Belonging | Spring 2023 Creative Citizens in Action programming explored the various dimensions of Belonging, unpacking its manyfold perspectives, premises and tensions. Event organizers sought 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.

• 📸 CCA 2023 Faculty Exhibition – stories of us | Organized by Jaime Austin
• 🎥 Public Podium: A collective press conference on supporting the unhoused | Organized by Chris Treggiari
• 📸 📖 Tea Time Talks on Belonging | Organized by Julia Grinkrug and Shalini Agrawal
• 📖 Ana Teresa Fernández: Were You Invited? | Co-presented by CCA@CCA and the Architecture Lecture Series
• 📸 🎥 Rashaad Newsome: Engineers | Co-presented by CCA@CCA and the CCA MFA Design and Animation Programs
• 🎥 Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging | Co-presented by CCA@CCA and the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture Series

CCA@CCA Faculty Micro Grants Program | CCA@CCA Faculty Micro Grants are designed to support the implementation of small-scale, immediate public-facing events, projects, or activations that aim to improve the learning experience of students and offer critical resources for civic involvement. These grants are administered by the CCA Exhibitions Department.

• 🔈📖 Cassettes - Music for What We Have Lost | Organized by Taro Hattori
• 📸 Xenoludology Open Game Meet-up | Organized by Rod Cavazos
• 📸 Taste of Belonging: An Almost-Night Market | Organized by Faith Adiele
• 📸 Forever Unseen | Organized by Marcel Pardo Ariza
• 📸 Bay Area Curator's Panel | Organized by Marcel Pardo Ariza
• 📸 Domestic Affairs: Relearning Kinship | Organized by Haight St. Commons and Neeraj Bhatia

Organized by Jaime Austin, Director, Exhibitions and Public Programming

stories of us, on view August 3–October 20, 2023, featured work by current CCA faculty that explores personal stories of belonging, care, and community.

Participating artists included Shalini Agrawal, Verda Alexander, Kim Anno, Curtis Hidemasa Arima, Sholeh Asgary, Bob Aufuldish, Tim Belonax, Rachel Berger, Rebekah Bloyd, Julian Carter, Nelson Chan, Gregory Climer, Marilyn da Silva, Sara Dean, John De Fazio, Melinda Luisa de Jesús, Mark Donohue, Mia Feuer, Max Gavrich, Caroline Goodwin, Lynda Grose, Mara Holt Skov, chris hamamoto, Taraneh Hemami, Rob Hugel, Thomas Ingalls, Chris Johnson, Steve Jones, Janette Kim, Yina Kim, Heesoo Kwon, Katherine Lam, Christina La Sala, Ana Llorente, Ian MacColl, Adam McCauley, Dan McHale, Nasim Moghadam, Ranu Mukherjee, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Erik Parra, Erik Scollon, Pallavi Sharma, Matt Silady, Peter Simensky, Deborah Stein, Jon Stich, Sunny A. Smith, Jon Sueda, Chris Treggiari, Michael Washington, Michael Wertz, Anne Wolf, and Corey Wolffs.

📸 View photos of the exhibition ➞

"I think that it is crucial as students to be able to learn from our faculty even outside of the classroom. All of the artists’ pieces remind us that we all have a voice, and we can use it to highlight the things we value and create a better world with our craft. Appreciating so many different stories from our own professors opens a door for communication, engagement, and solidarity. Seeing so many different perspectives and hearing so many stories, all of which have big and small similarities with one another, really makes the viewer realize that we are not in fact as different as we have been led to believe. An exhibition like stories of us is extremely relevant in the contemporary context where more and more people across institutions are working towards embracing inclusivity and belonging."

📖 Read Renata Blanco Gorbea's full review of stories of us on Rewind Review Respond ➞

Organized by Chris Treggiari, Senior Adjunct, First Year Core Studio

As part of stories of us, The Public Podium, a project co-organized by faculty member Chris Treggiari, held a press conference surrounding strategies for supporting our unhoused community in the Bay Area. Kathy Treggiari spoke on her 25+ years of experience working for the unhoused community across the Bay Area.

People with power regularly drive headlines that shape how we think the world works. Press conferences are a tool for both the powerful and organized communities to influence media coverage and shape these narratives. The Public Podium asks: What would you say if you convened your own press conference? What would be the topic of your public service announcement? The Public Podium is presented by The Oakland Lowdown, a community studio for local news and art.

🎥 Watch a recording of this event below and on YouTube ➞

Organized by 2023 CCA@CCA Faculty Coordinator Julia Grinkrug (Adjunct II, Architecture) in partnership with Shalini Agrawal (Associate Professor, Critical Ethnic Studies)

The Tea Time Talks on Belonging series invites members of the CCA community to talk about creative practices that amplify Belonging through pedagogy and art. Our panelists invite you to engage in thinking about Belonging through various mediums, including conversation, making, movement, and just being. Hosted by Shalini Agrawal and moderated by CCA@CCA Student Fellow Layla Namak (MArch 2025).

• Thursday, September 21, 11am | CCA Campus Gallery | …& with Steve Jones
  • 📖 Read a review of Steve Jones' Tea Time Talk by Hana Noory (Graphic Design 2024) and Isabelle Mitter (Graphic Design 2025) →
• Thursday, October 5, 11am | CCA Campus Gallery | ENOUGH Stitch n’ Bitch with Anne Wolf
  • 📸 View photos of Anne Wolf's Tea Time Talk ➞
  • 📖 Read a review of Anne Wolf's Tea Time Talk by Kyra Robinson (Illustration 2025) →
  • 📖 Read a review of Anne Wolf's Tea Time Talk by Eva Ponting (Illustration 2024) →
• Thursday, November 16, 11am | CCA Campus Gallery | Both/And: The Inherent Tensions Building Belonging with Tricia Brand
  • 📖 View Tricia Brand's slide presentation →
  • 📖 Read a review of Tricia Brand's Tea Time Talk by Victor Russell (Graphic Design 2025), Rui Xu (Interaction Design 2024), and Kya Higgins (Interaction Design 2025) →
• Thursday, December 7, 11am | CCA Campus Gallery | Closing Conversation with the full panel

Co-presented by CCA@CCA and the Architecture Lecture Series

Ana Teresa Fernández' practice explores the politics of intersectionality through time-based actions and social gestures that reference land art, performance, and history painting. Fernández’s multidisciplinary practice often begins with performance, and expands to video, photography, painting, and sculpture. In addition to giving a public lecture on November 2, 2023, Ana Teresa facilitated a hands-on workshop in the Nave Presentation Space on November 9 from 11am to 12pm. This workshop directly engaged students around the topics presented in the lecture.

Ana Teresa Fernández was born in Tampico, Mexico in 1981. Her family emigrated to San Francisco, California where she has been based since 1992. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; 21c Museum Hotels, Louisville, Kentucky; Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Illinois; Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; and Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame University, Indiana; among others.

"[Fernández] spoke first of her interest in disrupting the male dominated canon of painting as well as more specifically, the Mexican muralist canon through a process she described as 'performance documentation.' For Fernández, this is a reflexive process in which she paints or otherwise documents her experience making work that is extremely specific to the locations she travels through... I feel it is important for these clumsy cultural exchanges to be made; they open us up to new things and widen our view of the world and all it holds."

📖 Read Chloe King's full review of this lecture on Rewind Review Respond ➞

📖 Read a review of Ana Teresa Fernández's student workshop by Juncheng Lian (Industrial Design 2026) andXingyu Yang (Lydia) (Interaction Design 2024) ➞

Co-presented by the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series and the CCA MFA Design and Animation Programs

In this lecture, Rashaad Newsome discussed ideas around their new and recent work in 3D animation, collage, sculpture, and Artificial Intelligence. Adjacent to the lecture in the Nave, visitors could view Gathered Representation, an exhibition of student responses to the work of Rashaad Newsome and its theoretical grounding in bell hook’s cultural theory. Using collage as a method and concept, MFA Design and BFA Animation students explored personal and collective identity. Gathered Representation was organized by Sara Dean, Assistant Chair & Assistant Professor, MFA Design Program, and Christoph Steger, Chair & Associate Professor, Animation Program.

Rashaad Newsome's work blends several practices, including collage, sculpture, film & video, animation, photography, music, writing, computer programming, software engineering, community organizing, and performance, to create a divergent field that mirrors the intersectionality of his lived experience. Using the diasporic traditions of improvisation, he pulls from the world of advertising, the internet, Art History, Black and Queer culture to produce counter-hegemonic work that walks the tightrope between social practice and abstraction. Collage acts as a conceptual and technical method to construct a new visual, performance, and literary language that highlight the immaterial and material expressivity related to Black American Life. Rashaad holds a 2023 honorary Doctorate Degree in Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut and a 2001 BFA in Art History from Tulane University.

This event was co-presented in the Nave Presentation Space on October 18, 2023, by the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series and CCA MFA Design and Animation Programs.

📸 View photos of Gathered Representation ➞

🎥 Watch the BFA Animation students' contribution to Gathered Representation ➞

🎥 Watch a recording of Newsome's lecture below and on YouTube ➞

Co-presented by the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series and the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Binh Danh reconfigures traditional photographic techniques and processes in unconventional ways to delve into the connection between history, identity, and place. Danh is noted for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks. Their reflective surfaces enable people of all backgrounds to see themselves as a part of the beauty of the American landscape. His work has been collected by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. He is an associate professor of art at San José State University.

This event was co-presented in Timken Hall on September 27, 2023, by the Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series and the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture Series. The Deborah and Kenneth Novack Creative Citizens Series is funded by an endowment gift to support an annual series of public programs focused on creative activism. The Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Lecture Series is supported by the Fine Arts Division, Nion McEvoy, Pier 24 Photography, and the Larry Sultan Estate.

🎥 Watch a recording of this event above and on YouTube ➞

Organized by Taro Hattori, Chair & Assistant Professor Sculpture Program / Chair, Individualized Studies Program

This podcast explores how music helps us psychologically survive in times of difficulty. In each podcast episode, a pair of students from the fall 2023 UDIST course, Dissonance - Music and Conflict, taught by Taro Hattori, invite friends to join them in dedicating songs to something or someone they have lost in their lives. They discuss personal experiences around music and share why they chose the tracks they dedicated. The series was broadcast on CCA Radio in fall 2023.

Participating students include Batu Alpas, Hanjun Catherine Zhang, Isabella Necor, Jia Nancy Liu, Jonas Dettki, Lauren “Pearl” McGee, M Tanaka, Noah Rogacion, Owen Patia, Ruichen Yang, Ruofan Karry Zhang, Sean Cullen, Shijian Shao, and Winny Guan.

🔈 Listen to Cassettes - Music for What We Have Lost on creativecitizens.cca.edu →

📖 Read participating students' reflections on the process of creating the podcast →

Organized by Rod Cavazos, Senior Adjunct Professor, Graphic Design & UDIST Programs

Students in the UDIST course Xenoludology invited members of the CCA community and the public to stop by room 200 on December 11, 2023, between noon and 3pm, to take a break from finals and play board games they designed.

The course Xenoludology stakes out a new creative discipline at the nexus of game design and art-making. Students begin by studying a range of ancient abstract strategy games and spend the semester reinterpreting them as speculative sculptures and art objects that might be more at home in the 22nd Century. Artwork from other Room 200 classes was on exhibit on a rolling basis between December 7 and 11.

Xenoludology students include Loki Alzhin, Derek Cho, Arwen Creswell, Katiana Guillen, Marshall Hu, Marley James, Andy Lin, Ren Lo, Zoe Loa, Jackson Mayers, Keana Palacios, Carolina Quintanilha Stancati, Erika Wahlberg, Jingyi Wu, Hannes Zhang, and Kevin Zhong.

📸 View photos of the students' games ➞

Organized by Faith Adiele, Chair & Professor, Writing and Literature Program / Professor, MFA Writing Program

What does home taste like? What do our plates reveal about our family values and political histories? Which recipes provide cultural shelter and comfort during stressful times? How can food help facilitate deep conversations and create a sense of belonging on a global campus like CCA?

The members of LITPA 2000 Eating Words: The Literature + Film of Food invited the CCA community to Taste of Belonging: An Almost-Night Market, in the Blattner Multipurpose Room on December 5, 2023. The pop-up was modeled after popular night markets in Asia that bring communities together through food, crafts, music, and entertainment. Students and faculty took a break from finals to try international snacks, test their knowledge of food wars and colonial history, play food-based games, and connect with others through the universal language of food.

📸 View photos of Taste of Belonging ➞

Organized by Marcel Pardo Ariza, Adjunct II Professor, Photography Program

Forever Unseen presented works by ten contemporary artists, spanning photography, painting, graphic design, and illustration. Collaborating across majors, these artists offered diverse perspectives on their creative process. Moments of connection, loss, and love that may not get noticed became a collective focus within the group of work shown. Forever Unseen served as a platform for artists to tell their stories and considered the impractical term “forever” as it speaks on the absurdities of representation in the past and present.  

As artist-curators, students in Marcel Pardo Ariza's photography course, Practice, Process, and Production were given the opportunity to invite another artist of their choice into the exhibition. Keeping a critical eye on the idea of conversation, they considered the work of fellow artists and had the opportunity to uplift their practice and ideas. Understanding the technicalities of curating and leaning into the creative freedom curatorial work allows, the students individually and collaboratively created Forever Unseen.

Participating artists included Roy Almanza, Lynse Cooper, Emily Montes, M. Tanaka, Sofia Porzio, Rachel Zhang, Nick Satzger, tamara suarez porras, Jacob Hyun, and Johnathan Ramirez.

This exhibition was on view in PLAySPACE Gallery December 5–12, 2023.

"To be seen can be a source of affinity, power, and self-actualization. But as the show’s title suggests, visibility can also reduce racialized identities to stereotypes and singular notions of selfhood. The works on view ask us to consider the politics of who is represented, how, and by whom. Through a variety of media, the artists in Forever Unseen dictate the terms of their own representation. The mediums represented include painting, graphic design, illustration, installation, and photography, demonstrating a range of material approaches for visually representing one’s self and communities."

📖 Read Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle's full review of this exhibition on Rewind Review Respond ➞

📸 View photos from the opening of Forever Unseen ➞

Organized by Marcel Pardo Ariza, Adjunct II Professor, Photography Program

On October 31, 2023, curators PJ Gubatina Policarpio (Micki Meng Gallery) and Jonathan Carver Moore (Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery) presented on recent exhibitions and programs, the role of the curator, and best practices.

PJ Gubatina Policarpio’s (he/him) work is committed to advancing art and artists. PJ has over 10 years of experience in museum education, public programming, and art administration, advocating for artists, audiences, and communities of all kinds, previously at The Contemporary Jewish Museum, Queens Museum, The Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Museum, where he was a Fellow in Museum Education in 2012. As the inaugural manager of youth development at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, PJ led transformative initiatives, programs, and partnerships that engaged diverse audiences. He is currently Associate Director at Micki Meng San Francisco. PJ has organized exhibitions and programs internationally bringing together artists, writers, poets, scholars, activists and collectives whose engaged practices challenge power and representation.

Jonathan Carver Moore is the founder and director of Jonathan Carver Moore, a contemporary art gallery that specializes in working with emerging and established artists who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and women. As an openly gay Black male gallerist in San Francisco, Jonathan is dedicated to advocating for the arts and is an active member in the Bay Area’s creative community. He is the Development Chair of Root Division and he also serves on the advisory board at Black [Space] Residency. He has also interviewed a plethora of artists such as Zanele Muholi, Javiera Estrade and Lebohang Kganye with his articles being published in Frieze, Juxtapoz and the Nob Hill Gazette. Jonathan attended the George Washington University where he received a Masters in Public Relations and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology with a minor in Women's Studies.

Organized by Haight St. Commons and Neeraj Bhatia, Associate Professor, Architecture Program

Relearning Kinship bought together designers, activists, sociologists, and legal scholars to expand our understanding of kinship in relation to land and new family forms. Recognizing forms of kinship that sit outside blood relationships highlights the role of care in relearning our social and environmental bonds. 

Emily Silagon, of the San Francisco Community Land Trust and Vivian Schwab, of the Northern California Land Trust, described how land trusts can create permanently affordable housing for low-income communities brought together by the desire for homeownership. David Jay, Asexual Activist and Zachary Dunivin, of Bloomington Cooperative Living Inc., discussed the challenges and benefits of cooperative living arrangements defined by trust, rather than "traditional" familial ties.

This event was presented on October 24, 2023 by CCA@CCA, CCA Architecture, Urban Works Agency, and Haight St. Commons. It was 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.