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)
Rasanblaj is a Haitian Creole term coined by the artist in 2014 and defined as assembly, compilation, and/or the enlisting and regrouping of ideas, things, people, and spirits— not necessarily in that order. An organizing principle in Ulysse’s hybrid and experimental art practice, rasanblaj (unlike European-based concepts of assemblage, bricolage, collage, and pastiche) explicitly recognizes and embraces the spiritual to confront the fragmentation and dismemberment in the long lingering aftermath of colonialism.
Redwoods Rasanblaj is a site-specific regrouping of African diasporic resonances in the Redwood forests of the Central Coast. Many of the elements were created during formal and informal gatherings through repetitive practices of wrapping, tying, braiding and joining collected, found, purchased and donated materials from here and afar. With both the materials and makers carrying their own origin points and entanglements, concentric circles of relations emerge through tending to the discarded and in deference, awe, and dialogue with a world that has been harmed.
Gina Athena Ulysse is the recipient of an inaugural “Faculty Spotlight Exhibition,” awarded by the IAS Faculty Advisory Council.
Fèy (Leaf) 2026
Large calabash from Senegal, Small calabash from Haiti, marine ropes, cowries, yarn wrapped bottles, sticks, and Haitian têt gridap lamps, fishing wire and found, gathered, purchased and donated beads in Quarry rattle
72 x 28 in.
“I’m a leaf. Look at me on my branch. A terrible storm came and knocked me off. The day you see me fall is not the day I die…” These are the lyrics of a traditional Vodou folk song that has both religious and political overtones. Sung by the roots music group RAM, it was censored between 1992-1996. The artist imagines the song as a soundtrack to the piece in these redwoods that she reveres.
Location:
The Quarry Amphitheater (Campus)
1156 High St, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
The work is suspended about 20 feet high between a ring of redwood trees as you enter the quarry from the plaza. It is free and open to the public to visit.
Lamercie’s Variance Residency, 2026
Body calabash from Haiti, head calabash from Benin, sticks and branches, copper, cowries, wrapped bottles, wrapped sticks, and Haitian têt gridap lamps, Jasper and redwoods sticks, and lichens. found, gathered, purchased and donated beads in Variance rattle.
40 x 24 in.
Named after the artist’s grandmother, Lamercie the spider took up residency at Variance Objects after the apocalypse. Safely secured surrounded by beautiful gemstones, minerals and crystals imbued with their metaphysical energies, she recharges. In the future, she balances on clouds.
Location:
Variance Objects
1537 Pacific Ave #101, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Hours: Wed-Sun, 12-5pm
Na’p Balansé (Saved by…), 2026
Large calabashes, cowrie strings, copper, cowries, wrapped bottle, wrapped sticks, and Haitian têt gridap lamps. Community rattle created with found, gathered, purchased and donated beads and family heirlooms at a community workshop at the MAH.
Transitions between solo, paired, and collective movements are central to Contredanse, a Haitian folkloric dance that creolized French Baroque styles. This ongoing historical entanglement and the balance between self, relationship, and group inspire layered multiplicity of forms, materials, and processes in Na’p balansé (Saved by…).
Location:
Museum of Art and History
705 Front St, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Mon 9AM-1PM
Thu-Fri 12-8pm
Sat–Sun 12–6PM
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.
Photos by Anne Martinete
Funding generously provided by Visualizing Abolition, the Board Opportunity Fund of the UC Santa Cruz Foundation, The Humanities Institute at UCSC, annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences, and anonymous donors.
