Call for Proposals: Faculty Spotlight Exhibitions at the IAS
May 29, 2025UC Santa Cruz faculty across the divisions are invited to submit a proposal for an exhibition of their artwork at the Institute...
Galleries will be open 5pm-8pm Friday April 10th but otherwise remain closed through Tuesday April 14th, 2026.
May 7 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm
Please join us for a conversation between Gina Athena Ulysse and Jennifer González, discussing Ulysse’s solo exhibition Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins & Disentanglements.

Gina Athena Ulysse (b 1966) Haiti/United States is an artist-scholar, Professor of Humanities and Founding Director of the Rasanblaj Praxis Project Lab (RPPL) at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Concerned with the visceral in the structural, her questions engage geopolitics, historical representations, aesthetics and the spiritual in the dailiness of Black diasporic conditions. In the last two decades, her rasanblaj approach (the gathering of ideas, things, people, and spirits) to her multidisciplinary art and writing practice entails ongoing crossings and dialogues in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She has performed at The British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Cabaret Voltaire, Gorki Theatre, House of World Cultures, LaMaMa, Marcus Garvey Liberty Hall, MoMA Salon, among other venues. She has held residencies at the University of Buffalo, Oregon State, University of Zurich, as well as the Bogliasco Foundation Study Center in Italy. In 2020, she was an invited artist to the Biennale of Sydney. In 2024, she was invited to participate in the Biennale de Dakar. She is a 2025 MacDowell fellow. Her major publications include the forthcoming A Year and A Day. Leonore Mau and Haiti (Oct 2025, editor with Dora Imhoff and U5), a polyphonic inquiry into the photographs Leonore Mau (1916-2013) took in Haiti during the 1970s; Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle (2015); Because When God is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD (2017) – long-listed for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award and recipient of the 2018 Best Poetry Connecticut Center for the Book Award – and A Call to Rasanblaj: Black Feminist Futures and Ethnographic Aesthetics(2023). She was the invited editor of e-misferica’s Caribbean Rasanblaj (2015), the Hemispheric Institute’s Journal for Performance and Politics. Her visual art has appeared on the covers of Feminist Formations, Feminist Studies, Frontiers, and Meridians Journals.

Jennifer González writes about contemporary art with an emphasis on installation, digital and activist art. She is interested in understanding the strategic use of space (exhibition space, public space, virtual space) by contemporary artists and by cultural institutions such as museums. More specifically, she has focused on the representation of the human body and its relation to discourses of race and gender. González has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Her book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She has published articles in numerous scholarly and art publications such as Journal of Visual Culture, Frieze, Bomb, Diacritics, Archives of American Art Journal, Camera Obscura, Open Space and Art Journal. Her second book, Pepon Osorio, received an International Latino Book Award. She served as chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology which was listed among the best art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020. González also writes numerous exhibition catalog essays, most recently for the exhibitions Diego Rivera’s America (2022), Amalia Mesa Bains: Archeology of Memory (2023), and Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (2025). She has lectured extensively at universities and art museums nationally and internationally and teaches regularly at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York.