UCLA Art Student and Alumni Opportunities

Now in its 23rd year, with alumni from over 170 colleges and universities worldwide, SGPS is dedicated to the preservation of cultural heritage. We offer students the opportunity to study and travel in Italy where they acquire hands-on experience in restoration and conservation.   

SGPS is a program of the International Institute for Restoration and Preservation Studies, based in New York. An academic relationship has been established with West Virginia University that offers our students the opportunity to apply for and receive credits through the WVU Art History Department. Since COVID, we have established cooperation agreements with the Museo della Storie di Bergamo and the Parco del Colosseo to study and conserve artworks and archaeological objects held in their museums, as well as a collaboration with the Historic Archives of the Commune di San Gemini for SGPS participants to study and conserve archival documents. 

Caitlin Berrigan will present her process and research behind recent videos, sculptures, and texts that reimagine relations among human and more-than-human life forms through the lens of deep time. Central to the talk will be the artist’s ongoing research project, Imaginary Explosions (2018-present)—a speculative worldbuilding cosmology that blurs research science with art and fiction. Focusing on communication with geologic subjects through various technologies, sensory modalities, and mutual alliances, the project explores how human and mineral subjectivities are entangled, emphasizing moments when the earthly asserts its agency in the political sphere. Her work speculates on the idea of becoming mineral and enlists sensory modes to attune to geological animacies, while the notion of deep time offers a critical lens to think beyond the time scale of the human. Berrigan draws connections across ecological disasters and various scales of violence and contamination, along with personal histories that are enfolded in earth histories. She projects imaginary landscapes onto existing ones to propose alternative geological temporalities and affinities, enlisting embodied knowledge towards ecological reparation and the subversion of dominant power structures.

Art by Students is excited to offer two scholarships, each worth $500, to support and encourage the next generation of artists.