CART Fellow Jazmin Benton (Ph.D. student in Visual Studies) created a digital exhibition titled "See you when I see you...": Black Student Life at UCSC 1965-present, which showcases the many experiences of Black students at UC Santa Cruz from its establishment in 1965 through the present day. Benton spent dozens of hours leafing through archival collections including the J. Herman Blake papers, Merrill College records, and unprocessed university archives and ephemera, finding flyers, reports, photographs, and firsthand accounts of how Black students have experienced the campus and how the campus has responded (or not responded) to their needs.

For the Love of Rutland, the new feature documentary by Associate Professor Jennifer Maytorena Taylor of the Film and Digital Media Department, has its national broadcast premiere in Season 10 of World Channel's award-winning America Reframed series on March 3. The film will also be available for streaming on PBS.org and on all major VOD platforms with PBS Home Video.

UC Santa Cruz alumnus and Performance Play and Design technical director, Christopher Hackett, didn’t intend to earn a degree in theater arts but fate had different plans for him.

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UC Santa Cruz alumna Nikki Meñez credits the Rainbow Theater for her latest success as the new curatorial director at San Francisco’s Z Space in this San Francisco Chronicle feature article.

Artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien received this year’s Goslarer Kaiserring award, which has been awarded to international contemporary artists annually since 1975 by the German city of Goslar. In a statement, the prize’s jury said Julien “breaks down barriers between different artistic disciplines by drawing from film, dance, photography, music, theater, painting and sculpture and uniting them in a highly sensual visual narrative. Julien’s work deals with important social and human issues of our time—racism, migration, diversity, queerness, homophobia and chauvinism—and encourages us to rethink and explore social responsibility.”

A new musical play, The Artificial Woman, receives its world premiere at UC Santa Cruz this month.

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Professor A.M. Darke’s groundbreaking work, The Open Source Afro Hair Library, was featured in the New York Times.



Professor of Film and Digital Media Peter Limbrick has been awarded a residential research fellowship as the Camus chair at l’IMéRA, the Institute for Advanced Study at Aix-Marseille University, France. He’ll spend the rest of the academic year in Marseille, working on the legacy of the Moroccan filmmaker, writer, and artist Ahmed Bouanani and his family. Limbrick's recent book Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi was recently awarded the L. Carl Brown Book Prize from the American Institute of Maghrib Studies.

The National Endowment of the Arts has awarded the Institute of the Arts and Sciences a $50,000 grant for “Surge,” an event series on the theme of Afrofuturism organized by Professors Karlton Hester, Music Department, and Gerald Casel, Department of Performance, Play & Design, in collaboration with Aaron Samuel Mulenga, Ph.D. student, Visual Studies and IAS Fellow.

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Amy Beal, Professor of Music, is happy to announce the forthcoming publication of her fourth book Terrible Freedom, The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski (UC Press, May 2022), the first full-length study of American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925–2000), an important and prolific experimentalist who has been completely neglected by histories of contemporary music.

Kyle Parry, Assistant Professor, HAVC, co-edited an anthology of essays called Ubiquity: Photography's Multitudes. Thanks in part to funding from the Arts Research Institute, the anthology is open access: free for anyone to download and read:

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In March Professor Kailani Polzak, HAVC, is convening a colloquium at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts called Imprinting Race. Kailani and her co-organizer received an Association of Print Scholars Collaboration grant for it with additional sponsorship from the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute.

Performance, Play, and Design Professor Marianne Weems, who is also the director and co-founder of the New York-based performance company The Builder’s Association, is opening a new virtual performance in March, I Agree to the Terms, with the Skirball Center at NYU.

Black feminist theorist, Professor Tina Campt, will be speaking about her newly released book, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See, 2021, on February 22. Published by MIT Press, it examines "Black contemporary artists who are shifting the very nature of our interactions with the visual through their creation and curation of a distinctively Black gaze."

ARI launching a new initiative focused on art and oppression. Generously funded by UCSC alumni Jim Gunderson and Peter Coha in memory of Maxine M. Gunderson, the initiative aims to strengthen freedom of expression, combat censorship and support a multifaceted engagement with issues related to freedom of expression, censorship, race, and representation. The three-year program’s first bi-annual is the Slug Press Freedom of Expression Student Comics Competition, and follows with a call for participation in the Superheroes + Other Misfits visiting artist program, for artists/researchers whose creative work responds to oppression and/or is silenced, or is from countries where creative work is suppressed.

Just Futures: Black Quantum Futurism, Arthur Jafa, and Martine Syms is currently at the Sesnon Gallery through March 19. Against the present’s seemingly endless backdrop of deep political unrest, environmental emergency, and racialized injustice, Just Futures highlights poignant creative experiments in futurity and justice, directed at emancipatory worlds-to-come.

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