• M.F.A. Exhibition for Environmental Art & Social Practice (EASP)—”Picking up Shells Amid a Tsunami”

    Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    The culminating exhibition of the Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) M.F.A. program at UC Santa Cruz presents new projects—Picking up Shells Amid a Tsunami 쓰나미가 밀려오는데, 조개나 줍고 있네—developed through concentrated inquiry over a two-year period and offers a window into the artists’ unique long-term research projects that expand beyond the gallery space. — FULL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • The Tallest Dwarf—film screening and talk with Julie Wyman

    Communications Building 7487 Red Hill Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UC Santa Cruz affiliates are invited to a screening and discussion with filmmaker Julie Forrest Wyman. The Tallest Dwarf charts the filmmaker’s quest to find her place within the little people (LP) community at a moment when dwarf identity is poised to radically change. Wyman’s work engages issues of embodiment, body image, and the possibilities […]

    FREE and open to UCSC affiliates
  • Arts & Ecology Festival: Creative Resistance

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    On Earth Day, UC Santa Cruz launches the inaugural Arts & Ecology Festival: Creative Resistance, a campus-wide gathering that refuses to treat climate change as a problem of carbon alone. Instead, it brings together artists, scientists, students, and community partners to engage the deeper conditions of the crisis, and to open space for cultural, political, […]

  • Spring Exhibitions at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences

    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 […]

  • Visualizing Abolition Screening Series: Beyond Access

    Visualizing Abolition
    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 […]

  • Drop-in Figure Drawing

    Drop-In Figure Drawing
    Elena Baskin Visual Arts Center Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    Drop-In Draw provides a live model and room monitor. There is no formal lesson and only dry media is allowed (no paints). — ADVISORIES – These events contain mature content and nudity. – Drop-In Draw is subject to the possibility of last-minute cancellation without notification, and sessions are not guaranteed. — ADMISSION – FREE and […]

    FREE and open to the public.
  • Artist Roundtable for EASP M.F.A. Exhibition—”Picking up Shells Amid a Tsunami”

    Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery Baskin Service Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    The culminating exhibition of the Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) M.F.A. program at UC Santa Cruz presents new projects—Picking up Shells Amid a Tsunami 쓰나미가 밀려오는데, 조개나 줍고 있네—developed through concentrated inquiry over […]

  • Artist Talk with Federico Cuatlacuatl

    Institute of the Arts and Sciences 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States

    We invite you to join us for a film screeening and discussion with artist Federico Cuatlacuatl. This will be the west coast premiere of  QUEMAR LAS PATAS DEL IMPERIO (to […]

  • Alumni Reunion Weekend 2026

    Join your classmates back at UC Santa Cruz for Alumni Reunion Weekend, April 24–26, 2026. This annual celebration honors the pioneering classes of 1965–1976 and the mark you have left […]

  • Harriet: Performing an Archive

    Digital Arts Research Center 407 McHenry Rd, Santa Cruz, CA

    Through motion capture, immersive sound, and real-time digital systems, CHARI performs alongside Harriet, a life-scale avatar carrying a living archive of Black sonic and vernacular memory. Drawing from Black archival traditions rooted in call-and-response, improvisation, and communal stewardship, the performance understands memory as relational and alive. Together, our movements shape the environment as the performance […]

    FREE
  • Artist Tour with Libia Posada

    Institute of the Arts and Sciences 100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, United States

    We are thrilled to invite you to join Libia Posada, a multidisciplinary artist as well as a physician, for this artist-led tour of Everything is Going Right, the premiere solo exhibition of her work in the United States. With artworks influenced by her medical training, Posada will discuss how she engages the body as a […]

  • UCSC Orchestra

    Music Center Recital Hall 400 McHenry Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    UCSC Orchestra

    Free – $12
  • VMCC Talk with Jaleh Mansoor—Political Agency in The Anthropocene

    Virtual Event

    In this presentation, Jaleh Mansoor will draw upon recent Italian Marxist Feminist perspectives on ecology and discourses on the Anthropocene to question how Italian feminist analyses of invisible labor came to be elided with the question of a wider, post anthropocentric ecological horizon. Jaleh Mansoor is a writer and an associate professor of Art History […]

    FREE and open to the public
  • Rasanblaj as Spirit Turn: Gina Athena Ulysse in Conversation with Jennifer González

    Please join us for a conversation between Gina Athena Ulysse and Jennifer González, discussing Ulysse’s solo exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements. The internationally-lauded work of humanities professor Gina Athena Ulysse is on view at the IAS as an inaugural Faculty Spotlight Exhibition. The site-specific installation, produced in community from things collected, found, purchased and donated, […]

  • Flow and Friction Symposium: Media Practices Across Global Asias

    Cowell Conference Room 257 Cowell-Stevenson Road, Santa Cruz, CA

    “Media Practices Across Global Asias,” a  graduate-student research cluster working across the History of Art and Visual Culture and Film and Digital Media departments, hosts their first symposium titled “Flow and Friction.” The day-long symposium is comprised of four panels with presenters from UC Santa Cruz and universities further afield in the U.S. and abroad. Three of the […]

    FREE and open to UCSC affiliates