Digital Exhibitions

These digital exhibitions showcase the diverse and innovative collections curated by the CCA Libraries and the outstanding productions of our students and staff. They are a complement to the physical exhibitions we put on in the Meyer, Simpson, and Materials Libraries throughout the year.

• The Democratic Multiple Archive

  The Democratic Multiple is a cross-border exhibition and print exchange coordinated by Anthea Black that focused on experiences of global citizenship and democratic engagement.

• 2021 Yozo Hamaguchi Scholarship Winners Exhibition

  The Hamaguchi Printmedia Scholarship Awards were established to foster excellence and dedication in the study and practice of printmedia. Explore this exhibition of works by the six undergraduate and one graduate Printmedia students who have been awarded the 2020 Yozo Hamaguchi Printmedia Scholarship.

• a garden campus: oakland campus legacy prints

  An exhibition highlighting the Legacy Print Project, a commissioned series of ten prints, each one representing a decade of CCA on the Oakland campus.

• Inside/Out

  Inside/Out is an exhibition of the work that came out of a 2021 a student-led collaboration between photography majors at the California College of the Arts (CCA) and Georgia State University (GSU).

• Silence Unseen

  Silence Unseen features work by CCA MFA students Katayoun Bahrami and Trina Robinson. Using film, photography, installation, and other media, these artists explore their shared struggle to inhabit two worlds. Pulled in different directions by their respective familial histories or cultural traditions, their works suggest ways of locating oneself within that space of tension.

• Empowered Environmentalism: CCA's E-School

  This past year, a group of faculty at California College of the Arts came together to refocus the school’s pathways towards a deeply considered and empowered vision of the environment as something inseparable from social and racial justice. Under the name E-School, this collaborative and the classes they teach ask how artists, designers, writers and architects can find novel opportunities through the legacies of environmentalism, indigeneity, environmental justice, resource ownership, climate justice, circular economies, and Green New Deal, among many other narratives.

• Familiar Faces

  This exhibition spotlights the work Juan Huerta Coello, Kirra Hellfritsch, and Jose Ugas. Through sculptural objects and photography, these artists explore the complexities of common emotional and psychological struggles, especially as they relate to one’s identity, and how such internal feelings manifest externally.

• Forgotten Ephemera: The Alliance of Figurative Artists

  From 1969 through the early 1980s, hundreds of working artists gathered on Manhattan’s Lower East Side every Friday at meetings of the Alliance of Figurative Artists. Although little has been written about it, the Alliance set a key precedent for artistic development through community organizing, collaboration, and collective growth. This exhibition of archival documents provides a window into the infrastructures built by the Alliance and how they created opportunities to uplift their practices and each other.

• Looking Back, Looking Forward: Art in Response to Covid-19, One Year Later

  This exhibition' shares work by CCA students made in response to the pandemic and subsequent lockdown. In Spring 2020, students throughout the college submitted work to the Libraries’ exhibitions program via an Open Call. A year later, these works resonate with renewed, prescient somberness, for many of them reflect on circumstances that were new or heightened then but have, in the months since, become part of our daily reality.

• Safety on the Sidewalk

  Inspired by initiatives such as Art-in-Place in Chicago, wherein artists have made public-facing artworks from wherever they are living that can be safely viewed outside during the pandemic, students from Aspen May's Interdisciplinary Critique class made their own version, entitled Safety on the Sidewalk. As students in the class were located all over the world this semester, this far-flung exhibition was visible in locations throughout the Bay Area, other parts of California and the United States, as well as China. Here, we bring the projects together in an online iteration of the exhibition that also serves as a digital archive of the project.

• 1970-2020 from The Black Studies Institute to Critical Ethnic Studies

  In 2020, CCA celebrates a 50 year commitment to the interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, indigeneity, and the perspectives and experiences of people of color.

• The Joy of Life is Doing Things – CCA 100 Years Ago

  Looking back at CCA’s foundational decades from the Berkeley years to its beginnings in Oakland, The Joy of Life is Doing Things explores what the founders and the first students were doing: making in the studios, building the campus, creating a community, and laying the foundations of an enduring dedication to craft, industriousness, and community responsibility that we still find present in our institutional culture today.