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Alumni News

Alumni |Connect 
An Experimental Stage: Morgan Embry

Written by Christine Byrd In the few short months since graduating, Morgan Embry, M.F.A. ’19, has criss-crossed the country as a lighting designer for live music concerts. When she has time to spend in one place, it’s usually Los Angeles, where she’s busy showcasing her immersive art installations...
Alumni |Faculty |Connect 
Art of Social Change

Two more UCI faculty and alumni receive Guggenheim Fellowships When a shiny sculpture of a rabbit by the most commercially successful living artist sold for a record-breaking $91 million at auction earlier this year, UCI art professor Daniel Joseph Martinez shrugged. “We don’t remember the people...
Alumni 
14 Art World “Bad Boys” Whose Macho Work Was Impossible to Ignore

At the height of Performance Art, University of California Irvine student Chris Burden asked a friend to shoot him in the arm with a .22 rifle. He titled the action Shoot (1971). The friend was supposed to just graze the artist’s skin. Instead, the bullet passed straight through. (Two years later,...
Alumni 
Alexis Smith (BA 1970) to be honored at Venice Family Clinic Art Walks & Auction

The 39th annual Venice Family Clinic’s Art Walk...
Alumni 
Marcia Hafif, Painter of Monochromatic Works, Is Dead at 88

Marcia Hafif, an artist best known for monochromatic paintings that explored the intersection of color, brush stroke, surface and light, died on April 17. She was 88. In 1969, Ms. Hafif returned to the United States to attend the University of California at Irvine, where she earned a master of...
Alumni 
Noritaka Minami MFA 2011 and Ashley Hunt BA 1994 awarded Graham Foundation Grant

Graham Foundation awarded over $530,000 in grants to individuals which included Noritaka Minami MFA 2011 and Ashley Hunt BA 1994. Ashley Hunt - Degree of Visibility Degrees of Visibility tackles the politics of erasure and camouflage that allow mass incarceration to take place through photography...
Alumni 
Kori Newkirk, MFA 1997, Artist in Residence at Pasadena City College

Alumnus Kori Newkirk (MFA 1997) is currently Artist in Residence at Pasadena City College. A solo exhibition in the Boone Family Gallery accompanies this appointment. 

Alumni 
Ken Gonzales-Day, MFA 1993, "Unseen: Our Past in New Light: Ken Gonzales-Day and Tituts Kaphar" exhibition at National Portrait Gallery

Ken Gonzales-Day, MFA 1993, is in a major 2-person exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery , "UnSeen: Our Past in a New Light: Ken Gonzales-Day and Titus Kaphar." The exhibition will be on view from Friday, March 23, 2018 through January 6, 2019. As the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery...
Alumni 
The Art Department congratulates Liat Yossifor, MFA 2002, on the exhibition of her most recent paintings

The Art Department congratulates Liat Yossifor, MFA 2002, on the exhibition of her most recent paintings at Miles McEnery Gallery, opening in New York on Saturday, March 17. The exhibition will run from March 17 - April 14.  In 2011, Liat Yossifor definitively turned her painting practice toward...
Alumni 
Hong-An Truong MFA interviewed in Artforum about her recent work

Hương Ngô and Hồng-Ân Trương’s (MFA) work The Opposite of Looking is Not Invisibility. The Opposite of Yellow is Not Gold, 2016, pairs vernacular photographs of the artists’ mothers with texts from 1970s-era US congressional hearings regarding Vietnamese refugees. It is featured in “Being: New...
Alumni 
Alum James Luna (1950-2018)

James Luna (BA 1977) passed away on March 3. He was a highly influential Native American performance artist with an international reputation. "Luna has had more than forty solo shows and participated in eighty-five group exhibitions. His work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the New...
Alumni |Faculty 
Alumni and Faculty to be featured in Made in LA 2018 at the Hammer Museum

Opening June 3, Made in LA 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial survey exhibition of recent artwork from Southern Californian artists, is featuring two UCI alumni- Linda Stark (MFA 1985) and Alison O’Daniel (MFA 2010)- and one current UCI professor- Daniel Joseph Martinez- amongst its roster of 32...
Alumni 
'Urban Light': Everything you didn't know about L.A.'s beloved landmark

The artwork, one of the city's most popular landmarks, turns 10 this month. To mark its first decade, the museum has switched from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs, a birthday gift from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. It’s something that the late Burden’s wife, Nancy Rubins, said would have...
Alumni 
Celebrating a Leader of Chicano Art

"That’s what Gilbert Luján loved to create. The late artist, who went by the nickname “Magu,” was a pioneer in the Chicano art movement in Los Angeles starting in the 1960s. A member of the Chicano art collective Los Four (which, ironically, later gained a fifth member in Judith Hernandez), he...
Alumni 
SoCal Sculptor Eric Johnson Brings Wood and Resin Masterpieces to Doyle Arts Pavilion

The work of second-genteration "Finish Fetish," or "L.A." Look," arist Eric Johnson, MFA, will be on view at Orange Coast College's Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion from February 8 until April 7 in an exhibit entitled "Helix2: Sculptures by Eric Johnson." Johnson - whose art combines shipwright-like...
Alumni 
UCI Art Department Alum Alexis Smith's Exhibition at Pepperdine’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art

January 20 - April 1, 2018 For over 40 years, Alexis Smith's art has explored the depths of popular culture. She begins with an array of images—ranging from thrift-store finds to nostalgic advertisements—and juxtaposes them with poetic and poignant texts. Her art underscores how the media shapes...
Alumni |Faculty 
Artforum names UCI faculty and alum in the "Best of 2017" issue

Congratulations to the Department of Art faculty and alumni from the were recently named in Artforum's “Best of 2017” issue. Rhea Anastas (faculty) Curator Jamillah James selects Cauleen Smith’s  "Lessons in Semaphore", curated by Rhea Anastas at UCI’s University Art Galleries, as one of the years...
Alumni 
Two UCI Art Department MFA alumni, Sarah Ross and Jonas Becker, are joining the faculty at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) this fall.

  School of Arts Institute of Chicago is proud to announce 13 new full-time faculty members representing diverse artistic techniques, media, and practices that will focus on SAIC's indisplinary studies. Among these 13, are MFA alumini Jonas Becker and Sarah Ross joining the faculty....