Professor Margaret Laurena Kemp is an artist who explores what lies beneath the surface. Her work over a six-year period during a residency at Montalvo's Lucas Artists Program has been chronicled in Kim Yasuda's book Beneath the Surface.
Graduate Program Coordinator Rachelle Agundes’s new paintings and assemblages explore the porous boundary between the inside and outside. Her show “Outside-In” at the Birdhouse Gallery in San Francisco features works constructed from fragments of lived experience transformed into new spaces. Rachelle layers and rearranges fragments of images, allowing one image to interrupt another. Images from different times and locations are compressed, obscured, and allowed to remain unresolved. In “Outside-In” what is absent becomes present again.
Hong Chun Zhang's (M.F.A. 2004) site-specific installation "Passage," on view at the Boise Art Museum, links multiple ink drawings together to form the shape of a traditional East Asian robe. Made on soft white Italian Alcantara fabric, the robe shape represents history and tradition, while the flowing images of hair suggest movement, change, and identity. Hong's large ink paintings of hair, often based on her own hair, use a traditional Chinese painting style called Gongbi.
Assistant Professor of Cinema and Digital Media Lishan AZ is a multi-disciplinary artist working in immersive installation, interactive media, photography and film. She explores themes of home, intimacy, and interiority. Her work revives lost narratives in order to contextualize contemporary issues and discover/recover possibilities for our present condition.
Lecturer Jeremiah Barber is featured in a group show now on view in San Francisco. "Land / Water / Meat / Noise" at Southern Exposure highlights artists whose work explores tactile and sense-driven themes and work with water, landscape, food, and sound as primary mediums. The exhibition explores how these elements shape our environments and everyday lives—how they move, transform, and leave traces across spaces, bodies, and time.
On Oct. 14, the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art opened the exhibition “The Gift of Fashion: From the Maria Manetti Shrem Haute Couture Collection.” Formulated in collaboration with museum benefactor and namesake Maria Manetti Shrem as part of the Museum’s 10th anniversary season, the exhibition showcases a variety of meticulously designed gowns and jewelry.
Key contributors include Professor of Design Tim McNeil, along with Design Collection Curator Adele Zhang. In addition, McNeil recruited Maev Dunning, a master’s student in design.
Alum Muzi Li Rowe (M.F.A. 2017) and Jessica Wimbley (M.F.A. 2005) have teamed up with local researchers in the science and health care communities for the ARx Live program hosted by the Museum of Science and Curiosity (MOSAC) in Sacramento.
Muzi Li Rowe's (M.F.A. 2017) new solo show TECHNOLOGIA! at Prism Art Space features sculptures made from discarded electronic cables and obsolete technologies. Muzi transforms technological waste through labor-intensive processes of sorting, knotting and coiling into abstract sculptural forms. Drawing on Chinese knotting and basketry techniques, her sculptural works explore connections between historical systems of recordkeeping and contemporary technologies of communication.
Two recent design talks, presented by The Maria Manetti Shrem Institute for Sustainable Design, Fashion and Textiles, were in conjunction with “The Data at Hand: Data Physicalizations of Earth and Space,” a new art exhibit at the Mills College Art Museum in Oakland. The installation was curated by Kayleigh Perkov, assistant professor in science and technology studies at UC Davis.
Waltz of Life & Limb at the Pence Gallery in Davis pairs recent sculptural paintings by alum and artist Mercy Hawkins (MFA, Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program, '21), with her vibrant, large-scale watercolors on paper. With this work, Hawkins seeks to answer the internal call, to encounter what the body already knows, from our own inner rhythms, heartbeat, and breath, to dancing with wild arms.
Professor Heghnar Watenpaugh will give a public lecture on "Captive Sites: Official Heritage and Armenian Memory in Turkey" at UCLA in the Weds Talk series sponsored by the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology.
The stretch of coast between Accra and Lagos is home to four distinct national communities who identify as descendants of Brazilians: the Tabom in Ghana, the Brésiliens in Togo, the Agudas in Benin, and the Amaros in Nigeria. These communities were established by people who migrated from Brazil to West Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, forming what is arguably Brazil's oldest diaspora. Despite their historical, cultural, and physical separation from Brazil, they maintain a strong sense of Brazilianness through music, dance, and religious practices.
Acclaimed fiber artist and 2025 Guggenheim Fellow Josh Faught has been appointed to the Maria Manetti Shrem Endowed Chair in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program at the University of California, Davis.
Working primarily with textiles through techniques such as weaving and knitting, Faught draws on broader social and political histories, as well as his own experiences. He describes his process as “collaging and conflating” those influences, examining the relationships among them and considering where queer bodies exist within that matrix.
In late July, Professor emerita Diana Strazdes presented a paper, “Washington Allston’s New Paradigm for History Painting,” at the joint conference of Nineteenth-century Studies Association held in Washington D.C. There, she received the 2026 NCSA President’s Award for outstanding contributions to the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association and to scholarship in interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies.
