An exhibition at the California Center for the Arts, Escondido brought together work by 49 artists teaching across San Diego County, revealing the range of practices developing inside the region’s colleges and universities.
Campus Creatives: Featuring San Diego’s Fine Art Faculty assembled artists from 14 institutions, including community colleges, San Diego State University, the University of San Diego and the University of California San Diego. The exhibition remained on view until 15 May 2022.
A cross-section of regional practice
The display moved across drawing, painting, woodcut, porcelain, textiles, sculpture and mixed media. Its breadth reflected the different artistic approaches represented by faculty members whose professional practice continued alongside their teaching.
Among the works identified in the exhibition were Joanne Hayakawa’s graphite drawing Corvid: Suspicion, Leslie Nemour’s map-based painting Explanation of Colors, Joshua Eggleton’s charcoal work Petals to the Metal and Bill Mosley’s oil painting Albedo.
Several pieces used unconventional combinations of materials. Carlos Castro’s The Creation of the Virus took the form of a woven tapestry, while Stephanie Bedwell combined wood and fibre in Maintaining Bearings. YC Kim’s Cactus Transformation joined porcelain and light, and Julie Goldstein worked with woodcut, graphite and recycled fabric in Yuri-Tobabay, Japan 1932.
Teaching artists beyond the classroom
Social, political and environmental themes appeared throughout the exhibition, but the selection also included formal and material experimentation without an overt narrative. The result was less a single curatorial statement than a broad survey of how regional art educators approached contemporary practice.
By gathering faculty from large universities and smaller colleges in one venue, Campus Creatives made visible the professional work that often exists behind classroom teaching. It also offered a snapshot of San Diego County’s artistic ecosystem through the people responsible for training its next generation of artists.