Since its inception in 2001, the acclaimed VCS Forum has featured thought leaders from a wide range of creative and scholarly fields. Open to the entire CCA community, these public-facing talks aim to foster dialogues across disciplines on contemporary issues in the visual arena.

This spring, each Forum speaker comes from our own CCA community. Each brings a unique perspective on visual and critical methodologies grounded in their respective discipline(s). Collectively they speak to how visual culture operates as both a tool of critique and transformation. Their work embodies a hybridized, inclusive, and engaged approach to examining the visual and cultural systems that define—and can redefine—how we see ourselves and the world.

This semester’s particular focus is on methods that:

1. Unpack dominant narratives of race, gender, and power.

2. Explore the intersections of representation with personal and collective memory.

3. Reimagine the role of visual culture in building a more inclusive future.

About the Speaker:

Irene Cheng is an architectural historian and critic. She is an associate professor and chair of the Graduate Architecture program at the California College of the Arts. Her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cheng is author of The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America, and co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present  and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century. She is currently working on a book that explores the political ecology of Arts and Crafts architecture by focusing on its materiality.