College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences

VPA Visiting Artist Series

The Visual & Public Art Department’s Visiting Artist Series provides a forum for engagement and dialog with emerging and established figures in contemporary art and culture through a three-day mini-residency that includes a public lecture, workshop with students, and studio visits where students receive advice, exposure to professional opinions, and one-on-one creative criticism and feedback.

Each semester, the Visual & Public Art Department ’s Visiting Artist Series brings to campus prominent artists and scholars to give free, public on-campus presentations engaging our greater community, critique student work and participate in events, projects, and lectures.

VPA Visiting Artist Series Welcomes Tanya Aguiñiga

Join Us March 3, 2022, 6-8 pm for this virtual VPA Visiting Artist Series as we welcome Tanya Aguiñiga for:  

Expanding on Professional Practices to include the Migrant Experience: An Artist Lecture by Tanya Aguiñiga

Zoom Registration Link 

About this Event:  How does one navigate the art world (college, grad school,  building a studio and gallery/museum success as a first gen, ESL, multi-national) with no predetermined path or aid as a person of color? Tanya Aguiniga unpacks lessons she learned along the 20+ years of her artistic practice, including performance, site-specific installation, community based collaborations, collectives, and object making. Sharing how large scale projects have been funded and maintained, how she has managed to keep her studio afloat all these years and how these methods are often at odds with each other. A best practices for community engagement guide will be provided to all participants.

About the Artist:  Tanya Aguiñiga was born in 1978 in San Diego, California, and raised in Tijuana, Mexico. An artist, designer, and craftsperson, Aguiñiga works with traditional craft materials like natural fibers and collaborates with other artists and activists to create sculptures, installations, performances, and community-based art projects. Drawing on her upbringing as a binational citizen, who daily crossed the border from Tijuana to San Diego for school, Aguiñiga’s work speaks of the artist’s experience of her divided identity and aspires to tell the larger and often invisible stories of the transnational community.

Tanya Aguiñiga holds an MFA in furniture design from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA from San Diego State University. She was just awarded the Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities (2021), is a United States Artists Target Fellow in the field of crafts and traditional arts, a National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures awardee, Creative Capital grant awardee, and a recipient of an Americans for the Arts Johnson Fellowship for Artists Transforming Communities.

Artist website: http://www.tanyaaguiniga.com

All images courtesy of the artist | photo credit: Katie Levine & Gina Clyne

* This event is by registration and waiting room enabled.

VPA Visiting Artist Series Welcomes Paola de la Calle

Join Us February 24, 2022, 6-8 pm for this virtual VPA Visiting Artist Series as we welcome Paola de la Calle for:

Threading Between Past and Present : An Artist Lecture by Paola de la Calle

About this event: Thinking about the artist as storyteller, Paola de la Calle shares the tactics she employs to express a narrative that traverses time through her work and practice. In this lecture, De la Calle details the different aesthetic and material choices that define her practice and details her artistic journey to becoming an interdisciplinary artist.

About the artist: Paola de la Calle is a Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work examines home, borders, identity, and nostalgia. Her practice is a multidisciplinary exploration that ties together her family’s migration, personal memories, as well as historical and political narratives through the use of textiles, printmaking, and collage. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally. In her recent work de la Calle unpacks cultural elasticity by combining printed fabric, sewing, and text to investigate the symbolism within everyday objects she considers cultural artifacts. Paola is a graduate of the New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program in 2019 and the lead artist for the Caravan for the Children Campaign as part of her residency with Galeria de la Raza. Her work has been published in The New Farmer’s Almanac and Graphite Journal. Her studio practice has been featured on Hyperallergic’s “A View from the Easel”, KQED’s Rightnowish, The Boston Art Review, and VOGUE among others. She is currently based in San Francisco, CA.

Artist website: www.paoladelacalle.com

All images courtesy of the artist.

* This event is by registration and waiting room enabled.