Events

Spring Exhibitions at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences
2026-05-29 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-05-30 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-05-31 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-03 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-04 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-05 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-06 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-07 12:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) and 1 more date | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Visit the IAS, UCSC’s premier art galleries, for our spring exhibitions. On view April 10–August 16, 2026 are three diverse and interdisciplinary shows: Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right, the first US solo exhibition by the Colombia-based artist and medical doctor; Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj, a site-specific and immersive exploration of the Haitian kreyol conception of rasanblaj; and Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies, a mixed-media exhibition emerging at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art.
The IAS Galleries are open Wednesday-Sunday, 12 pm – 5 pm. Admission is free to the public.
Libia Posada: Everything is Going Right
Libia Posada’s first solo exhibition in the United States features installations, sculptures, and drawings meticulously constructed from surgical instruments, gauze bandages, crutches, used books, and domestic picture frames. The new and existing works in the exhibition powerfully stitch together the personal, social, and political disorders and afflictions that currently trouble the world, from the wars that resonate across the globe to the violences of aging in US prisons.
Gina Athena Ulysse: A Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements
The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view as a premier Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, centers on the Haitian concept of rasanblaj, a form of assembly and collage that transcends the formal use of materials to draw together people, spirits, and ideas.
Ronaldo V. Wilson: There Are No Words, But Melodies
Collage is both a material practice and a structural interrogation in the Faculty Spotlight Exhibition artworks by literature professor Ronaldo V. Wilson. In video, painting, and installation, layers and folds conceal and reveal, delving into the experience, both bodily and emotive, of living in times of violence.

Rules Are Not Neutral: Play As Sense-Making, Acts Of Resistance, And Imagining Otherwise
2026-05-29 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-05-30 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-01 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-02 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-03 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-04 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-05 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-06 12:00 - 17:00 | Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery, 11 Cowell Service Rd, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
This exhibition brings together a range of analog games – including board, card, role-playing, and other participatory works – that engage social and political realities in different ways. The works span widely circulated commercial games to independently produced projects, one-of-a-kind artworks by artists, faculty, alumni, and students, and materials drawn from UC Santa Cruz Special Collections and Archives.
In part, the exhibition challenges the persistent assumption that games and play are detached from social and political life. On the contrary, game designers and artists across diverse perspectives and positions have long used play to engage questions of social systems, lived experience, and how power operates. This exhibition does not attempt to represent that full spectrum. Instead, it brings together a particular set of works that foreground how games can make systems visible, intervene in them, and imagine alternatives.
All games embody values, whether intentional or not.
– Mary Flanagan, game designer and scholar
Across all of these works, games are not only forms of entertainment, though they may be that as well. They are encountered in multiple ways: as objects, as systems, as artworks, and as experiences that unfold unpredictably through interaction. In each case, rules and constraints shape what participants can do. In these different forms, the works stage systems – such as housing and land ownership, capitalism, race and identity, civil rights and protest, fascism, and colonialism – in ways that are simplified and easy to see, opening space to recognize similar structures beyond the game. In this sense, the works suggest that rules are not neutral – they organize experience, distribute power, and produce meaning.
Games are the art of agency.
– C. Thi Nguyen, philosopher
The exhibition is intentionally dense. This abundance reflects the breadth of ways games operate across contexts, from activism and education to art and everyday life. While it celebrates creativity and difference, it also asks how these works engage critically with the structures that shape our lives.
Some works use rules to model systems, helping players understand how those systems operate. Others use play to rehearse action, asking players to practice navigating or challenging those systems. Still others turn toward speculation, inviting players to imagine alternative futures, worlds, and the systems that might shape them.
The imagination is an instrument of change.
– Ursula K. Le Guin, author
The focus on analog games reflects how they foreground materiality and shared physical presence. Played face-to-face, handled, read aloud, and experienced together, these works show how rules operate not in abstraction, but through lived, embodied experience.
Ultimately, the exhibition asks us to consider not only how games represent the world, but how they shape our engagement with it – and how through play, the social and political systems they model might be understood, challenged, and reimagined.
Games are not apolitical.
– Kishonna L. Gray, media scholar

Gallery Reception
May 15 from 1 to 4pm at the Eloise Pickard Smith Gallery

Art Friday
Hands-on art activities drawing from the current exhibition.
ALL ARE WELCOME regardless of skill level. Art supplies and free snacks are provided!

Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access
2026-05-30 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-05-31 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-03 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-04 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-06 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-07 12:00 - 17:00, 2026-06-10 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
On view in the IAS Screening Room is a selection of short films curated by Visualizing Abolition Visiting Faculty Fellow Dr. Pooja Rangan.
Prisons deny and censor the access of those trapped inside them—to information, to intimacy, to community, to meaningful work, to nourishment of all kinds, and perhaps most cruelly, to care. This program assembles a series of films, including works by filmmakers incarcerated in California as well as others without that lived experience. Together, these works confront the debilitating impacts of these restrictions and reveal how the disabling logic of the prison is extended to other institutional spaces (the hospital, the university), turning access into a scarce commodity by enclosing what should be held in common. Questioning the carceral and state-sponsored productions of disability and accessibility, the short films together reveal the courage of people working despite limitations to produce collective access for one another, described simply and beautifully by disability justice activist Leah-Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha as “revolutionary love without charity.”
Thanh Tran
Dying in Prison, 2022
HD Video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Carolyn Lazard
Pre-Existing Condition, 2019
HD video (color, sound), 6 minutes
Courtesy of the artist and Trautwein Herleth3
Anthony Alejandrez
Another Rainy Day, 2023
Phone video (color, sound), 3 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Jordan Lord
After…After… (Access), 2018
HD Video (color, sound), 16 minutes
Courtesy of the artist
Rahsaan “New York” Thomas
Friendly Signs, 2023
Video (color, sound) 21 minutes
Courtesy of Tommy Wickerd, Empowerment Ave & System Impact Media

Office Hours Under the Sea
2026-05-30 12:00 - 17:00 | Institute of the Arts and Sciences, 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States
Join Ronaldo Wilson and special guests for a site-specific, endurance performance as part of there are no words, but melodies. The exhibition emerges at the intersections of Black poetics, performance, and visual art toshuttle between verbal and non-verbal forms of language, rendering the boundaries of identity and meaning slippery.
Drop in and visit Wilson’s office hours any time between 12pm and 5pm.
About the Artist:
Ronaldo V. Wilson is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, academic, and the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the Cave Canem Prize; Poems of the Black Object, winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry; Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, and Lucy 72. His latest books are Carmelina: Figures and Virgil Kills: Stories. He is the editor of three special issues of hybrid and experimental work in Interim: A Journal of Poetry and Poetics; and Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He has shown work and performed most recently at the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard. The recipient of numerous fellowships, including Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, and The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Wilson is Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at U.C. Santa Cruz, where he directs the Creative Writing Program, and serves on the core faculty of the Creative Critical PhD Program; principal faculty member of CRES (Critical Race and Ethnic Studies); and affiliate faculty member of DANM (Digital Arts and New Media).

Creative Technologies—Digital Spaces: From Practice to Praxis
2026-06-04 18:00 - 22:00 | CA
The inaugural class of Creative Technologies presents, Digital Spaces: From Practice to Praxis, a digital art exhibition hosted in New Art City. This digital showcase highlights the culmination of the students’ work both in and out of the program. Explore the various creations from our students that range from game design, digital art, media and visual design. Through individual exploration and collaborative exchanges, these students have shaped a virtual destination that is representative of their personal creative growth and technical practice. We invite visitors to explore a small glimpse into the variety of work this program has been able to foster and sharpen, and to see just how “creative” Creative Technologies can be.
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ADMISSION
– Free and open to UCSC affiliates.
– This is an online event.
– Click this link here to enter the Creative Tech Lobby.
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This program is open to all UC Santa Cruz affiliates consistent with state and federal law.

52nd Annual Print Sale—a two-day event
2026-06-05 10:00 - 18:00, 2026-06-06 10:00 - 18:00 | Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
The 52nd anniversary of the UCSC Print Sale runs in conjunction with the Art Department’s Spring Open Studios. Hundreds of original prints will be for sale in a variety of media at this two-day event, including:

Woodcuts
Lithographs
Etchings
Photo-based prints
Screen prints
And more!

All proceeds benefit art students: 80% of proceeds go to the individual artists, and 20% goes to support the Print Studio (thereby back to printmaking students). This once-a-year event presents an extraordinary opportunity for students to display and sell their work to the public. The event also offers an opportunity to see the exceptional quality of the printmaking program and facilities at UC Santa Cruz.
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ADMISSION
– FREE and open to the public.
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FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS
– Print Sale: Two-day event scheduled for Fri. June 5 & Sat. June 6 from 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m.
– Open Studios: One day only, in conjunction with the Print Sale, on Fri. June 5 noon–4:00 p.m.
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PARKING
– Parking by permit or ParkMobile
– Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event.
– Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS)
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Spring 2026 Open Studios
2026-06-05 12:00 - 16:00 | Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center, Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Art Department students exhibit their art work throughout studios and classrooms at the Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center at UC Santa Cruz. The Open Studios event features student art work in a variety of media, including:
– Drawing
– Painting
– Print media
– Sculpture
– Photography
– Environmental art
– Electronic art/new media
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ADMISSION
FREE and open to the public.
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PARKING
– Arts Lot #126 is the closest parking lot to the event.
– $5 ParkMobile Arts Special Event flat rate; cash/credit via parking attendant when present in the lot; or by valid UCSC permit.
– Before arriving to UCSC, we recommend downloading the ParkMobile App on Google Play or Apple App Store and setting up a profile with license plate and payment information.
– Visitors with DMV placards or plates may park for free in DMV spaces, Medical spaces, or ParkMobile spaces without additional payment, or in timed zones for longer than the posted time.
– UCSC affiliates must get their permits in advance; attendants will only sell non-affiliate rates
– More information provided by UCSC Transportation & Parking Services.
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This program is open to all members of the public consistent with state and federal law.

Sluggers of the Lost Goal: Mud, Slime, and World Cup Madness!
2026-06-05 18:00 - 20:30 | Kresge College, R-3 Suites, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064
Watch robots compete in the Mechatronics Public Demo! Cheer on their sleep-deprived creators as they run their ‘bots through the field.Thrill to contest between autonomous robots navigating the field and score points by shooting ping-pong balls at each other and scoring the Golden Goal! Come see this exciting Sluggers of the Lost Goal competition!
The Mechatronics class is having their public demonstration of their final design project, Sluggers of the Lost Goal: Mud, Slime, and World Cup Madness! , Friday June 5th, 2026 at 6:15 PM in the UCSC Kresge Auditorium.
In this thrilling competition, teams from UCSC’s Mechatronics course will pit their autonomous robots against each other in an epic Sluggers of the Lost Goal Competition. Each robotic agent will navigate the field, shoot ping pong balls at each other, hide behind obstacles, and try to score the golden goal. The champions will compete in a wild head to head tournament, until one robot emerges victorious! The Public is welcome (and it is free)!
The public is invited (you might have to duck a few ping pong balls) and the teams will be on hand to explain their designs to one and all. Come see what these students have accomplished in 10 weeks and cheer on the competition.
There will be a live webcast starting at 6PM: www.twitch.tv/elkaim_ucsc (we will try, might not work)
Feel free to forward this to any and all that might be interested, children (future engineers) especially welcome.
