Art 130 Art in the Age of Instagram & Contemporary Digital Culture

This quarter the Art 130 course topic, entitled Art in the Age of Instagram & Contemporary Digital Culture, will focus on the study of art in the digital age. Students will explore works of art that use the language of the internet and social media to critique the way in which art has changed as a result of these digital platforms. This course also seeks to investigate how the Internet and social media has shifted the way that the spectator engages with art, and how it has transformed the way that artists think about, and make, art. We will have two museum field trips, and interesting reading materials that will help contextualize contemporary art practice in the time of social media.

Once the course website has been updated, you will be able to find the details here:
https://arthistoryandvisualculture.blogspot.com

Art 117 Intermediate Drawing with Eric Beltz Summer Session A

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring KeyShawn Scott on Wednesday, June 3

Untitled (2025). Courtesy of KeyShawn Scott

 Who: KeyShawn Scott

What: Art 1A Artist Talk

When: Wednesday, June 3

Where: Chemistry 1171

Website: www.keyshawnscott.com

Instagram: @sklamar_

Artist Bio: 

KeyShawn Scott holds a BA in Art Studio from UC Davis and is currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His artworks have been featured in exhibitions such as "What You Give" at the Latino Center of Art & Culture in Sacramento, CA, "Larger Than Life: Murals in the Making" at The Barn Gallery, Woodland YoloArts, CA, and at the Glassbox and Red Barn Galleries at UCSB. He is also recognized for his contributions as a Recreational Leader at the Greater Vallejo Recreation District, where he mentored and engaged with young artists. KeyShawn’s practice spans drawing and installation, exploring how systems of visibility, order, and control shape everyday experience. His work examines vulnerability, identity, and the educational, commercial, and social structures that influence how we move, see, and are seen.

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Alexis Childress on Monday, June 1

Artwork and photograph courtesy of Alexis Childress

What: Artist Talk featuring Alexis Childress

When: Monday, June 1 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Chemistry 1171

Website: www.alexischildress.com

Artist Bio:

Alexis Childress (1993) is a mixed media artist born in Illinois. She received her BFA from Georgia State University (2020), and is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of California Santa Barbara. Her work visualizes an investigation of identity, systems and Afrofuturistic dreams. Using 2D and 3D digital collage to craft creatures and imagine worlds that symbolize the Black American consciousness. Alexis has exhibited in venues such as the Morean Arts Center (FL), MINT Gallery (GA), Atlanta Photography Group Gallery and the Rhode Island Center of Photographic Arts. As an established writer, her contributions extend to publications like Burnaway Magazine, Create! Magazine and the New York Public Library Zine. She has been recognized with the Red Bull Arts Microgrant, the Georgia Visual Artist Grant as well as selected to present at the 2021 Society of Photographic Education National Conference.

FIELD TRIP TO THE UCSB AD&A MUSEUM: FAULT LINES MFA THESIS SHOW ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 27

WHAT: Field Trip! Fault Lines: MFA Thesis Show

WHEN: Wednesday, May 27 from 12:30-1:45 PM

WHERE: UCSB AD&A MUSEUM

Please arrive at the museum on time. The museum is adjacent to the University Center and Storke Plaza/Tower. *MEET AT THE MUSEUM!

About the Exhibition:

The Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara are pleased to announce the 2026 Master of Fine Arts exhibition Fault Lines, featuring the work of graduating artists Tiffany Aiello, Alexis Childress, Hope Christofferson, Emily d’Achiardi, Negar Farajiani, Vivek Karthikeyan, and KeyShawn Scott. Fault Lines brings together each artists’ physical and conceptual lines of inquiry into a shifting, evolving conversation, where investigation and creating tensions and new worlds are possible. These artists break with linearity and overturn expectations for lines to mark boundaries. Collectively their work asks visitors to examine their own perceptions of fault lines as not only splits, but also openings in existing, constructed, and imagined realms.

An installation by d’Achiardi challenges visitors’ understandings of fact and fiction through a generated experience with real and invented news headlines. Drawing on Buddhist and Hindu contemplative practices, Karthikeyan's expanded cinema installation explores ways in which moving images can model our subjective experience of consciousness. Handmade anthropomorphic animal masks and paintings by Aiello engage with queer and neurodivergent identities at the intersection of simulation, reality, and performance. Christofferson’s creation of new realities connects human design to nature through living spaces for animals and humans. Childress pairs digital sculpture with a reconstructed corn field to highlight the systemic forces of racism and related experiences of isolation within rural topographies. A full-scale grocery store aisle by Scott demonstrates how the physicality of barriers, like security glass in these spaces, spotlight the social and cultural policing of minoritized bodies. Farajiani exhibits three interrelated components: soft sculpture, video, and public artwork, located outside the museum. Her project speaks to embedded networks of resilience and memory, both in materials and collaborators on campus and the artist’s homeland of Iran. Fault lines, both metaphorical and material, disrupt our understanding of the nature of boundaries as impenetrable. Upon closer inspection, these apparent divides are invitations to transgress and generate anew.

Fault Lines is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. Curatorial text is by Alida Jekabson, PhD candidate, and Kristin Yinger, PhD student, in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.

See the full Press Release HERE.

About the Artists:

Alexis Childress is a visual artist born in Illinois and received her BFA from Georgia State University. Inspired by Astro-Blackness, her work uses 2D and 3D digital sculpture and collage to explore Black American nationalism, systems of power, and the inception of a black identity framework within emerging techno-cultural assemblages, algorithms, and digital networks. Through a combination of installation and digital art, her work confronts the concept of constructed reality, creating worlds that become reflections of the broken systems of society.

Emily D’Achiardi is an internet artist exploring the intersections of digital culture, memory, and intimacy. Emily received a BA in art history from Reed College and is currently pursuing an MFA at UC Santa Barbara. Emily creates digital works that use the browser as a site of memory, intimacy, and emotional residue. Her work foregrounds fragments, repetitions, and the quiet systems that script online feeling.”

Hope Christofferson works with nature to amplify human imagination. With a deep love for creative problem solving, she often looks at natural design and animal behavior to inform the work she makes. As an illustrator, her work stems from a hybrid source of transmutation and communication. Recently the California coastline has inspired a series of wondrously collaborative works that roam the shorelines of reality and dream, merging orchids, ferns, corals, and people into artworks that swim free in our shared fantasea.

KeyShawn Scott works across drawing and installation. His drawings celebrate Black culture while addressing Black experiences and challenging stereotypes. His installations critically engage with American education systems and the ways grocery store settings oversimplify complex systemic issues.

Negar Farajiani is a multimedia artist. Her thesis explores weaving as a social and embodied practice. Drawing on her experience as an artist, mother, and migrant, she approaches weaving not only as a material technique but also as a way of building community, memory, and resilience. With a focus on socially engaged art and networking, her work builds connections between individuals and communities. Through collective weaving, installation, and her essay film, the project creates temporary spaces for gathering and storytelling, both inside and outside the museum.

Tiffany Aiello’s thesis project explores the relationship between identity and nonhuman performance, using objects like puppets, costumes, masks and digital avatars as vessels for expression.

Vivek Karthikeyan is interested in reimagining moving image as a medium of phenomenological perception rather than visual storytelling. Drawing from disciplines including cognitive psychology, South Asian philosophy, and contemporary philosophy of mind, he creates immersive hybrid installations that combine traditional time-and-lens based video, sound, creative coding, and VR technology.

Art 1A Assignments to Clear Unexcused Absences

If you have missed a lot of classes, with unexcused absences throughout the quarter, then you should do these assignments to clear them. As you know, 5 or more unexcused absences will result in failing the class. However, if you had emergencies, and can provide me with a note from your doctor, from Student Health, or from your CAPS, DSP, CARE Counselor (for the specific dates in question)– then those absences will be excused. These are not extra credit assignments to improve your grade. These papers are due no later than Friday, June 5 by 5:00 PM. Submit them to Alexis and KeyShawn via email.

Please note: If you did not go on the museum field trips, or the alternate museum field trip, then you have 2 unexcused absences for each of the trips, and you will also be missing the graded weekly assignment those weeks.

To clear unexcused absences: Watch the recorded Arts Colloquium Artist Talks found below, and write a 2-page Artist Talk response. Each talk and written assignment clears a single absence. Therefore, if you need to clear more than one absence you will need to do more than one of these assignments. 

You may submit up to 3 assignments total:

1) Tia-Simone Gardner: Recorded Talk

2) Nicholas Galanin: Recorded Talk

3) Alisha Wormsley: Recorded Talk

Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Dannah Hidalgo on Monday, May 18

My Mom Is My Dog's Favorite Person. Courtesy of Dannah Hidalgo.

 What: Artist Talk Featuring Dannah Hidalgo

When: Monday, May 18 from 12:30-1:45

Where: Chemistry 1171

Instagram: @dannahmari_art

Artist Bio:

Dannah Mari Hidalgo (1994) is a Filipina-American artist based out of California and Oahu, Hawai‘i where she was born and raised. Hidalgo obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in 2019. Hidalgo has also attended the Lorenzo de’ Medici Institute in Florence, Italy in 2015 and in 2016. Hidalgo recently received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2024. Hidalgo is a proud graduate of Leilehua High School, a Hawai‘i public school.

Hidalgo creates cacophonic narratives through a collage-like technique, identified as “double image.” Two images simultaneously existing on one surface, while still attempting to maintain distinction, compels the viewer to alternate between narratives -recognizing one in the context of another. The concept of double image reinforces dichotomous relationships: abstract and representational, severity and humor, depth and flatness, the brazen and tender, and resolve and tension.

Within the intersections of patriarchal and colonial structures of domestic spaces, servitude of the matriarch, and thus consequentially, of the daughter, is reflected upon in Hidalgo’s recent works. These structures condition women from early on to be self-sacrificing and dismissive of their individuality, personal interests, and pursuits, existing to bear the weight of domestic labor and servitude. The lineage of designated and assumed stewardship of domestic spaces is confronted, as well as the weight of maintaining communal spaces at the expense of the self. Through the exchange of figures between mother and daughter, Hidalgo looks to highlight fraught domesticity, while excising a departure that exemplifies brazen femininity. Within this dynamic, residual guilt, care, and tenderness seep between bursts of assertive mark making and layering.