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...
Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos
1817 Soquel Avenue
Santa Cruz, CA 95062
May 16, 2026-ongoing
By appointment (email aalejan2@ucsc.edu)
Visions From Within is a continuing series of exhibitions dedicated to uplifting and platforming artists who are currently system impacted.
For this iteration curators Anthony Alejandrez and Sonny Trujillo asked each artist a simple question:
“What keeps you going after all these years?”
Their answer was clear: resilience.
The included artworks provide a rare and deeply human insight into the complex reality of incarceration. Most of the artists featured in this exhibition were children or very young adults who made decisions that forever altered the course of their lives. Some were mothers and fathers, doing what they could to provide in the only ways they knew. Too often, instead of being guided or supported, they were met with extreme sentencing. For the artists in Visions from Within, making art has become a tool for survival and a site to demonstrate their resilience.
Featured Artists:
Reba Welch, Katherine Henson, Cherisa Lucio, Edgar G. Ortiz, Unique B., Bones, Ashley Williams, Jairo Aguiniga, Lorena Pena, Damian Herrera, Paul Aguilar, Jr., Oscar Coreas, Ronnie Zuniga, Cesar Santana, Dymitri Hubert Haraszewski, Gene Sanchez, Susan Rank, Roselee McCulloc, Etha Meserve, Anonymous, Aimee Gana, Heather Brown, Joe A. Felix, Nancy Larios, Amelia Carlson, KG Noordman, Tami J. Huntsman, V. Wolfe, and Leo Gayne
Poetry by:
Mimi Le, Anthony Byers Knoller, Celeste Carrington, Patrick Birdsong, Kiana McNeal, Melissa Hernandez, Veronica Gonzales
Visions From Within is available for viewing by appointment. Email Anthony Alejandrez, exhibition curator and Visualizing Abolition Transitions program coordinator, at aalejan2@ucsc.edu.
Visions from Within is organized as part of Visualizing Abolition, an arts-based initiative that reaches across prison borders to contribute to the unfolding collective story and alternative imagining underway to create a future free of prisons.
