporary social media influencer culture, Chapin forges an entanglement between the collapsing dichotomies of the real and the artificial, and the valuable and valueless.
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January 11 - February 14, 2026
Air de Paris, Paris, France
Titled after a 1949 drawing by Toyen and framed by his monograph Royal Book Lodge (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023), Welchman draws on Raoul Vaneigem’s tart critique of Surrealism set out in Histoire désinvolte du surrealism (A Cavalier History of Surrealism,1977) to discuss how Bourgoin, Susin and their RBL friends and colleagues worked through an epistemological and aesthetic inquiry that developed a salient dispute with the historical deployment of alchemical metaphoricity.
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January 9 - March 21, 2026
Document, Chicago, IL
This intergenerational dialogue between the work of Jimmy DeSana (b. 1949 – d. 1990) and Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982) unfolds as a set of carefully matched pairings. Both artists use photography to engage with queer bodies and the politics of representation, implicating the viewer as much as any figure who appears in the frame.
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January 17 - January 29, 2026
CSULB Galleries, Long Beach, CA
This mixed-media exhibition showcases exceptional work by MFA students from 14 graduate programs across Southern California. GLAMFA is an entirely student-run endeavor that provides opportunities to connect with our broader MFA cohort. Through the central exhibition, affiliated events, and catalog publication, GLAMFA cultivates a community of emerging artists, stoking critical dialogue and lasting social camaraderie.
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Set Margins'
The texts offer amplified meditations on the possibilities—but also defaults and limits—of the studio visit and on how this scene of encounter sets engagements with work that are dialogical and critically robust; respectful but also challenging; full of seeing into and through; and tactically combustible, in the sense of sparking future allusions.
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Bartlebooth
Memes, screenshots, glitches, virtual exhibition spaces, and digital materialities are some of the concepts explored in Medios inestables. De objetos técnicos y arte by Mexican curator and researcher Doreen A. Ríos.
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Suwon Cultural Foundation
Ph.D. candidate Jae Hwan Lim published a critical article titled "The Autonomy of ‘Engaged’ Artists," which reviews recent projects by Park Hyesoo. Park's group exhibition, titled Talking to Strangers, features her installation exploring individual and collective memory within Korean society.
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Undertow Notebook
James Horner’s Making of an American Dandy at Amos Eno Gallery looks back across forty years of the artist’s life and practice without tidying the record. The works in the retrospective are bruised and glamorous, horny and grieving, and above all, alive. Horner is a New York-based artist whose practice widens the space for LGBTQ+ life to be seen on its own terms.
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The Wrap
Rajee won the TRUER THAN FICTION AWARD for his film “Your Touch Makes Others Invisible." The award is presented to an emerging director of non-fiction features who has not yet received significant recognition and includes a $25,000 grant.
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For their project Flight Over Frontera, the students won the Outstanding Art Prize at Biodesign Sprint 2025: Ocean Futures. Over the course of two months, participants developed projects that illustrate how biologically informed design can be leveraged to address pressing environmental and social issues related to the oceans, ocean life, and aquatic industries.
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January 15 - February 14, 2026
Mandeville Art Gallery, UC San Diego
Participating artists: Jamil Baldwin, Rahul Basu, Sophia Cleary, Walker Hewitt, Izzai Martinez Angulo, Aambr Newsome, erika roos, and Andrew Wharton. The group exhibition To Hold is To Be Held features Visual Arts MFA students in their final year, serving as a preview to their thesis projects. Curatorial Advisor: Selene Preciado, Curator and Director of Programs, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE).
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November 15, 2025 - January 31, 2026
LUBOV, New York, NY
My Barbarian (Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, Alexandro Segade) presents Cat Suit, a series of prints representing the first 14 Minor Arcana cards alongside the video installation and sculpture. The exhibition debuts Nine of Cats (2025), a new video installation made with Eric Geiger, Matana Roberts, and Argel Rojo. The works suggest that all the joyful and tragic experiences foretold by the cards have already happened to those who came before us.
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December 18, 2025 - January 31, 2026
Artist Curated Projects, Los Angeles, CA
For those who crawl inside with urges that defy their logical, structural custodians, who look around and see only somatic frenzy in the hall of infinitely reflective hypocrisy. Is there something redemptive burgeoning in the brink of collapse? We must invent poetry for the new world because it will not simply come to us. The false progression of the world is a cataract in beauty’s eye.
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June 21, 2025 - February 1, 2026
ICA Central, San Diego, CA
The annual exhibition celebrates emerging artistic voices and highlights the innovative work being produced across the San Diego and Baja California region. Through NextGen, ICA San Diego provides local emerging artists with both exhibition opportunities and professional development, while highlighting the strength of our creative community.
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November 8, 2025 - February 1, 2026
La Jolla Historical Society, La Jolla, CA
Double Bill: The Art of Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson will explore the creative partnership of the celebrated husband-and-wife painters, highlighting how life in Leucadia and their work at UC San Diego shaped their distinct artistic voices. The exhibition presents paintings, sketches, photographs, and archival materials that offer insight into their individual practices and shared creative world.
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