by Enrique Leal, Assistant Professor, Art Department with the Western Service Workers Association and the Little Giant Collective.

This project brings a skill set to farm workers in Watsonville in the tradition of social activist posters and WPA era graphics. It will give not only basic techniques in the screenprinters graphic arts and social activist tradition, but also bring information and access to the resource network available to this community: health care/aid, counseling, emergency care, and access to legal assistance.

This project was born out of a desire to mobilize the power of art to tell a story about the diversity of the people, work, and impact of the Genomics Institute. Artists and Professors Jennifer Parker and Karolina Karlic invited all Genomics Institute faculty, researchers and staff to participate in a portrait series that uncovered the lens through which genomics is seen by the people who live and work in it.

Each person was asked to bring an object of significance — something that inspired their being, personally and professionally. The result is a stimulating exploration of the diversity of the group as seen not only through the eyes and expressions, but also through the objects that reflect influences beyond the immediate work space.

By Barbara Benish, UCSC Art Department Lecturer in conjunction with UCSC Social Practice Arts Research Center and SeaCliff State Park in Aptos, CA.

The goal of the project is to design an aesthetically enhanced public space on the central coast of California to engage transformative education, inspire environmental awareness and promote ocean sustainability

The research team for this project is composed of Psychology graduate student Roxy Davis, Film and Digital Media professor Sharon Daniel, Sociology professor Jenny Reardon, and Sin Barras members Leslie Potenzo and Rebekah Mills.

Jails are spaces of exclusion where prisoners are rendered invisible to the general public. Their invisibility makes them vulnerable to neglect and subject to treatment that the general public would find unacceptable, if they could see it. By recording and publishing the testimonies of those whom the jail’s healthcare system has failed, we hope to bring those who have been marginalized and excluded through the criminal justice system together with the greater Santa Cruz community and to activate the community to support their human right to health care.

By Axelle Boyer, a PhD student in the department of History of Art and Visual Culture

The Collective Fabric project is meant to create a safe environment on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz for students and faculty to come together and participate in the creation of a collective textile.

People are invited to weave a collaborative textile on a giant hand loom at this free, public art installation which opens in the courtyard by the koi pond at Porter College. The loom will be available on the mezzanine of the Porter College Dining Hall through fall quarter for continued weaving. Once the textiles are complete, they will be exhibited at Porter College.

Collective Fabric aims at creating a safe space where everyone, regardless of ethnicity, sex, gender, or status, can sit together and bond in a moment of artistic creation.

The M.U.R.A.L. invites proposals from current and former UCSC art students for murals to be installed on campus this Fall (2020). The irony of making a mural in real space in the time of COVID and when we expect most fall classes to happen online is not lost on us. M.U.R.A.L. provides a forum for expression in this intense time of uncertainty, grief, and rage, as well as a platform for the creative work of students. We welcome students back to campus with messages of solidarity and community, even if that welcome may be, for the moment, a virtual image of an actual artwork located in real space. One mural will be chosen for installation in each space for this fall. The chosen designs will express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement and/or with related movements working in solidarity to end systemic racism, police violence, and/or the prison system. It might do this by re-telling art history or visually enacting other historic reparations. It might honor people or events that have had a significant impact on struggles for social or economic justice. Or, it might address solidarity with these movements and urgent issues in ways that we can’t imagine.

by Juniper Harrower, graduate student in Environmental Studies and UCSC Lecturer.

We are losing many species at alarming rates because of our impacts on the Earth’s ecosystems. This project will engage students and researchers at the UCSC greenhouses, arboretum, and UC Reserves to illustrate threatened local species, creating detailed imagery for key morphological aspects

by Yolande Harris, Lecturer in the Art Department

This project focuses on expanding our relationship to the Monterey Bay through underwater sound. The project brings together expertise from local communities in different forms of listening, from science, arts and sound healing, to help shape a more integrated awareness of the ocean. The study of underwater sound as a harbinger of environmental change exposes the impact of uncontrolled anthropogenic sound, and enables insights into the many marine species of this area.

Created by Sophia Lev, a UCSC undergraduate student majoring in Art.

Sophia will be host monthly events on campus to ‘check the temperature’ of a given site as part of an ongoing collaborative performance that creates space for discussion and reflection about the relationships between students, natural space, and the institution.

By Isabella Bobrow, UCSC undergraduate double major in in Architecture (individual major) and Neuroscience.

The goal of this project is to explore the emotional connections people have with trees. Especially on campus, trees are the primary markers of place and central to the community’s identity.

Project Led: Sean Macnaughton, UCSC undergraduate in Sociology

We Belong is a Community Initiated Student Engaged Research (CISER) project designed to mentor first-generation undergraduate researchers, while generating new, locally actionable knowledge on the experiences of mixed-status immigrant families in Santa Cruz.

By Wes Modes, Art Department Lecturer

The project examines the ways that river communities respond to threats to river culture such as economic displacement, gentrification, environmental damage caused by generations of river modification, and the effects of global climate change. In 2019 and 2020, we will focus on stories from the San Lorenzo River and the historic Ohio River