Past Exhibits

Squeak Carnwath is widely known for her large, luminous canvasses. “Carnwath builds her paintings up layer by layer, blending poetry and imagery with color and luminosity to emphasize the essence of her message: We should all take the time to appreciate and revel in the familiar circumstances of our daily lives,” art critic Miriam Seidel has said. As Carnwath herself puts it, “Art is the antidote that reminds us to breathe, to feel the soles of our feet and the touch of the ground on the bottom of our toes.”

Katherine Sherwood teaches in the Art Department at UC Berkeley. Her mixed-media paintings gracefully juxtapose abstracted medical images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist’s brain, with calligraphic renderings of ancient symbols. Her paintings investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect—playing with our striving to know more, to control our future.

Bay Area artist Ali Dadgar works in painting, experimental printmaking, digital photography, and performance. He explores various processes and techniques with a variety of objects and surfaces in order to reflect on and transform how meaning, function and value are created.

Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UC Berkeley and the author of several books and articles on medieval political theory. His current projects are “The Invention of the Discourse on Peace in the Late Middle Ages” and “El Conflicto entre Caballería y ‘Res Pública’ en Castilla, Florencia y Borgoña, siglos XIV y XV.”

Lydia Nakashima Degarrod is a visual artist and cultural anthropologist from Chile. Her stated aim is to expand the boundaries of the disciplines of cultural anthropology and art by using the knowledge of both to question the boundaries of ethnographic and artistic representations.

An MFA Candidate at UC Berkeley, Jonn Herschend has exhibited at locations around the Bay Area, and in Portland, Nashville, and Norway. In 2002 he was artist in residence at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Hershend’s works have been critiqued in The New York Times Magazine and the San Francisco Examiner. He serves on the board for Out of Site, the center for art and architecture in San Francisco.

Saule Suleimenova’s style, says art historian and professor A. Mukhambetova, “is deeply individual and instantly recognizable. Many influences make up its pedigree, including European expressionism, symbolism and dada, the decorative component of Central Asian miniatures, Kazakh ornamental style…One should add God-given talent and hard work by the soul and mind, a unique psyche, both sensitive and dynamic, plus a heightened reaction to falsity, both in life and in creative work.”

Rábago draws on his training in sculpture and painting to create large-scale, site-specific public art installations. His award-winning work has been exhibited widely at museums and galleries throughout Europe. He is particularly known for his Babel towers, monumental works made entirely out of books that he has installed in libraries in Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and elsewhere. This exhibit featured sketches by Diaz de Rábago of proposed installations for sites across the UC Berkeley campus.

Photographs and texts presenting the story of Jewish life in Norway as it flourished in the period from 1851 until the Second World War.

This show features an in-depth look at the artwork of Alice Wingwall. A sculptor, photographer, and filmmaker, Wingwall experienced a progressive loss of vision as a result of retinitis pigmentosa. Her self-portraits and drawings attest to her deep knowledge of and relationship with architecture.