We, the faculty, stand with our community of students,
faculty, staff, researchers and colleagues to uphold our
commitment to listen, learn and to take action against social
injustice. We pledge to act in solidarity with those
who seek to end racism and achieve equity and justice for
all.
To set up an advising appointment current students please
click here. If you
are not a current student please call 530-752-0890 to set up an
appointment.
“Temporary Home,” an exhibiton curated by Professor Beatriz
Cortez at the Galka Scheyer House in LA, was selected by
Hyperallergic among the best exhibitions around the world for
2025.
Alum Maryann Steinert-Foley (BA ‘11) has work in an
exhibition through Feb. 1 at the Pence Art Gallery in Davis.
The installation, The Realm of Possibility, features
work by Steinert-Foley and Diane Williams that explores the
persistence, generosity, and unseen forces that sustain both
nature and humanity.
Alum Kelly O’Leary (M.F.A. ‘22) has received
a 2025 Art
Bae Award. Kelley will use this award to complete her
Mars ventifact project: turning uncanny rover photographs into
aluminum prints as well as 3D-printed sculptures, bringing the
full series to exhibition scale.
Teju Cole is a novelist, essayist, and
photographer. He was the photography critic of the New York Times
Magazine from 2015 until 2019. He is currently the Gore Vidal
Professor of the Practice of Creative Writing at Harvard and a
contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine. His
photography and writing have received numerous awards. His most
recent novel, Tremor (2023), was named a book of the
year by Time, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times, among
others.
Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, Davis, CA
Raven Chacon is a composer, performer, and installation artist
born at Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. A recording artist over the
span of 24 years, Chacon has appeared on over eighty releases on
national and international labels. He has exhibited, performed,
or had works performed at LACMA, The Whitney Biennial, Borealis
Festival, SITE Santa Fe, Swiss Institute Contemporary Art New
York, and more. As an educator, Chacon is the senior composer
mentor for the Native American Composer Apprentice Project
(NACAP).
Hosted by the Gorman Museum of Native American Art, music
students in the Department of Music will perform
Chacon’s American Ledger No. 1 (2018) in
the courtyard between the Gorman Museum and the Della Davidson
Dance Studio.
American Ledger No. 1 is a narrative score for performance,
telling the creation story of the founding of the United States
of America. In chronological descending order, moments of
contact, enactment of laws, events of violence, the building of
cities, and erasure of land and worldview are mediated through
graphic notation, and realized by sustaining and percussive
instruments, coins, axe and wood, a police whistle, and a
match.
Chacon is the Winter Quarter spotlight artist in The
California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residencies.
Stephanie Syjuco works in photography,
sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and
craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive
excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and
image-based processes are implicated in the construction of
exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship.
The intersection between climate change and art history opens new
pathways for understanding how visual and material culture
mediates human relationships to the natural
world. Historical and contemporary depictions of nature
illuminate how aesthetic practices register environmental
knowledge and respond to ecological stress. Far from being a
luxury of elite culture, art history is an essential tool for
imagining alternative ecological futures.
Andre Keichian is an interdisciplinary artist and educator
working across photography, video and sculptural installation.
His work houses conversations around exile, trans
identities, and diaspora and questions how these connections
might speak to geopolitical and subjective understandings of
migration.
Mimi Plumb is part of a long tradition of socially engaged
photographers whose work explores the landscapes and communities
of California and the American West. In 2022, she was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship to support her ongoing project, The
Reservoir.
Dyani White Hawk is a multidisciplinary artist based in
Minneapolis. Her practice, strongly rooted in painting and
beadwork, extends into sculpture, installation, video, and
performance, reflecting upon cross-cultural experiences through
the amalgamation of influences from Lakota and
Euro/Americanabstraction.
