The Artists of Love & Revelation

Please join this public conversation with the artists and curator from Of Love & Revelation discussing photography, mentorship, and their journeys to calling this place home.

Gabriel Saloman Mindel is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and scholar whose
research focuses on the relationship between noise, protest, and power. His recent curatorial work — Landscape and Life (Indexical, 2022-23); On Love and Revelation (Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2024) — focuses on artistic experimentation, landscapes, and the trouble of settler colonialism. Mindel received an MFA from Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and is completing a PhD in the History of Consciousness at the University of California Santa Cruz. He will be joining the Minneapolis College of Art and Design as a Visiting MFA Faculty in the Fall of 2024.

Edgar Cruz (b. 1998) is a Oaxacan ecologist, naturalist, and photo-based artist from South Central Los Angeles. His photography explores an array of experimental film and processing techniques including cyanotypes and in-camera double exposure. His work is inspired by his experience of eating, sleeping, and living in the landscapes of the Mojave Desert, Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Big Sur where he currently works as a Watershed Steward.

Norman Locks became the Director of the Ansel Adams Gallery Workshops in Yosemite upon completing his MFA at San Francisco State University in 1973. He continued in that role until he joined UCSC as the Art Department’s first photography teacher in 1978. Now a professor emeritus, Locks continues to lead students on annual field quarters to Big Sur and the Mojave (his student Edgar Cruz and his colleague Karolina Karlic have also joined these trips).

Binh Danh (b. 1977) is an arts educator and photographer who got his start as a student of Shelby Graham at Gunderson High School in San Jose. Danh’s work often explores landscapes in the U.S. and in his native Vietnam through chlorophyll prints and readymade assemblages. He also uses daguerreotype, a photographic process from the mid-1800s, to depict anachronistic landscapes and city spaces that layer the past and the present on top of one another. Since receiving an MFA in Studio Art from Stanford University, Danh's work has been widely exhibited, exhibited, and recognized by numerous awards.

Karolina Karlic (b. 1983) is an Associate Professor of Art at UCSC and the Art + Science Faculty Director of the Norris Center. Through her documentary photography research practice, Karlic tells stories about people and places affected by industrial transformations, often touching on her family’s own stories of labor and migration. She has researched and photographed the social impact of the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota, and rubber manufacturing, from plantations in Brazil to the Detroit auto industry. More recently she has founded Unseen California, a collaborative research initiative that engages the public land of California as an outdoor artist studio and classroom laboratory.

Shelby Graham has a 35-year career as an educator and conceptual photographer. Her work explores the entangled relationships between humans and our environment through surreal portraits of plants, stones, insects, seaweed, and plastic. In addition to her work as an artist and teacher, Graham is a prolific curator who directed the Sesnon Gallery on UCSC’s campus from 1999-2021. One of her earliest exhibitions at the Sesnon featured the work of Binh Danh who she had taught as a high school student, and one of her final exhibitions as curator there featured the photographs of Edgar Cruz.

Image: Edgar Cruz, Two Shadows with Two Cameras, 2024