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 fine arts degree in 1971.

“I took those two years at U.C.I. to explore other things, to see, read, study, meet people, make work,” she told The Orange County Register in 2011. “That was extremely useful to me and changed my way of thinking about painting. Afterward, I went back to painting, but I was painting with a different view.”

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, text, and community partnership. Starting with an unprecedented survey of the architecture of mass incarceration, the project juxtaposes photography of over 250 prisons across all 50 US states and territories with histories, anecdotes and numbers—presenting a meditation on race, vision, photography, history, language, and space. Following ongoing research into the post-War shift toward camouflage in contemporary prison architecture, each facility is photographed from a publicly available point of view, seeing how it is situated among architecture, land uses, and with varying degrees of visibility and concealment. The exhibition includes a national tour that partners with

Simon Leung, Professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art, is giving a lecture, Simon Leung: To squat a country, to find the next Bed. at the Manetti Shrem Museum at UC Davis on April 20, 2018. 

Just as DeLap’s art influenced and inspired new generations of younger artists, so too did his efforts in the classroom. DeLap taught and mentored some of today’s most notable contemporary artists, including Bruce Nauman, John McCracken and James Turrell. But while he pioneered art forms and founded a major artist community at UC Irvine, he never sought out the same level of attention as some of his contemporaries. For him, teaching, creation and experimentation were enough.