The work of three UC Santa Cruz undergraduate art majors will appear in the de Young Museum’s 20th annual New Generations Student Showcase: Sanctuary in San Francisco on April 22-24.
The three-day event includes a juried showcase of visual art and film with museum talks, music, and performance by university and college art students--inspired by the theme, Sanctuary, and by the de Young's permanent collections and special exhibitions.
Rachel Smith’s piece, How Many Syrians #4, is from a dramatic and reflective series of six works on the plight of migrating Syrians. It combines the despair of the Syrian migration with the impossibility of welded steel life vests.
A 42-year-old re-entry transfer student now in her junior year at UC Santa Cruz, Smith lives in Family Student Housing with her husband and three-year-old daughter. She said she has worked as a bead artist for 20 years, teaching internationally and writing three books on beadwork with print runs of 20,000 copies.
“Since fall of 2015, I’ve won $5K in scholarships and learned to weld,” Smith noted. “Preparing for the de Young show I discussed the opportunity with my fellow students. So few of them had heard of the open call that I decided to hold a show at the Bridge Gallery in Porter College modeled exactly after the de Young show and hopefully encourage people to apply."
"The show was a success with 18 students participating and one of them--Austin Carlson--getting into the de Young show as well. I’ll be bringing his work up to the museum for him.”
Smith described Carlson’s paintings as a reflection of life and death. “While painting, he attempts to reconcile the polarities between these concepts and understand how they relate to one another.”
Jocelyn Lozano’s contribution to the show will be Untitled 1, a work from her short digital photography series Hold You, which touches on themes of love, security, and mental illness. Lozano is an art and psychology double major, now in her junior year at UC Santa Cruz.
For more information about the show, visit the de Young Museum web site.
