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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Alum and painting instructor Deirdre White (M.F.A. '93) will open her new solo show "Out of Place" at the John Natsoulas Gallery in Davis. "Out of Place" presents recent work that continues White's dialogue with paintings from history as well as paintings by her contemporaries.
"Out of Place" is on view from Setp. 30 to Oct.. 24, 2026. A reception is scheduled for Oct. 9 from 7-9 pm.
Professor emeritus Hearne Pardee's new solo show Landscaping features a selection of recent paintings and collages reflecting on his transition from the West Coast to the Hudson Valley. It also culminates fifty years of work from landscape, abstraction and collage. Combining work from observation with photographs, Pardee maps his new surroundings, locating himself in views from different cardinal points and at different seasons.
Julio Rodriguez (M.F.A. '27), Sierra Faust (M.F.A. '27), Lev Keatts (M.F.A. '26) and Tara Daly (M.F.A. '26) will present works in the group show Here After at the Dream Farm Commons in Oakland. Curated by artist Zoe Grey, Here After examines the Bay Area's changing arts ecosystem as seen through the eyes of emerging artists.
Professor Fidencio Fifield-Perez has a solo show at Dreamsong, which runs Sept. 10 through Oct. 24, 2026. It’s the first solo exhibition (ever) of the Minneapolis gallery.
Renowned performance artist Cassils has been appointed to the Maria Manetti Shrem Endowed Chair in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program at UC Davis. Cassils is a Canadian transgender artist who makes their own body the material and protagonist of powerful performances that examine the histories of LGBTQIA+ violence, representation and struggle while illuminating narratives of resilience and empowerment.
Professor Shiva Ahmadi’s recent show Shiva Ahmadi: Crown of Flames at Haines Gallery in San Francisco was just positively reviewed by Maria Porges in Artforum. Ahmadi’s show featured new and recent works that present Ahmadi’s longterm exploration of conflict, corruption, and instability, informed by her own experiences and the current news cycle.
Professor emeritus David Hollowell’s solo show “Hollowell Heaven,” on view at Harhawik in New York to June 6, was just reviewed in the New York Times. “Hollowell Heaven” features paintings and drawings made between 1985 and 2005, most of which have not been exhibited publicly in the years since.
