Commissioning process
Landmark Program
The Stuart Collection Landmarks Commissioning Program seeks to enrich the cultural, intellectual, and scholarly life of the UC San Diego campus community and local San Diego community; and to enhance public life through art that encourages thoughtful deliberation, an awareness of difference, mental and physical wellbeing, and that inspires creative solutions to complex issues.
The Stuart Collection Landmarks Commissioning Program continues to commission exciting new works from the world’s most important established contemporary artists. They have been honored with every major award in the art world, ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Award and the National Medal of Arts.
Emerging Artists Program
Emerging Artists Program
The Stuart Collection’s Emerging Artists Commissioning Program fosters experimental practices and supports the exploration of ideas that engage with the complexities of public space and the communities within it. By providing a platform for young artistic voices, our program plays a crucial role in helping shape what is meaningful in art and its future. It will cultivate a vibrant and diverse artistic community that resonates with audiences locally and internationally by encouraging experimentation and embracing current cultural contexts.
The Stuart Collection has selected artist collective RojoNegro, comprised of Noé Martínez and María Sosa; sculptor Max Hooper Schneider; and poet, artist and chef Precious Okoyomon to create new, site-specific works that will join the established collection. The artists’ works, their first permanent public art installations, will become a lasting part of the Stuart Collection and will be experienced by the tens of thousands of students, university staff and visitors who use the campus daily.
Inaugural Artists
Inaugural Emerging Artist
Rojo Negro
Rojo Negro
The work of collective RojoNegro, Noé Martínez (he/him) and María Sosa (she/her), focuses on the lived experience of Indigenous communities and artistic interpretations of communal histories, of which shared experiences of resistance and the celebration of their heritage are crucial elements.
Noé Martínez (b. 1986, lives and works in Mexico City, MX) is a visual artist and filmmaker who graduated from Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado (“La Esmeralda”), Mexico City. His work functions as a case study that emerges from personal history, using ethnographic methodologies and research on the various histories of Indigenous communities on the American continent. His work has been presented at the Rose Art Museum (2024); Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana (2020); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2019); 21 Bienal de Arte contemporáneo SESC Videobrasil, São Paulo (2019); FilmFront, Chicago (2019); Native Crossroad Film Festival, Norman (2018); Festival Internacional de Cine, Morelia (2018) and Festival Internacional de Cine, Morelia (2018).
María Sosa (b. 1985, lives and works in Mexico City, MX) holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. Her work develops from research about colonial pasts and how they shape contemporary racial, sexual and social dynamics in the American continent. Throughout her practice, Sosa particularly highlights the eroding knowledge surrounding non-Western ways of life and pre-Hispanic cultures. Her work has been exhibited at Fundación Casa de México, Madrid (2022); Laboratorio de Arte Alameda, Mexico City (2021-2022); Tale of a Tub, Amsterdam (2021); Arewá, Madrid (2021); Servais Family Collection, Brussels (2020); Lasécu Artothèque, Lille (2019); FilmFront, Chicago (2018- 2019); Native Crossroad Film Festival, Norman (2018); Festival Internacional de Cine, Morelia (2018), where she won the Eye to the Best Short Film of Michoacán Award; and International Performance Art Week, Venice (2016).
RojoNegro has exhibited work at individual shows at MAZ, Zapopan, Jalisco (2024), Swiss Institute OFFSITE, Mexico City (2022) and Fudación Alumnos 47, Mexico City (2017). Work by RojoNegro has also been included in collective shows at Forma, Paris (2024), No Mans Gallery, Amsterdam (2023), IV Congreso de Estudios Poscoloniales/VI Jornadas de Feminismo Poscolonial, Buenos Aires and California (2018), Venice International Performance Art Week, Venice (2016), Juan José Arreola Lake House Museum, Mexico City (2015) and MUCA Roma, D.F., Mexico City (2012). RojoNegro participated in the Clarice Oliviera Tavares residency at the Swiss Institute in New York, New York in Fall, 2020.
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Precious Okoyomon
Precious Okoyomon
Precious Okoyomon (b. 1993) is a Nigerian-American poet and artist. Their work considers the natural world, histories of migration and racialization and the pure pleasures of everyday life. They have had one-person exhibitions at the LUMA Westbau, Switzerland; the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; Performance Space New York; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; and The Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Madrid Foundation, Madrid, Spain. They were included in the Baltic Triennial 13, Tallinn; the 58th Belgrade Biennial; the 59th Venice Biennale; the 2022 Okayama Art Summit; the 11th Sequences Biennial, Reykjavik; and the 2023.
Thailand Biennial, as well as in group exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; LUMA Westbau; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; LUMA Arles; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Nigerian Pavilion, 60th Venice Biennale; and Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Okoyomon's work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt and LUMA Arles. Okoyomon was the 2021 recipient of the Frieze Art Fair Artist Award, as well as the 2021 Chanel Next Art Prize. In 2024, their second book of poetry But Did You Die? was co-published by the Serpentine and Wonder Press.
Max Hooper Schneider
Max Hooper Schneider
Max Hooper Schneider (b. 1982, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) graduated from Harvard University in 2011 with a master's degree in landscape architecture. The foregrounding of material technologies and tactics of defamiliarization within the fields of biology, philosophy, landscape architecture and varying subcultures continue to inform his polymathic practice. Hooper Schneider's work develops and explores the aesthetics of succession, abandonment and the uncanny through the creation of habitats and installations that materialize and dramatize nature in diverse ways, with nature conceived as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. Obsessive travel, documentation and field work in distant regions, and the sacrificing of his own material compositions to environmental elements remain integral to his codex of artistic procedures. He continues to experiment across institutions, venues and outdoor sites locally and internationally and is held in major public and private collections around the world.
Public Program
Public Program
In addition to our commissioning programs, the Public Program aspires to explore the multidimensional and evolving nature of public space to foster community engagement and meaningful learning with a focus on diversity and experimentation. The Public Program aims to increase access to world renowned artists and unique experiences for the campus and broader communities.
We had our first program in 2024 with artist Jeppe Hein where guests were invited to paint their breath in a public participation mindfulness exercise centered around breathwork and painting.
