By: Hannah Z. Morley
This Thursday at noon, the art of five UC Santa Barbara students will be featured in a UC Santa Cruz online exhibition and webinar called “What Makes Us Human: An Art + Genomics Convergence.”
“the positive reality” by Ahsia Barrientos
This piece is featured in “What Makes Us Human” to represent how Barrientos has coped with COVID-19.
“I use romanticization in my own life to create these new worlds to truly cherish these experiences that have been highlighted by being inside. One reflects the celebration of life when given time and begins to truly cherish the precious moments we often forget.”
—Ahsia Barrientos
The artists — Erin Adams, Ahsia Barrientos, Andrew Chan, Camila Uriegas Fabian, and Natalia Spritzer — belong to a student-led art colloquium in UCSB’s College Creative Studies called The Gaucho OpenLab Initiative (GOLI).
Founded by student Natalia Spritzer with the help of her faculty sponsor UCSB Art professor Kim Yasuda, GOLI creates cross-departmental collaborations focusing “on project-based learning, student academic interest, and initiative.”
In addition to being interdisciplinary at UCSB, the art initiative also forges ties with other university campuses. “Our mission is to spearhead collaborative efforts at UCSB and across the UC system in general,” Spritzer said in an interview with HFA. “We have an amazing and infinite range of students on our campuses, yet we hardly ever know or interact with each other. Often, this type of interaction is reserved for smaller academic communities at the higher level.”
Supported by the UC placement initiative, UC Santa Cruz’s OpenLab invited the GOLI students to feature their art at this week’s event. The curator, UC Santa Cruz professor Jennifer Parker, is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara.
The exhibition and webinar event marks 20 years since UCSC first posted the assembled human genome on the Internet. It brings together artists, scientists and humanists from around the globe to explore what it means to be human at a time when we are socially distanced by the pandemic and politically divided by entrenched identities.
Click each art piece to learn more
“Our experience in this current climate is a new niche to explore, especially in art,” Spritzer said. “We're also synchronizing our creative development with technology, which is currently more relevant in everyone's lives due to COVID. Implementing technology and media into art is a very modern concept, and our project itself is an experimentation of this implementation.”
“What Makes Us Human” is available for registration and will be recorded for later public viewing.
Hannah Z. Morley is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Writing & Literature at the College of Creative Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.