Unsettling California
A Summer Program and Art Exhibition at UCSB
Unsettling California is a student-curated art exhibition and justice-oriented educational program focused on race and migration in California, which builds on our Mellon Sawyer Seminar. The Summer Sessions 2022 programming has culminated in an exhibition OPEN NOW in the Art Department’s Glass Box Gallery featuring works by contemporary California artists whose practices question the persistent presence of colonial ideologies, structures, and policies that have shaped migration, citizenship, inclusion, exclusion, and the racial formations of the State.
Alongside the art exhibition, we hosted a series of dialogue-building events including a panel discussion and a skill-building workshop on justice- and action-oriented art. Check out details about each event and the exhibition below.
If you’re an undergraduate at UCSB consider submitting your own original artwork to be featured here in a virtual gallery. Click the Call for Art button for more information.
Recordings are available upon request. Contact the graduate coordinators listed below.
Faculty Advisors: Kim Yasuda, Lisa Parks, France Winddance Twine
Graduate Coordinators: Dani Kwan (Art), Samantha Harris (Education)
Contact info: dkwan@ucsb.edu, syharris@ucsb.edu
Supported by grants from the UCSB Summer Enrichment Program and the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Race, Precarity, and Migration.
Unsettling California: The Exhibition
September 1 - October 1, The Glass Box Gallery, Free Admission
Dominant migration narratives are often represented globally and nationally as an exemplar of the “American Dream” and/or the “California Dream”. These stories hide the historical and ongoing realities of European settler colonialism and white supremacy. While California, the largest state by population in the United States, tries to maintain an image of a progressive, multiracial, multicultural utopia, the actions of state actors alongside the mythologies of the “California dream” mask histories of genocide, forced removal, and segregation, use of forced labor, indentured labor, and semi-bound labor contracts. They also conceal ongoing state violence, anti-black racism, and symbolic and cultural violence that Native Americans continue to endure. These colonial and racist structures connect to contemporary conditions through state legislation, immigration policies, allocation of resources, forced removal and dispossession of land, and systems of oppression; they will undoubtedly have consequences far into the future. In response to such historical erasure and lingering legacies, we offer the concept of “unsettling” as a means of disrupting existing narratives and as an analogy for rejecting colonial logics of migration. The exhibition will offer visitors the opportunity to learn about their role in colonial histories and to reimagine/remap their place in future migration narratives and racial formations.
