Past Exhibitions
I am sending you love from the future
January 9-February 8, 2025
The MFA in Visual Arts Preview Exhibition is an annual group exhibition showcasing work by soon-to-graduate MFAs in advance of their final solo thesis shows held in the Spring 2025 quarter. Acclaimed Los Angeles-based curator Irene Georgia Tsatsos worked as the Curatorial Advisor for the 2025 exhibition, where she conducted studio visits with the cohort and devised the exhibition’s title and theme.
Participating Artists: Cuyler Ballenger, Maddie Butler, Coralys Carter, Nykelle DeVivo, Olivia Kayang, Moe Penders, John Singletary
Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work
September 28-December 7, 2024
As part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, the Mandeville Art Gallery at UC San Diego presents Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work, a retrospective exhibition about the work of husband-and-wife team of Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison, who were among the earliest and most notable ecological artists. Founding members of the Visual Arts Department at UC San Diego, Helen and Newton were local San Diego artists for nearly four decades, where they developed their pioneering concepts of Ecological Art. Helen and Newton Harrison: California Work is the first exhibition to focus on their California work, including nearly 20 projects produced between the late 1960s and 2000s.
LaJuné McMillian: The Portal's Keeper
July 1-September 26, 2024
LaJuné McMillian: The Portal's Keeper is a new site-specific commission for the exterior video façade of the Mandeville Art Gallery. Building on the artist's interest in stewarding spaces for liberated Black realities and the Black imagination, McMillian conducted a movement and meditation workshop with UC San Diego students using extended reality and physical computing to translate participants' movement data into visuals for this new artwork. In the artist's words, "The Portal's Keeper is a reminder that movement not only represents our individual experiences, but it also represents our collective memory, transcending space, time and oppressive social structures. It allows us to connect to each other, our ancestors, our deepest selves, and gives us space to communicate to our future. Movement is a technology, holding the stories of our existence globally."
Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy
March 2 - May 25, 2024
For the past fifteen years, Lauren Lee McCarthy has worked in performance, video, installation, software, artificial intelligence, and other media to address how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and social life. Bodily Autonomy is McCarthy’s largest solo exhibition in the United States to date. The show brings together two major works to examine bio-surveillance. Together, Surrogate and Saliva encourage a potent and timely dialogue regarding bodily autonomy in times of rapid technological development and increased corporate and government surveillance.
NOT NOW BUT NOW
January 11 - February 3, 2024
The first MFA in Visual Arts group exhibition held in the Mandeville Art Gallery since 2015, NOT NOW BUT NOW features six emerging artists who reckon with the impossibility of now through urgent evocations of past and future. Spanning photography, film/video, printmaking, sculpture, drawing, and performance, the works in the exhibition reimagine communal archives and ancestral histories, contest colonial narratives of progress and discovery, and portray the body as defiantly present, undergoing constant movement and transformation.
Participating Artists:
Deanna Barahona, JAX, Jun!yi Min, Naomi Nadreau, Chanell Stone, Nathan Storey
How We Gather
October 7 - December 9, 2023
The group exhibition How We Gather investigates the notion and enactment of solidarity across various contemporary artists’ practices through the lens of the pandemic. The state of emergency brought on by COVID-19 both magnified existing structures of precarity and inequity, while also strengthening social bonds.
Participating Artists:
Zarouhie Abdalian, Adelita Husni-Bey, Pia Camil, Cog•nate Collective, Kimi Hanauer, Susan Jahoda and Caroline Woolard, Elana Mann, noé olivas, Nina Sarnelle and Selwa Sweidan, Alice Yuan Zhang
Nature Scene
July 1 - October 2, 2023
Nature Scene is a program presented on the Mandeville Art Gallery’s exterior screen featuring work by digital artists that have been commissioned or specifically adapted for the space. The works use artificial intelligence, generative algorithms, 3D scanning, and more to depict the influence of technological evolution on the staging and mediation of the natural world. It is on view daily from 7 am to 10 pm.
Participating Artists:
Anna Carreras, Entangled Others (Sofia Crespo & Feileacan McCormick), Tiare Ribeaux, Nicolas Sassoon, Clement Valla, Qianqian Ye
ARE WE NOT DRAWN ONWARD TO NEW ERA
March 4 - June 17, 2023
The first UC San Diego Visual Arts faculty show organized since 2015, ARE WE NOT DRAWN ONWARD TO NEW ERA presents work by new faculty who have joined the department over the past eight years. The exhibition marks the grand reopening of the Mandeville Art Gallery after a period of closure for extensive renovation.
Participating Artists:
Memo Akten, Danielle Dean, dean erdmann, Malik Gaines, Mariah Garnett, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Lorena Mostajo, My Barbarian, Alexandro Segade, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Pinar Yoldas