UCI Art History
Undergraduate
Association
Art Show 2024:
Belonging: [home, memory, and root]
Our exhibition theme explores the multifaceted nature of home, tied to memory and roots. It challenges perceptions of "home" by delving into how individual backgrounds and experiences shape this concept, whether literally or metaphorically. The theme extends beyond humanistic settings, using "home" as a symbol across disciplines to promote empathy, celebrate diversity, and bring awareness to those still searching for a sense of belonging. The exhibition acts as a frame to prolong the UCI community's effort to make the campus a home for all, emphasizing inclusivity and understanding among students, faculty, and supporters.
Exhibition website:
Exhibition Booklet:
Art Show 2023: Aurora
In collaboration with the Students for Health Humanities.
The polar lights illuminate the night sky, connecting observers from oceans and continents apart. In the same vein, our art show will illustrate shared experiences from around the state to foster compassion in healthcare. From your brightest hopes to darkest struggles, we warmly invite you to shed light on your stories, reflections, or perceptions related to health/well-being.
People are not defined by their culture, profession, or diagnosis. We encourage everyone to see the light in people and always be a light for each other.
Exhibition website:
Art Show 2022: Sonder
SONDER: “The profound realization that everyone, including strangers passed on the street, has a life as complex as one’s own.” We often go about our lives with tunnel vision, forgetting that others lead just as complex and vivid lives as ourselves. To cultivate a growing movement of empathy, this exhibition aims to explore how art can encourage others to understand the beauty in the people around them. How do we, as artists and as people, look beyond what we see at face value to embrace the masterpieces within?
Exhibition Booklet:
Art Show 2021: The Theme is Love
Encouraging artists to explore the different forms and meanings of love through their artwork, we posed the question: In a culture that offers to sell us every desire, in the age of the Hallmark card, how do we talk about love? This purposefully simple exhibition title provoked a broad range of responses and interpretations. The artworks featured in this exhibition express personal stories, desires, and anxieties about love across a variety of mediums- and above all, they express a yearning for human connection that especially resonates in the context of a global pandemic. Whether created by a single artist or through collaboration as one half of a pair, each piece weaves its own thread into the show's tapestry, illustrating how we approach interpersonal relationships across time and space, how profoundly we experience love both new and old, and how we learn to love ourselves and each other.
Exhibition Booklet:
Art Show 2020-2021: Querencia
Our exhibition theme, Querencia, considers the relationship between physical spaces and identity, power, and safety. As the quarantine began, the concept of home became unstable and fraught for many college students suddenly caught between local campus residences and family homes, many facing housing insecurity and exploitative rent termination fees. Public spaces such as the college campus became inaccessible, transforming from safe and familiar spaces to areas of uncertainty and risk. Many of the artists in this show respond to the conditions of the pandemic, reflecting on returns to childhood hometowns or their new relationships with online spaces. Their works reflect shared anxieties and hopes during a period of uncertainty, loss, and separation. Threads of isolation, nostalgia, found families, and connection wind through the artists' artworks and stories, joining us across space and forming our own Querencia.
Exhibition Booklet:
Art Show 2016-2017: Under the Scope
The Art History Undergraduate Association, inspired by artists who use art to magnify aspects of inward and outward reality, set the theme Under the Scope, asking artists to explore ways of perception and deception. Some artworks respond to the theme directly while others have taken a metaphorical approach in their manifestation of the artists' message. Put in dialogue with one another, these works create a spectrum of interpretation that speaks to each viewer's unique reality. When we consider what is gained and lost in the act of looking, new ideas
and perspectives are born.
Art Show 2015 - 2016: Transcending Limitations
Transcending Limitations presents works by artists from the UCI community. By encouraging individual expression, the Art History Undergraduate Association hopes to explore the way that students, faculty, and alumni choose to convey, conceal, and identify aspects of limitations in their lives.
In a world obsessed with the big picture, single voices and personal histories are too easily dismissed. All people struggle with limitations that are either personally imposed or imposed upon them by society. Art confronts these realities. We invite you to reveal how you push and break through limitations and experiment with the limitations that define who you are. Think about the way that we transmit or conceal our identities, forge new meanings, create new dialogues, or touch upon shared human experiences.
Art Show 2014-2015: Altered Perceptions
The Art History Undergraduate Association, inspired by artists who use art to magnify aspects of inward and outward reality, set the theme Under the Scope, asking artists to explore ways of perception and deception. Some artworks respond to the theme directly while others have taken a metaphorical approach in their manifestation of the artists' message. Put in dialogue with one another, these works create a spectrum of interpretation that speaks to each viewer's unique reality. When we consider what is gained and lost in the act of looking, new ideas and perspectives are born.
Exhibition Booklet:
https://uciahua.weebly.com/uploads/6/0/8/7/60874153/altered_perceptions-1.pdf
