One of the nation’s most acclaimed photographers, LaToya
Ruby Frazier’s work depicts the unsettling reality of
today’s America: post-industrial cities riven by poverty, racism,
healthcare inequality, and environmental toxicity. By featuring
voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American
narrative, Frazier not only captures our cultural blind spots,
she teaches us how art is a powerful tool for social
transformation.
Claudia Rankine, an award-winning author, playwright, poet and
multimedia artist, comes to UC Davis, virtually, on Nov. 4 for a
reading and lecture based on her new book, “Just Us: An American
Conversation,” which is being hailed as a must-read book this
fall, and her “magnum opus.” “Citizen: An American Lyric,” a
meditation on race relations in the United States, is widely
considered one of the most influential books of our age.
Njideka Akunyili
Crosby, whose art negotiates the cultural terrain between her
adopted home in America and her native Nigeria in collage and
photo transfer-based paintings, will give the
seventh Betty Jean and Wayne Thiebaud Endowed Lecture on
Thursday, Nov. 12, 2020. This year’s lecture celebrates
Wayne Thiebaud’s centennial.
Defying categorical restraint, Kyle Dunn
combines sculptural and painterly traditions, including
bas-relief and trompe l’oeil, to express the vibrancy of the
masculine emotional landscape not often represented in popular
visual culture. Drawing upon a range of influences such as
Italian cinema as well as horror and science fiction novels,
Dunn’s contorted figures ache with emotional and physical desire.
Rita Gonzalez is the Terri and Michael
Smooke Curator and Department Head of Contemporary Art at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art where she has
curated Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano
Movement; Asco: Elite of the
Obscure; Lost Line: Contemporary Art from
the Collection; Agnés Varda in
Californialand, In Production: Art and the Studio
System, Christian Marc
Soo Sunny Park is Professor of Studio Art
Department at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA.
Park received a BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design in
Columbus, Ohio and M.F.A in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of
Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. After a residency in Skowhegan
School of Painting and Sculpture, 2000, she was awarded with the
River Front Times Best of 2001, Sculptor of St. Louis.
Growing up in Jim Crow South during the Civil Rights
Movement, Ramekon O’Arwisters had a
safe haven, quilting with his Grandmother where he was “embraced,
important and special.” These early memories prompted his nascent
series of unique crocheted/ceramic sculptures
titled, Mending. Employing ordinary household, or decorative
pottery, broken and discarded, O’Arwisters combined traditional
crafts into a dimensional woven tapestry, stripping both cloth
and ceramic of their intended function.
Irina Rozovsky (born 1981, Russia) has exhibited
in museums and galleries in the US and abroad. She has published
two monographs, One to Nothing (2011) and Island in
my Mind (2015). A monograph of her ten year project, In
Plain Air is forthcoming in 2021. Irina’s work is in the
collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia
Museum of Art, and Haggerty Museum of Art and is currently
featured in MoMA’s New Photography: Companion Pieces. With her
husband Mark Steinmetz, she runs The Humid, a photographic
project space in Athens, GA.
The Art Building is located on Hutchison Drive, about halfway
between the Memorial Union and Mrak Hall on the UC Davis campus.
There is limited parking behind the building, but there is
visitor parking nearby, across the Arboretum in lot VP5.
