VCS Alumni Award
The Visual & Critical Alumni Award was established to annually recognize an alumni whose work after graduation from CCA exemplifies the interdisciplinary values of the VCS program and the dedication and scholarship demanded within the broader field of Visual and Critical Studies. This award recognizes the innovative and diverse ways VCS graduates mobilize the skills they honed and the ideas they germinated while at CCA in a broad range of creative and professional arenas, further evidencing the versatility of the degree and the luminosity of this community.
The VCS Class of 2023 is pleased to bestow this award on Dr. Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa (Class of
2025 ALUMNI AWARD RECIPIENT
Jesus Barraza
Jesus Barraza, the elected recipient of the 2025 Visual & Critical Studies Alumni Award, is a distinguished artist, printmaker, educator, activist, community leader, and social practitioner based in San Leandro. Currently, Barraza is a lecturer at UC Berkeley in the Ethnic Studies and Art Practice department, with a focus on Xicanx Art History & Practice, a member of JustSeeds Artists Cooperative, and the co–founder of Dignidad Rebelde, a community-driven graphic arts collaboration that amplifies community voices, struggles, and resistances. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the de Young Museum of Art, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe; El Paso Museum of Art; Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juarez, MX; and Parco Museum, Tokyo.
Barraza holds a BA in Raza Studies from San Francisco State University, and earned dual graduate degrees from California College of the Arts in 2016, an MFA in Social Practice and an MA in Visual & Critical Studies. At CCA, Barraza explored tactics of decolonial social practice and Indigenous knowledge production in contemporary contexts in his VCS thesis entitled, “LOWRIDING AS SOCIAL FORM: ANISHINAABE GRANDFATHER TEACHINGS AS DECOLONIAL VEHICLES OF RESISTANCE.” Exploring artist Dylan Miner’s ongoing project and community-based workshop series, Native Kids Ride Bikes, Barraza investigated how lowrider bicycles—and the communal process of making and customizing them—can be tools for reviving cultural memory among Indigenous youth. As he argued, projects like Miner’s demonstrate alternative pathways for political resistance in the face of contemporary realities of extraction, displacement, and dispossession, ones grounded in traditional and sacred knowledge practices. This work was both a personal and political undertaking—an extension of Jesus’ lifelong dedication to resisting colonial erasure and uplifting cultural memory through creative expression.
Long before I [Vanessa], came to study art history in college and moved to the Bay Area, as a high schooler sometime around 2012, my older sister first introduced me to Jesus Barraza’s and his co-founder Melanie Cervantes’ printmaking work as Dignidad Rebelde by gifting me a couple of their silkscreen prints. Their bold and colorful graphics gave visual form and weight to a number of the national and localized issues I was witnessing and was instrumental in helping shape my own politics, including around Indigenous sovereignty, global resistance movements, migration, police violence, and worker’s rights. In doing so, their prints not only shaped my political consciousness, but introduced me to a historic lineage of graphic political art and the grassroots activist efforts they reflected. Beyond visual statements, Dignidad Rebelde offered me a radical vision of what art could look like when it's directly in service to the community and accountable to the people it represents.
Jesus’ continued efforts at Dignidad Rebelde and across various other projects embody the same values he explored in his time at CCA. Through, as Dignidad Rebelde states, “creat[ing] art that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it,” Barraza pulls art and creative practice out of the theoretical space, and puts it into effective action. Further, Barraza’s work also exemplifies a sense of intergenerational and inter-community solidarity, which we have seen reflected in his work as an educator and mentor for the next generations of artists and cultural workers. His work continues to remind us that artistic practice and research can be an instrument for building movements, sharing knowledge, remembering, and imagining otherwise. Barraza’s practice of intertwining knowledge sharing, art-making, and cultural archiving represents a truly community-driven activist art practice.
Each year, the graduating Visual and Critical Studies cohort nominates an alumni of the program to receive the Visual & Critical Studies Alumni Award. The award is intended to recognize a VCS community member whose continued work and efforts embody the interdisciplinarity and dedication to scholarship and criticality core to the program’s values and the field of Visual and Critical Studies. For us, the 2025 VCS cohort, Barraza’s multi-valent commitment to community empowerment, critically-engaged creative praxis, and social justice truly carries the spirit of interdisciplinarity and critical labor within Visual and Critical Studies that has been so influential to our work. We are honored to inherit the legacy of Jesus’ values, his critical practice, dedication to his community, and passion for the work he does.
– Vanessa Pérez-Winder and Samantha Hiura (VCS Class of 2025)
2022
Dorothy R. Santos