Events & Exhibitions
CCA’s dynamic public programming brings art, architecture, design, writing, and the world of ideas to life through events, lectures, exhibitions, and more.
Join us
All of CCA’s lectures, symposiums, and workshops are free, offering opportunities for students and the public to engage with cultural topics and creative practices through the work and ideas of award-winning artists, designers, authors, scholars, and alumni.
Featured events and programs
Art in action
Explore how democracy, creative activism, and voter advocacy intersect through Creative Citizens in Action’s ([email protected]) annual series of public programs, which span the disciplines of art, design, architecture, and writing.
Creative Citizens Series
Enjoy curated new work by our community of students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in our contemporary galleries. Exhibitions are open to all and always free.
Current exhibitions
Recognitions / 认 • 知, a solo exhibition by Christine Wong Yap, at the new CCA Campus Gallery in Blattner Hall.
Discover on-campus experiences
Enjoy the future of art and design all year-long in CCA’s mix of campus galleries and presentation spaces. Visitors will find new work by students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in curated venues that embrace diverse perspectives and a range of contemporary approaches. Offering our students the unique opportunity to present their work and expand their practice in a professional setting, the campus galleries are also a place for our community of makers and the public to connect across contemporary art and design. Plan a visit, today.
Meet the voices of tomorrow
CCA’s graduating student showcases, presented by class year, are digital time capsules of capstone projects and culminating work across CCA’s Architecture, Design, Fine Arts, and Humanities & Sciences divisions.
Creative Citizens in Action
The Creative Citizens in Action ([email protected]) initiative provides important resources to the CCA community to power dialogue and making related to creative activism. The connected programming explores art, democratic engagement, and current affairs through public events, exhibitions, grant opportunities, voting resources, and connections to the classroom.
[email protected] is overseen by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department in partnership with Student Affairs, as well as libraries, academic divisions, communications, and faculty.
Explore our stories
Rewind Review Respond
Rewind Review Respond (RRR) is an online forum where CCA students write about recent events and the ideas that affect their practice, communities, and fields of study. Through writing, videos, and interviews, RRR is an opportunity to debrief on a lecture, panel, screening, or roundtable and to dive deeper into ideas discussed.
RRR is organized by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department and led by a team of student editors, writers, and designers.
Exhibitions at CCA
@ccaexhibitions
March 15, 2023
This is the last week to see Recognitions / 认 • 知, a solo exhibition by @christinewongyap at the CCA Campus Gallery. The gallery is open 11am–7pm today, 11am–4pm Thursday and Friday.
Photo by Josef Jacques
March 14, 2023
Thanks to everyone who came to the [email protected] Belonging Symposium on March 4!
The [email protected] Belonging Symposium was an afternoon of participatory workshops, conversations and activations that explored the various dimensions of Belonging, unpacking its manyfold perspectives, premises and tensions. The goal of this symposium was to set in motion a reciprocal and generative dialogue among the members of CCA community about the conditions for belonging as a space of safety, care and virtuous mutualism.
The Symposium kicked off with a Conversation About Belonging featuring Vice President of DEIB Tricia Brand and 2022 Creative Citizenship Fellow Christine Wong Yap. The conversation was followed by a panel and parallel workshops led by CCA faculty Faith Adiele, Genevieve Hyacinthe, Steve Jones, and Michael Washington.
After the symposium, guests were encouraged to attend an interactive tabling session featuring work by faculty Ana Llorente, Stephanie Sherman, and guest artist Maureen Burdock, and view interactive installations curated by [email protected] Student Fellows Shreya Shankar (MArch ‘23) and Layla Namak (MArch ‘25).
View a recording of the opening conversation and more photos in the [email protected] Archive (link in bio).
Photos by Tariq Stone and Nick Bruno.
March 13, 2023
THIS THURSDAY, from 7:15–9pm in the Blattner Multipurpose Room (75 Arkansas St), wheelchair-dancer/scholar/activist Petra Kuppers will lead a public movement workshop and talk exploring contemporary disability culture performance through co-experienced embodiment in unequally distributed, not-always-accessible power fields.
Traditional somatics teach us how to hone our introspective senses and expand our bodies’ worlds; Eco Soma methods extend that attention toward the creative possibilities of the connection between self, others, and the land from a critical disability perspective. Eco Soma proposes an art/life method of sensory tuning to the inside and the outside simultaneously, which allows for a wider opening toward ethical cohabitation within human diversity, and with more-than-human others. Using video examples and participatory exercises, we will explore what this can mean for us art makers as witnesses/actors of our own lives.
Participants will collectively make a poetry installation that will be installed on campus after the event.
Image: Petra Kuppers, a white queer cis disabled woman of size, smiles with her arms thrown wide open and her head tilted up toward the sky. She has yellow glasses, a shaved head, pink lipstick, purple scarf, and patterned black top. She sits on Scootie, her mobility scooter, in front of a brightly painted urban building.
March 3, 2023
Black Hole Cinematheque (BHC) / arc will present a public screening of Bay Area experimental time-based work from its archive, as well as arc's own analog film manipulation, in the CCA Production Stage on Thursday, March 9, from 9:30–11:30am. The screening is free and open to the public.
BHC is a community-based microcinema and film archive that had a hub and resource center in West Oakland for years. Due to increasing costs of living, BHC lost their physical space and their screenings halted. BHC was operated by tooth, an artworker and anarchist, living somewhere in so-called California. They are involved in the process termed arc.
arc operates as a collective entity which seeks to work outside of a framework that privileges the solitary authorship of objects as a point of artistic creation and finitude, looking instead to a process of intersubjective communal encounter as a locus from which the work generates. As conductive vessels, a configuration of material elements are used to initiate this process, including (but not limited to): photochemical film, performance, sound & light installation, written language, & time-based sculpture. arc work has been presented at numerous galleries, museums, and exhibition spaces around the world, including: The Lab, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, The Stud, Sutro Baths Cave, Ann Arbor Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Glada Sprutan (Stockholm), Spectacle Theater (Brooklyn), Squeaky Wheel Film & Media Art Center (Buffalo), NDSM Treehouse (Amsterdam), All Hallows Church (London), Atelier Äuglein (Berlin), L'Abominable (La Courneuve), Les Innatendus Film Festival (Lyon), La Cueva (Mexico City), among others.
This event is organized by Sofía Córdova, Adjunct 2 Professor, Graduate Film, and funded by an endowment gift to support The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series at CCA, an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism. Learn more at the link in our bio.
Image courtesy of arc.
#CreativeCitizensInAction
Find what’s next in our calendar of exhibitions and events