Timothy McNeil (Department of Design) 

Professor of Design Timothy McNeil brings us an illustrated handbook that explains how to design exhibitions and attractions successfully. He contextualizes contemporary exhibition design practice through its historical and theoretical underpinnings while elevating understanding of one of the most rapidly evolving and trans-disciplinary creative disciplines.

Annabeth Rosen (Department of Art and Art History)

Distinguished Professor of Art and Robert Arneson Endowed Chair Annabeth Rosen offers the companion catalog to her first retrospective show. Rosen’s sculptures made of fired and glazed clay seem to have neither fixed contours or stable shape, even their scale appears to shift as you look. They are variously volcanic, beastly, catastrophic and unnervingly funny, suggesting things going terribly wrong, but not yet irreversible.

Shiva Ahmadi (Department of Art and Art History) 

This heavily illustrated book explores the art of Shiva Ahmadi, professor of art, with an essay by Talinn Grigor, professor of art history. Ahmadi's work is in collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Asia Society and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

James Housefield (Department of Design) 

Department of Design Professor James Housefield examines the influences of astronomy, geography and aviation on artist Marcel Duchamp. In the book, Housefield offers new interpretations of Duchamp’s work showing how environments of popular science, from museums to the modern planetarium, prepared paths for Duchamp’s art. 

Katharine Burnett (Department of Art and Art History) 

Professor of Art History and program chair Katharine Burnett examines how art collector Pang Yuanji's taste has had a long-standing and ongoing impact on Chinese art museum collections and research around the globe. In Shaping Chinese Art History, Burnett analyzes the approach that Pang (1864-1949) used to build a collection, how that compared to other collectors and how this knowledge helps in understanding current Chinese art history.

Susette Min (Department of Asian American Studies)

Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and Department Chair Susette Min takes a critical look at how the definitions of Asian American art stifle more than it reveals in Unnamable: The Ends of Asian American Art. Min challenges the idea that Asian American art is an agent of reconciliation or an instrument for marginalized artists to break into the canon or mainstream art scene by outlining its historical conditions and the expansive surroundings of its formation. Undertaking a critical examination of the politics of visibility and the ways in which this classification confines Asian American artists' creations to limited interpretations. Min reimagines Asian American art as a medium that subverts embedded knowledge and representations rather than a subset of objects.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh (Department of Art and Art History)

Department of Art History Professor Heghnar Zeitlin Watenpaugh traces eight illustrated pages from a 13th-century Armenian manuscript that disappeared in 1920 to their purchase by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1995. A 2010 lawsuit against the Getty demanding the pages be returned to the Armenian Church set off her search that is set against larger issues of the Armenian Genocide.

Nitheen Ramalingam, a graduate of UC Davis' Art Studio M.F.A. program, speaks about the growth he experienced during his studies — also his first time in the U.S. — and how the legacy of the caste system back home in India continues to influence his art practice. 

Non-linear time sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, but what if we could rewrite our histories in ways that feel as if things don’t happen sequentially? Overlapping the concepts of time, memory and the body, Gracianne Kirsch uses many art modalities to explore their own many-sided self.