About
The Department of Art & Art History at the University of California, Davis offers two programs:
The Studio Art program centers on its Master of Fine Arts degree, which culminates in the annual MFA Exhibition. The program encourages the development of studio practice in drawing, painting, printmaking, sculpture, ceramic sculpture, photography, video, and electronic arts. 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. The exhibition catalogues document the continued flourishment of young artists and their mentors on the Davis campus.
The program in Art History studies the changing visual expression of values, beliefs and experiences across diverse cultures and over time.
Department of Art & Art History
Materiality as Periphery, Revisited
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.