Introduction

This essay begins with a grateful acknowledgment of the original inhabitants of the land on which Sightlines 2023 has been published.

California College of the Arts (CCA)’s current campus is located in Yelamu, also known as San Francisco—a city on the unceded territory of Ramaytush Ohlone peoples who have lived upon this land since time immemorial. We recognize the historic discrimination and violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples in California and the Americas, including their forced removal from ancestral lands and the deliberate and systematic destruction of their communities and culture. Land Acknowledgment by itself is a small gesture. It becomes meaningful when coupled with authentic relationships, informed actions, and unyielding commitment to change that improves people’s lives. CCA honors Indigenous peoples—past, present, and future— here and around the world, and we wish to pay respect to local elders.

As the land acknowledgement asserts, place is “about” the physical environment and our engagement with it. We are shaped by places and we transform them, too. CCA was founded in Berkeley in 1907, moved to Oakland’s leafy Rockridge neighborhood in 1922, and opened a San Francisco campus in 1996. In this most recent location, nestled between Potrero Hill and the city’s historical Design District, CCA has watched development along the formerly industrial corridor 16th Street and has been part of it as well. Around our main building (once a Greyhound bus repair shop) are new dormitories, a dining hall, and existing structures converted to administrative offices, exhibition spaces, classrooms, studios, labs, and workshops. Construction on CCA’s “Double Ground”—a cluster of multi-use, duo-level buildings ringing open, green space—is already underway and is scheduled to open next summer. Our residential campus is taking its place next to the University of California-San Francisco’s Medical Center and the Chase Center entertainment arena, extensive projects completed in nearby Mission Bay in recent years. CCA is in the middle of something, an observable transition in terms of our institutional body, and more broadly, the visual organization of San Francisco.

Placemaking, a term urbanists working in North America started to use in the 1960s, is, of course, an age-old concept that has long mattered to artists, writers, designers, and architects. At CCA, students, faculty, and staff are makers in creative communities—spheres of experimentation and discovery. We seek to respond to contemporary needs and take up activities that contribute to greater good in places where we live alongside others.

The Graduate Program in Visual and Critical Studies

VCS students are cultural producers who “make” writing. The award-winning VCS faculty guide them. We illuminate paths of interdisciplinary inquiry, and then get out of the way so that students can dive into the histories of visual culture and identify intellectual allies whose scholarship will aid their analyses. VCS students demonstrate their progress in seminar papers, oral presentations, and short-form articles.

The VCS Master of Arts is a two-year commitment. For students who are interested in earning a second terminal master’s degree in Creative Writing, Fine Arts, and Curatorial Practice at CCA, there is the option to pursue their ambition over three years.

For both the MA and the Dual Degree students, the preparation of a Sightlines essay is one of the culminating activities of the VCS program: this writing is drawn from the student’s eight-thousand-word Master of Arts thesis. Students also deliver formal talks about their theses in the annual VCS Spring Symposium. After this preparation, graduating students move on to become arts and college administrators, archivists, critics, curators, editors, educators, grant writers, journalists, and working artists with research-driven practices. Some VCS alumni continue with graduate study, earning doctoral degrees in Visual Studies, Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, Art History, Anthropology, and other humanities disciplines at universities in the US and across the world. The diversity of their routes is a solid measure of their training in visual and critical studies and their desire to use those skills for further inquiry and problem-solving.

The Essays in Sightlines 2023

Sightlines essays are about 2,500 words in length. Each offers an aspect of the writer’s MA thesis—either a summarization of the longer document’s main claims or a single chapter’s argument extracted from it. Sightlines essays appeal to the curious reader who may not have the opportunity to read the entire thesis. Sightlines writers also might circulate their essays as writing samples when they are sharing their research to journal and magazine editors who might publish it, scholarly conference organizers who may invite them to present it, fellowship and residency administrators who fund and otherwise support humanities projects, and admissions committees assessing their applications required for entry into PhD programs.

The three essays in this year’s Sightlines volume are in one way or another about place. As emerging interdisciplinary scholars, the writers engage popular culture, art history, queer studies, ethnobotany, and installation art practices. Even with this range of interests, there are parallels among these projects. Each of the writers trains their attention on the work of a single artist, albeit one who works in collaboration with others. Lastly, they are interested in contemporary visual cultural practices, ones that they look to connect to historical artistic strategies, icons, and rhetorics.

In “Envisioning an Enchanted World: On Christi Belcourt and The Wisdom of the Universe,” Liz Godbey interprets this artist’s revisionary project. A mural-size painting, The Wisdom of the Universe (2014) stands in opposition to the genre of landscape painting and its colonizing views of place. Belcourt’s research-informed, labor intensive practice emphasizes vitality: the spellbinding image of beautifully rendered plants and animals is a message that confirms abundance and balance in nature. Godbey informs us that Belcourt, an award-winning, Métis artist who lives in Canada, also describes herself as a community organizer, land protector, and an advocate for all indigenous people. Belcourt, in all of these roles, presents a model of interconnected and sustainable creativity.

In “Glitched Being,” Alexander Antai Hwang examines Na Mira’s Night Vision (Red as never been), a multi-channel video installation (2022) that was exhibited in the prestigious Whitney Biennial of 2022. Hwang reads Mira’s glitchy representation of the demilitarized zone that separates the nations of North Korea and South Korea as a resonant declaration of cultural rupture–both the Korean American artist’s and his own as an American of Chinese and Korean heritages. Inspired by Mira’s intention to recover her family history on the Korean peninsula and strike a creative connection to the Korean-born Theresa Hak Yung Cha (1951-1982) as an artistic ancestor, Hwang articulates the desire to address diasporic narratives that are central to his sense of self.

In “Most Campy Objects Are Urban: Transgression in Villano Antillano’s ‘Muñeca’,” Wenmimareba Klobah Collins situates this video made for the rap song of the same name (2021) as an activist anthem of Puerto Rico’s queer community. In the video, Antillano, a non-binary transfemme, moves from the sunny realism of a San Juan street into a shop selling sex toys. The candy-color palette of the establishment’s interiors and the employees’ uniforms match the energy of the track’s thumping beats and the campy wit of its double-entendre lyrics. Klobah Collins explains the transgressions of Muñeca, a Spanish word that translates to “doll” in English: in Puerto Rico, the term has been used to pejoratively label sex workers and to positively describe effeminacy among transgender women. Klobah Collins asserts that Muñeca is an empowering visualization of queer joy and optimism.

VCS proudly publishes the Class of 2023’s powerfully moving writing. Sightlines proffers the writers’ skills and knowledge, and our program’s values as well. Please share it with other readers who are curious about visual and critical studies scholarship, for it is a bold and urgent response to the challenges and opportunities of our times.

Jacqueline Francis, Chair Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies