Robert Brian Huerta places himself in a long line of artists who are considered rebels in their own generation as they explore new directions in their work.
At his recent Glassbox exhibition, UC Santa Barbara’s student-run exhibition space, Huerta invited several punk rock groups to perform within the space. He titled the exhibition Tresspassing: punks in the glassbox.
At the event, Huerta encouraged a clash by having conventional art pieces surround a group of people drinking, singing, and dancing to a live, black-clad punk band.
Second year UC Santa Barbara music student, Vincent Gao steps forward on stage and waves his arms, facing the crowd as he sings the Chinese song “Confession Balloon” into a microphone along with his partner Max Wong.
“Everyone, can you please take out your phones,” Gao calls into the audience. Suddenly one by one, with arms raised and with loud cheers, the audience illuminates the Lotte Lehmann Concert Hall with a sea of bright cell phone lights, in a waving motion.
This was the first round of the Super Nova 2017 Finale in late fall, hosted by the Chinese Student and Scholar Association for Chinese international students. Excitement filled the venue as 300 Chinese international students filled the seats of the concert hall that evening in to enjoy music far away from home.
Sasha Nasir, a student in our new Journalism for Web and Social Media course, has produced a video featuring undergraduates in UC Santa Barbara's division of Humanities and Fine Arts explaining what they love about their majors - Classics, Black Studies, Film and Media Studies, and English.
“I know that it’s not very practical to be a performer. That’s a hard life because you’re just gigging all the time,” UCSB senior Claire Garvais said as she sat at a Starbucks at UC Santa Barbara. “I never wanted that for myself, but I also wanted to stay in music.”
Garvais recently declared a double major in Global Studies and Music Studies. Though it may seem unlikely for a musician, she majored in economics her freshman year then switched her major to global studies only to realize by junior year that she wanted to participate more fully in the university’s music scene.
“There’s no one else in my family that does music. I’m the only one,” said Garvais, who picked up her first instrument in elementary school. “I’ve always been in music.”
Weihao Qiu, a UC Santa Barbara Media and Technology student, had to work quickly to design and modify his data visualization project for exhibition at the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation.
In the end, his hard work paid off. In a recent interview, he described how exciting it was to receive the commission for his piece and how thrilled he has been by the reaction of visitors who have interacted with it.
“When it was exhibited, I saw people playing with it, and that moment was very special,” he said. “You already know the tricks but they don’t. So you can see the process of them gaining knowledge to understand the piece.”
