Installation and Architecture

From the Yankton Reservation to California, Ruby Jay traces their family history in final installation at Art Practice

May 16, 2023

Each year, nine seniors in the Department of Art Practice are selected to receive an honors studio for their final semester. Each student receives their own studio space with 24/7 access. The studio space allows students to work on longer-term projects and explore new mediums alongside their cohort. Arts & Humanities had the opportunity to interview three of the nine students in this year's honors studios as they completed their final projects for Professor Stephanie Syjuco's Art + Archive class.

Ruby Jay works in painting and installation and is an honors studio recipient. They...

Borders and Crossings Examined through Film, Media, and Engaged Discussion at CICI’s Inaugural Conference

April 14, 2023
How do border policies and technologies reanimate histories of racialized and imperial violence? How are climate and environmental changes affecting borders and their crossing? What are the possibilities and limits of humanitarian and human rights discourses on migration and refugees?

These are only a few of the complex questions posed and discussed at the inaugural two-day conference titled Borders and Crossings: Contemporary Arts and Techniques of Migration, hosted by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry (CICI) this March. Co-...

Exhibit of emerging UC Berkeley artists’ work opens May 10 at BAMPFA

May 8, 2023

It’s a Tuesday morning at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and Samuel Wildman is covering the wall of an art gallery with night-lights. At a glance, these objects could be mistaken for mass-produced lights from the local hardware store, the sort you might find installed in a child’s bedroom to ward off bedtime anxiety.

But take a closer look, and you’ll notice that each light is covered in a porcelain flame that seems more ominous than comforting. The sense of unease deepens when you...

PBS Art21 Presents: Stephanie Syjuco (Season 9, Bay Area)

Art21 proudly presents an artist segment, featuring Stephanie Syjuco, from the "San Francisco Bay Area" episode in the ninth season of the "Art in the Twenty-First Century" series. "San Francisco Bay Area" premiered in September 2018 on PBS. Watch now on PBS and the PBS Video app: ...

PBS: Art Practice Chair Ronald Rael on Restoring one of Colorado’s most endangered places

August 1, 2022

WATCH HERE(link is external)

For a quarter century, Colorado’s Most Endangered Places List(link is external) has been a harbinger of statewide preservation efforts, bringing awareness and preservation resources to important structures at risk of being lost due to time, natural disaster, and...

Documentary: Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands, Ronald Rael (Cooper Hewitt)

Set in the remote San Luis Valley of Colorado, Mud Frontier: Architecture at the Borderlands is Cooper Hewitt's first feature-length documentary film, and follows design studio Rael San Fratello’s experimentation with 3D-printing technology and traditional adobe architecture. The film offers an intimate, tactile look at Mud Frontiers, a project led by artist-architects Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello, who use 3D-printing technology to build adobe structures on Rael’s ancestral homelands in Colorado’s San Luis Valley. In an area where Indigenous and European colonists have...

Documentary "Borderlands" Featuring Ronald Rael (The New Yorker)

“Isn’t it so fascinating that the simple act of drawing a line on a map can transform the way we see and experience the world?” Ronald Rael observes in the opening of the documentary film “Borderlands,” which looks at communities in San Diego and Tijuana, Brownsville and Matamoros, and El Paso and Juárez. Rael, an architect, explores the area near the border fence outside El Paso with an eye tuned to reimagining the space around him and plotting ways to transgress it. He is accompanied by his nine-year-old son, Mattias, and he teaches the boy how to interpret a wall that has come to...