Saturday, May 23, 2026
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.
Friday, May 22, 2026
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
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.
Saturday, May 16, 2026
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
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.
Monday, May 11, 2026
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
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.
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
Art 1A Artist Talk Featuring Christopher Velasco on Monday, May 11
Courtesy of Christopher Velasco.
What: Artist Talk featuring Christopher Velasco
When: Monday, May 11 from 12:30-1:45
Where: via Zoom:
Artist's Website: https://www.christopheravelascophotography.com
Artist's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caver83/
Artist Bio:
Christopher Anthony Velasco (born 1983) is a photographer and performance artist based in Los Angeles, known for exploring the queer brown body and blending horror with camp aesthetics. He earned his Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2019, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts in 2011.
Velasco has contributed to his field through various internships, including positions at the Santa Monica Museum of Art (Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) and UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center and Library as a Getty Marrow Undergraduate Intern. He is an adjunct professor at Moorpark College and East Los Angeles College, and he teaches at CSSSA (California State Summer School of the Arts).
His work has been prominently showcased in exhibitions at respected venues such as the Art Center College of Design, AD&A Museum, Avenue 50 Studios, the California Institute of the Arts, the Hibbleton Gallery, the Getty Museum, and the Vincent Price Art Museum. Additionally, Velasco has collaborated with Harry Gamboa, Jr., notably through Virtual Verite, and has performed at Los Angeles Union Station, UC Santa Barbara, and LAST Projects. Velasco's work is part of collections at The Getty Museum, Alta Med Art Collection, Cerritos College Art Gallery, UC Santa Barbara Department of Art, Keck School of Medicine at USC Research, and East Los Angeles College Photography Department.
Artist Statement:
My photographic works often incorporate performance-based encounters with clearly defined boundaries of the photograph structure that defy purpose or permanence. Each of my photographs captures the unsustainable gaze upon a disregarded, disfigured body that is constantly evolving, descending, and autodestructing into endless layers of lost memory. The uncanny loops camp aesthetics together.
My efforts to capture the briefest moments of awareness most often result in beautifully played-out visual vignettes that echo beyond the façade that sustains the original setting of place or subject.
Through my photographic works, I have effectively portrayed the fragility between existence and metaphor. My sense of self serves as a medium by which characterizations can be asserted in visual form. My insistence that role-playing, role reversal, and role surrender are all acts of defiance against that which portends to control the destiny of the image gives my photographic works an essential urgency and definite positive charge.
Wednesday, April 22, 2026
LACMA CAMPUS MAP, DIRECTIONS & PARKING
LACMA DIRECTIONS & PARKING INFORMATION HERE.
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90036
MEETING AT LACMA:
We will meet at LACMA at the Wilshire Blvd. entrance next to the ticket office and Chris Burden's Urban Light sculpture (shown picture below) at 12:00PM on Saturday, May 9. LACMA will be providing us with free admission to the museum, but they do not provide free parking. I will be waiting for you with your free admission ticket.
Please read all guidelines HERE before your visit. https://www.lacma.org/plan-your-visit
5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036
Phone: (323) 857-6010
Parking costs $23.00 per vehicle, and it is not part of our free admission. You can also park on the street in the surrounding neighborhoods, and at parking meters (but you will have to periodically run back to your car to feed your meter).
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