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...
Institute of the Arts and Sciences
100 Panetta Ave, Santa Cruz, CA
P (831) 502-7252
Email ias@ucsc.edu
April 10 - August 16, 2026
12 - 5 p.m. Wednesday - Sunday
(Closed Monday and Tuesday)
Redwoods Rasanblaj: Origins and Disentanglements will be a multisited public art project and series of creative gatherings and offerings at the Institute for Arts and Sciences and across sites at UC Santa Cruz and Santa Cruz. The exhibition builds on a large-scale installation at the Dakar Biennale (2024) and marks a decade since Gina Athena Ulysse’s call for rasanblaj. This decolonial organizing principle takes its meaning from a Haitian creole term translated as the assembly, compilation, enlisting and regrouping of ideas, things, people, and spirits.
About the Artist:
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.
