Department Event

Our 2026 Regents’ Lecturer events in Art History with the artist Walead Beshty are scheduled, for Mondays November 2, 16 and 30, in Royce Hall 306. All events will begin at 5:00 PM Aesthetics, an open seminar Walead Beshty Artist and theorist Walead Beshty will lead a series of three open seminars organized around his forthcoming book, Worlds of Appearance: An Introduction to Aesthetics in Practice (University of Chicago Press, 2026), exploring the foundations of aesthetics, its use in reflexive disciplines in the field of art, and its emergent forms. The seminars are open to all and each session will...

Entitled “Fugitive Tiepolo!” this talk ask the question, what are the relations between poetry, painting, and art-historical practice? And how might the connections between them be re-framed? This lecture considers the work of Saint Lucian poet (and painter) Derek Walcott, concentrating on the pictorial imagination of his book-length poem Tiepolo’s Hound (2000). Tracing the strange intimacies Walcott explores between the visual world of Giambattista Tiepolo and his own – two prospects onto the ends of empire – it considers his engagement in relation to the eccentric scholarly literature this eighteenth-century painter continues to accrue. In doing so, the lecture seeks...

This year’s annual UCLA Department of Art History Graduate Symposium will be held at the Hammer Museum’s Nimoy Studio on Friday, November 13, 2026. This year’s theme is Bodies Under Duress: Violence, Pressure, and the Visual. Across art and visual culture, bodies have served as both the objects upon which power is exercised and the means through which its effects become visible, imaginable, and contested. Bodies Under Duress invites scholars to consider how visual and material practices register the forces exerted upon bodies, while also asking not only what happens to bodies under violence, but how violence is made possible,...