Events & Exhibitions
CCA’s dynamic public programming brings art, architecture, design, writing, and the world of ideas to life through events, lectures, exhibitions, and more.
Join us
All of CCA’s lectures, symposiums, and workshops are free, offering opportunities for students and the public to engage with cultural topics and creative practices through the work and ideas of award-winning artists, designers, authors, scholars, and alumni.
Featured events and programs
Art in action
Explore how democracy, creative activism, and voter advocacy intersect through Creative Citizens in Action’s (CCA@CCA) annual series of public programs, which span the disciplines of art, design, architecture, and writing.
Creative Citizens Series
Enjoy curated new work by our community of students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in our contemporary galleries. Exhibitions are open to all and always free.
Current exhibitions
Recognitions / 认 • 知, a solo exhibition by Christine Wong Yap, at the new CCA Campus Gallery in Blattner Hall.
Discover on-campus experiences
Enjoy the future of art and design all year-long in CCA’s mix of campus galleries and presentation spaces. Visitors will find new work by students, faculty, staff, and visiting artists in curated venues that embrace diverse perspectives and a range of contemporary approaches. Offering our students the unique opportunity to present their work and expand their practice in a professional setting, the campus galleries are also a place for our community of makers and the public to connect across contemporary art and design. Plan a visit, today.
Meet the voices of tomorrow
CCA’s graduating student showcases, presented by class year, are digital time capsules of capstone projects and culminating work.
Celebrating the makers of 2024
Featuring work by graduating students, the 2024 Showcase represents the diversity of practice across CCA’s Architecture, Design, Fine Arts, and Humanities & Sciences divisions. Navigate the full showcase experience on Portal, and check out the Deans' Spotlight collection of outstanding projects from each academic division.
Creative Citizens in Action
The Creative Citizens in Action (CCA@CCA) initiative provides important resources to the CCA community to power dialogue and making related to creative activism. The connected programming explores art, democratic engagement, and current affairs through public events, exhibitions, grant opportunities, voting resources, and connections to the classroom.
CCA@CCA is overseen by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department in partnership with Student Affairs, as well as libraries, academic divisions, communications, and faculty.
Explore our stories
Rewind Review Respond
Rewind Review Respond (RRR) is an online forum where CCA students write about recent events and the ideas that affect their practice, communities, and fields of study. Through writing, videos, and interviews, RRR is an opportunity to debrief on a lecture, panel, screening, or roundtable and to dive deeper into ideas discussed.
RRR is organized by the Exhibitions and Public Programming department and led by a team of student editors, writers, and designers.
Exhibitions at CCA
@ccaexhibitions
July 26, 2024
In "Emanata," the MFA Comics second-summer cohort displays the artistry behind their comics: original art pages, character and location designs, world-building artifacts, and more.
"Emanata" is on view by request through Friday, August 2nd. Please contact Justin Hall ([email protected]) to schedule a visit.
July 24, 2024
"Through her work, [Sofía] Córdova seeks to remind us that revolution is a collective process, often enacted by marginalized groups, whose labor is then decentered or erased. Central to 'GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry' is the idea that revolution is messy, non-linear, and marked by both failure and resilience."
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle's review of a February 2024 lecture by Sofía Córdova for CCA's MFA Fine Arts program appears in RRR Vol. 8 (available via our linktree).
Emilia Shaffer-Del Valle (MA Visual & Critical Studies 2024) is a writer and curator whose interdisciplinary research centers on decolonial notions of selfhood and community.
Born in 1985 in Carolina, Puerto Rico and currently based in Oakland, California, Sofía Córdova makes work that considers sci-fi as alternative history, dance music's liberatory dimensions, colonial contamination, climate change and migration, and most recently, revolution - historical and imagined - within the matrix of class, gender, race, late capitalism and its technologies.
July 2, 2024
"It is increasingly vital for us as community members, educators, employees, students, public servants, etc., to find equitable and effective ways of getting to know those outside of ourselves, approach our positions of power or influence
with understanding, and more actively participate in building the world we want to live in."
Read Vanessa Perez Winder's review of “Belonging is an Act of Resistance,” in RRR Vol. 8. "Belonging is an Act of Resistance" was a conversation between Oakland-based cultural leader Dorothy Lazard and CCA’s Vice President of DEIB, Tricia Brand, that took place in February 2024.
Dorothy Lazard is a writer, librarian, and public historian who played a major role in popularizing the Oakland Main Library's Oakland History Center by hosting lectures, mounting exhibits, writing articles about Oakland's history and assisting researchers exploring the city's history. After serving as a librarian for nearly 40 years, Lazard, who retired in 2021, has published a memoir about growing up in San Francisco and Oakland, "What You Don’t Know Will Make a Whole New World." She is currently working on a book about the library as a public institution.
Vanessa Perez Winder (MA Visual & Critical Studies 2025) is a writer and RRR’s new Lead Editor. They believe in working toward liberatory and experimental forms of art historical study and curatorial action, and are interested in collaborative, community based, and site specific artistic practices and public interventions.
June 27, 2024
The CCA Voting Coalition has submitted a new Action Plan to the Campus Vote Project and the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge. This plan helps us hold ourselves and our communities accountable for voting work related to November's Presidential Election and provides a framework to measure and celebrate our successes.
CCA's 2024 Voting Action Plan is available to read via our linktree.
Find what’s next in our calendar of exhibitions and events