UC Davis Art Studio MFA and BA Programs

NEW 🗓️ DATE:

Save the date for the winter quarter Open Studios! On Thursday, Mar. 12, from 4:30–6:30 p.m., our graduate students will open their studios to the public.
Featured students include Nick Block, Tara Daly, Levi Keatts, Davion Macks, Sean Olmstead, Marjorie Williams, Sierra Faust, Gemma Pasilla, Erica Rawson, Julio Rodriguez and Lulu Smith.

Studios are located in TB9 and the Grad Art Building.

.theartist .loop .gem

Save the date for the winter quarter Open Studios! On Thursday, Feb. 19, from 4:30-6:30 p.m., our graduate students will open their studios to the public.

Featured students include Nick Block, Tara Daly, Levi Keatts, Davion Macks, Sean Olmstead, Marjorie Williams, Sierra Faust, Gemma Pasilla, Erica Rawson, Julio Rodriguez and Lulu Smith.

Studios are located in TB9 and the Grad Art Building.

.theartist .loop .gem davisarts

Robin Hill, Professor of Art in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program, makes work that focuses on the intersection between drawing, photography, and sculpture. Her recent work takes on a collaborative
sensibility, where objects and materials which have been rejected by others have served as starting points for acts of transformation. Robin strives to give shape to nuance and to relocate familiar things in an unfamiliar order. While handmade might best describe her early
work, hand-altered is a more apt description for the work she is doing today.

For Robin, a good studio day looks like this: “Turn the radio on. Drink coffee. Walk the dog. While swimming laps I conjur solutions to problems and set goals for the day. Drive to studio. Dive into one or more projects that are underway. Lose track of time. Succeed in being
only partial sidelined by janitorial, archivist, educator,
administrator, public relations tasks. Go home.”

The best advice she has ever received and one she shares with her MFA students now? “Keep going. Make the work you want to see.”

Photos courtesy of Marjorie Williams .loop

Fidencio Fifield-Perez (Assistant Professor of Art) is an artist whose current art examines borders, edges, and the people who must traverse them. Fifield-Perez’s interdisciplinary practice centers the materiality of paper ephemera, everyday self- documents discarded
after having fulfilled their purpose. “Working across painting, calligraphy, weaving and collage, Fifield-Perez transforms materials associated with bureaucracy into intimate records of belonging.” (William Hernandez Luege in his accompanying essay for not never over
nothing exhibited at ).

Fifield-Perez is the newest faculty member of the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program. What’s a typical studio day for an artist who is also a professor? “There isn’t a typical routine as every day of the work week looks different depending on teaching schedule, meeting with graduate and undergraduate students in their studios or other faculty/staff. Some days I’m squeezing a bit of painting in between meetings and studio managing duties, emails, etc. But I’ve worked it
out where works that don’t require long and undisturbed hours of work@can happen in my campus studio, while larger and experimental works will occur in my off-site studio. What I’m trying to say is that I
prioritize my studio work and try and fit it into a typical day regardless of location.”

Even though juggling his own art practice and teaching takes planning, working with UC Davis students is very rewarding. “Students at UC Davis are incredibly hardworking, make thoughtful and vulnerable work,
and are engaged with various parts of the University at large, making for dynamic and rigorous work.”

Photos courtesy of Marjorie Williams .loop

f.perez

Justine Di Fiore is featured in a new group show in SF Art Week opening this Friday. On the occasion of CULT Aimee Friberg’s 12th anniversary, and San Francisco Art Week, The Veil Between brings together a constellation of artists whose practices move through the space between the material and the immaterial—between body and spirit, memory and myth, earth and cosmos.

January 16 - March 14, 2026
Opening reception: Friday, January 16th, 6 - 8 PM
1401 16th Street, San Francisco



Image: Justine Di Fiore, Crushing Loud Shimmering Devotion, 2025, oil on canvas, 55x48 inches. Photo: .wakai

Darrin Martin is Chair of the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program at UC Davis. His work engages the synesthetic qualities of perception through video, performance, sculpture, and print-based installations.
Influenced by his own experiences with hearing differences, his projects consider notions of accessibility through the use of tactility, sonic analogies, and audio descriptions. His works have
screened at numerous institutions and festivals, such as the Museum of Modern Art (NY) and European Media Art Festival (Germany), and his artworks and installations have exhibited at venues including Moscow
State Vadim Sidur Museum (Russia), McIntosh Gallery (Canada), Krannert Art Museum (IL) and, most recently, at the Weatherspoon Art Museum (NC) and Saint Joseph’s Art Society (CA).

We hope you can join us on Saturday, Jan. 10, when Darrin and writer and curator Tanya Zimbardo will have a conversation about Stacked Artifacts from 2-4 pm at Telematic Media Arts. There will be a closing reception on Saturday, Jan. 24, 2 – 5 pm.

Telematic Media Arts
323 10th St. @ Folsom (SoMa), San Francisco


ucdavisartstudio

Images: Courtesy of the artist.
Today I Will Work on My Book… For Sure!, crossed synchronized corner
projections of 26-minute 4K to HD video loop with sound, 2025.

The Unfolding, carved hollow core closet door, two monitors, 49-minute
HD video loop with sound, lumber, cork sheets, lauan strips, 2025.

The Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program presents its fall Visiting Artist Lecture Series art talk featuring artist Felipe Baeza in conversation with Professor Ruben Zecena. Event is Nov. 6 in 5:30 p.m. in 1002 Cruess Hall. Baeza has presented solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, London, Mexico City, and New York. His work was included in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy; Prospect.5: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, New Orleans, LA; and Desert X, Palm Springs, CA, among other group exhibitions across Europe, South America, and Asia. Zecena is an interdisciplinary scholar specializing in contemporary Latinx Literature and Culture, which he engages through the lens of Q***r of Color Critique, Border Studies, Affect Theory, and Transnational American Studies. The event is free and open to all.

Alum Luka Vergoz is featured in Comstock’s magazine Art Exposed. Read the interview by Jennifer Fergesen by following or visiting
https://comstocksmag.com/web-only/art-exposed-luka-vergoz

Vergoz’s solo show “Forming, Here, Again” is still on view at until Nov. 3.

Opening tomorrow! “Teaching Practices” at 120710 Gallery in Berkeley features .woodcock

Opening reception 4-8 pm

@120710.art

Save the date! Soft Land opens August 2 at Public Land and features the class of 2025.

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