The Berkeley/Stanford Symposium is an annual gathering of emerging voices in the arts organized by graduate students in art history at Stanford and UC Berkeley.

The ascendance of COVID-19 has forced us to reconsider the facets of our lives that we took for granted before. One of these is the day-to-day experience of contact, touch, breath, and life. This year’s Berkeley/ Stanford Graduate Symposium seeks to address the multiple ways in which we now think about contact — from its affective, material, aesthetic, and social implications to its presence in relationships between the human and non-human, in the realms of ritual, knowledge production, art-making, and reception. How then do we make and unmake contact individually and collectively, through time and space, and across borders geographical and corporeal?

Keynote speakers:

A Fulbright scholar, Eva Hayward is an associate professor of gender & women’s studies at the University of Arizona. In 2021, she co-edited a special issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP) “Trans in the Time of HIV/AIDS.” She works across a range of disciplines, including sexuality studies and aesthetics.

Candice Lin is an artist whose practice utilizes installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Times Museum, Guangzhou, China (2021); Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth (2020), New Zealand; ICA, NYU Shanghai (2020); Pitzer Galleries, Claremont, CA (2020) and the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Art Center, Canada (2019). Lin has been included in recent group exhibitions including the 2021 Prospect Biennial, 2021 Gwangju Biennial, the 2019 Fiskars Village Art & Design Biennale, 2018 Taipei Biennale; the 2018 Athens Biennale; and Made in L.A, 2018, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She is the recipient of several residencies, grants and fellowships, including the American Academy in Berlin Fellowship (2021), the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), The Artists Project Award (2018), Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Davidoff Art Residency (2018) and Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2009). She received her BA in Visual Arts and Art Semiotics from Brown University, in 2001, and MFA in New Genres from San Francisco Art Institute, in 2004; and she is currently Assistant Professor of Art at UCLA and lives and works in Los Angeles.