Recent aah items

Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity

Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Feline Creativity on the Eve of Modernity

Materiality as Periphery, Revisited

Wed, 6 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This essay revisits the themes of an earlier essay on the peripheralization of materiality in art-historical practice and adds insights to it based upon disciplinary and cultural developments since 2019. Primary among these is the advent of artificial intelligence image-generating applications, which challenge the materiality of artworks in entirely new ways. This essay proposes that such mechanisms mask art’s materiality within and behind seductively sleek illusions that hide the true materiality of art. It also uses the repatriation of art objects to propose that art’s materiality still matters.

Tom Bills Sculpture

Mon, 6 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Tom Bills Sculpture

Emergence and Structure

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Emergence and Structure

Multiplying the Variations

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Multiplying the Variations

Persistence of Vision

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Persistence of Vision

Displaced

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Displaced

Case Discussions

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Case Discussions

2010 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, UC Davis

Wed, 2 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

The 2010 MFA Exhibition, provocatively titled by the artists themselves, presents the final degree work for our second-year class of graduate students. The first-years open a show on 7 June 2010 at the University Club; just behind them a new class of eight students, selected from a very large pool of the most talented college graduates in the country, readies itself to matriculate in the fall.

This cycle has been repeated now for some four decades, always culminating in the annual MFA Exhibition. The graduate program in Studio Art maintains a curriculum of diverse and cross-disciplinary study, emphasizing creative and independent studio practice and advanced intellectual inquiry. Studio Art at UC Davis enjoys an illustrious history—the confluence between 1959 and 1962, for example, of Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Manuel Neri, Wayne Thiebaud, and William T. Wiley. This exhibition catalogue, we believe, documents the continued flourishment of young artists and their mentors...