Arts Division Newsletter

Summer Rogers went to UC Santa Cruz planning to major in anthropology, but she happened to take a class in the History of Art and Visual Culture (HAVC) department and switched. “I fell in love with how it’s kind of like the anthropological and historical perspective, but through visuals, as opposed to just writing and language,” she said.

Saul Villegas was invited last October to the inaugural Latinxs & the Environment conference at UC Riverside. This collaborative effort between UC Berkeley and UC Riverside invited students from a UC campus-wide pool of applicants to attend the event and present abstracts that advocate work done by Latinx students that bridges policy and research for the environment. Villegas presented his work with OpenLab Research, Venom Lab & E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF that inspired him to lead up to his involvement with new advocacy with a staff member at Central California Environmental Justice Network—where he hopes to disseminate information to the community in Avenal, California through digital platforms ways in which they can speak up against the air quality caused by the local landfill.

The Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz welcomes Art Professor Karolina Karlic as the first Art + Science Faculty Director. Karlic’s role will strengthen connections between the arts and natural history science on campus. The Norris Center, known for its art and science internships and community engagement programs, is well poised for expansion under her guidance. Karlic’s mission is to cultivate a thriving community passionate about natural history in all aspects of life. Her appointment brings exciting prospects for enriching the integration of the arts and sciences within the Norris Center, offering valuable opportunities for students, faculty, and the community to explore and grow.

Celeste Lagrange first wanted to be onstage in second grade when her twin brother acted in a play, and she got jealous. Then in high school in San Diego, her love of theater started in earnest. Her first role was as the Queen of the Birds in a modern retelling of Aristophanes’ The Birds, and she went on to other roles, such as Eleanor Vance, a lead role in The Haunting of Hill House.

Giulianna Marchese recently had an article published by Howlround about an arts festival she attended in Rwanda. As a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, Giulianna’s research focused on using performance to support alternative approaches to justice. “Dean Celine was so supportive of my research when I was a grad student at UCSC,” she says. Marchese currently is the literary manager at Red Theater in Chicago.

The 2nd Annual Deep Roots Dance Festival that took place at the Crocker Theater at Cabrillo College on Saturday Nov. 11, 2023 featured new work by Brazilian choreographer & Co-Artistic Director of Viver Brasil Dance Company Vera Passos with collaboration by Marina Magalhães, Assistant Professor of Performance, Play & Design (Dance) at UC Santa Cruz. They shared a work-in-progress excerpt of Passos's newest project, "Rezas e Folhas" (prayers & leaves), which recently received the National Dance Project 2023 Award. 

Film and Digital Media Ph.D. candidate, YoungEun Kim’s work is on view as a part of the media exhibition Beyond the Crest at the M+ Mediatheque at the M+ Museum in Hong Kong until March 2024. Another work of hers was screened in November at the Museum of Kyoto in Kyoto and Aichi Arts Center in Nagoya, both in Japan, as a part of Image Forum Festival  respectively. Her third work was on view at the Monitoring exhibition as a part of the Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, held at the Kasseler KulturBahnhof in Kassel, Germany, November 14-19, 2023. 

Atoms Never Touch the novel by micha cárdenas, Associate Professor, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies and Performance, Play & Design, was recently featured in the Washington Post as one of five great science fiction fantasy novels to read: “cárdenas devotes a lot of space to explaining the physics of Rea’s universe-hopping as well as the mechanics of Cora’s hacking. cárdenas also conjures an immersive dystopia, full of facial recognition, augmented-reality lenses and a brutal security state—while still showing the power of community and resistance...Atoms Never Touch packs a lot of power.”

Assistant professor of music composition James Gordon Williams performed on former prison bars from Cook County Department of Corrections Jail in collaboration with Chicago-based artist Maria Gaspar’s solo exhibition Maria Gaspar/Compositions at the Institute of Arts and Sciences. Williams’s artistic research-based performance, which he entitled The Principle of Alloys, was the second iteration and took place October 7, 2023, at the IAS special event. Williams’s first performance on the bars was at El Museo del Barrio in New York City. Williams’s performance is the inaugural performance of Gaspar’s performance series called We Lit the Fire and Trusted the Heat (after Angela Davis).

Last summer, Bala Raghavan, Cross-Cultural Musicology Ph.D. candidate in the Music Department, was awarded a Digital India Learning Fellowship by the American institute of Indian Studies. They developed their digital sonic projects at the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology, culminating in a presentation and the creation of virtual exhibits on the Virtual Museum of Images and Sounds. Their digital exhibition is titled “Annanmar Katai (The Elder Brothers Story)” and is based on a 15th-Century Tamil oral epic and archival recordings from a live performance from the 1960s. The project was partially funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Education.

Mark Davidson, the co-author/co-editor of the book, BOB DYLAN: Mixing Up the Medicine was reviewed recently in the New York Times. Davidson earned a Ph.D. in cultural musicology from UC Santa Cruz in 2015. “This collection of archival treasures at the Bob Dylan Center includes fan mail from Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen.” – New York Times

Continuing Lecturer in Music, William Winant’s recording of Peter Garland's “Basketweave Elegies” made #7 on The New Yorker's Best Recordings of 2023 top 12 list. Says The New Yorker: “The album’s performer, William Winant, is a revered percussion-ist, but ‘The Basketweave Elegies’ feels elemental, instinctive, and natural, as though it were being broadcast from a radio station on the moon, or maybe from somewhere inside your body.”

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