The Institute of the Arts and Sciences (IAS) is starting the new year with two imaginative and heartfelt exhibitions exploring liberation and justice. EDELO and Our Bedrock, both of which run from Jan. 31 – April 20, offer visitors immersive experiences of large-scale sculptural works, installation art, video, and performance reflecting the diverse practices and regional concerns of award-winning U.S. contemporary artists.
EDELO is an unusual survey of the work of Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte, artist collaborators who’ve spent the past 15 years creating community-based art projects. New large-scale installations and immersive artworks have been made of remnants of past projects, making this exhibition the first time much of their work will be shown in an institutional setting.
The exhibition is named after a project Rollow and Duarte began almost 16 years ago. EDELO, short for En Donde Era La ONU (Where the United Nations Used to Be,) 2009-2013, involved the artist collaborators repurposing an abandoned United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico. The building was transformed into an experimental, community laboratory for intercultural artist residencies and organizing. The survey of their practice brings together this work with other projects undertaken with communities in a wide-range of locations including Chiapas, Tijuana, Frankfurt, and Santiago de Chile.
The second exhibition, Our Bedrock by Philadelphia-based artist Levester Williams, explores the use and history of Cockeysville marble, a stone that was used to create monuments including the U.S. Capitol Building and the Washington Monument as well as row homes in Baltimore. Through this material, Williams explores Black resistance in America. “This exhibition centers on the embodied agency of African Americans and some of our material transactions with Cockeysville marble, such as extracting, stonemasoning, cleaning and protesting,” says Williams. “These are haptic transactions that highlight the border where a system of distributing wealth breaks, often along racial fault lines, and where the concept of race is tethered to a notion of ‘value.’”
The exhibitions open on Jan. 31 and the opening reception will be on Feb. 7, 2025 at IAS with the artists in attendance. The event, which runs from 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM offers a unique chance to meet the artists and gain a greater perspective on the work.
About the Artists
Mia Eve Rollow is a multidisciplinary nomadic artist that makes site-specific work that cultivates terrains of spiritual, social, and cultural resistance. Working in globally engaged collectives of artistic practice, she incorporates healing strategies from pre-colonial practices and uses magical realist aesthetics to explore the psyche. Engaging whole communities, these projects aim to counteract eugenic civic paradigms and connect art to radical political strategies for liberation.
Caleb Duarte migrated from Northern Mexico to the farm working communities of the Central Valley in California. His sculptural performances, installations, and paintings confront issues of institutional encounter, the use of the body in distinct political and artistic movements, and art’s pedagogical possibilities. He has collaborated with autonomous indigenous Zapatista communities, communities in movement, and working children and refugees. A professor of sculpture at Fresno City College, his work and performances have been widely shown in the United States and internationally.
Levester Williams is a sculptor whose praxis is deeply rooted in aesthetic and critical inquiries into modes of existence and existing. Questions arising from the politics and poetics of identity, space/place, and boundary coalesce into sculptures, installations, drawings, sound, code, and the moving image. Williams received a MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, Master of Computer and Information Technology from University of Pennsylvania and BFA in Art and Design from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. His works have been included in exhibitions at San José Museum of Art, San José, CA; N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit, MI; Institute for Contemporary Art, Richmond, VA; and Museum of African Design, Johannesburg, South Africa among others. His residencies include the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, Maine; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; and the Bag Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Exhibitions
January 31, 2025 – Apr 20, 2025
Tuesday – Sunday 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Opening Reception
February 7, 2025
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Institute of the Arts and Science
100 Panetta Ave
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Media inquiries: ias@ucsc.edu