Natsoulas exhibit pays tribute to essential workers

The John Natsoulas Gallery is presenting a tribute to the essential workers of the United States who have sacrificed to provide food and services for an entire population during a global pandemic.

Titled “A Working Lense,” this exhibition is installed in the public space outside the gallery walls at 521 First St. in Davis. The photographs and statements reveal the conditions of America’s working class. The show is available from now through June.

Arts and Place at the University of California

How do the arts contribute to our sense of place? How does our sense of place evolve as neighbors, as city inhabitants, and as citizens in a fast-changing world? Versions of these questions have been on the minds of many of us who care both about the arts and about the future of our public sphere. Indeed, throughout my career as a scholar, teacher, and convener, I have found myself asking and answering versions of this question in myriad ways.

A Team Effort

Kim Yasuda, an artist and professor of public practice in the Department of Art, will lead a team that brings together art, design and media practitioners and projects that engage in place-making as an emerging form of scholarship that highlights the potential “to demonstrate direct impact of UC research within the diverse environs of California.” According to Yasuda, over the past decade, creative place-making has evolved as a community-based approach to land use that brings together arts and cultural development with fields of civic and environmental planning and design.