Special Collections & Archives presents artist and UCSC alumnus Israel Campos in conversation with History of Art & Visual Culture Professor Jennifer González on the evening of Wednesday December 4.

Israel Campos is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the rich and diverse tapestry of cultures, lifestyles and narratives found in the “City of Angels” through paintings, prints, photography and artist books. The contradictions woven into the city are explored through the lens of an Angelino who was raised and lives in a neighborhood that is heavily industrial and predominantly working class. Special Collections & Archives at UCSC is home to two of his unique works, The Codex Ollin Americanus and The Codex Amiktampla. 

Israel graduated with a bachelors from the University of California Santa Cruz in 2011 and acquired an MFA from the University of Wisconsin‐Madison in 2015. His work is in the permanent collections of the Kohler Art Library, the UCSC Digital Art Research Center, the Zuckerman Museum of Art, and the Oregon College of Art and Craft. He has exhibited in venues across the country, including the ArtHelix Gallery in New York City, the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art in Portland and is an active member of the Vox Pop printmaking artist collective and the California Society of Printmakers. He also runs and operates Chayote Press.

Jennifer A. González, Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture, is affiliated with the History of Consciousness, Latin American/Latinx Studies, and Feminist Studies. She also teaches annual seminars at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, and the American Council of Learned Societies. She has published widely in journals such as Camera Obscura, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs, most recently in Diego Rivera's America, SFMOMA (2022) and Amalia Mesa Bains, Archeology of Memory (2023). Her first book Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary Installation Art (MIT Press, 2008) was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Her second book focused on the MacArthur-award-winning artist Pepón Osorio (University of Minnesota Press, 2013). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019) which was named one of the top art books of the decade by ArtNews in 2020.