Past Exhibitions

Because We Eat - How Growing Our Food Affects Farmworkers is a multimedia installation by Antonia Davis that shines a light on the invisible labor behind the food we consume.

The centerpiece of the installation is a dining table with a quilted and embroidered tablecloth. Engraved place settings and chairs each tell a story of a farmworker, highlighting the physical, emotional, and social costs of the work that produces the food that sustains us all.

Every stitch and detail embodies respect for the resilience, endurance, and dignity of farmworkers. This work asks us to honor their struggles, to acknowledge the fruits of their labor and to see our shared humanity in the act of eating.

Davis is a lifelong artivist whose creative practice is rooted in amplifying the voices of marginalized communities. Since 2003, Davis has worked at the intersection of art and social justice, co-founding the San Diego Puppet Insurgency to provide visual storytelling and art builds to grassroots organizations, student groups, and local social movements.

This exhibition was previously installed at Centro Cultural de la Raza (March - May 2024) and the Chicano Park Museum (May - October 2024). This installation calls viewers to partake in interactive reflection and it continues to grow through community engagement. We are grateful for the Kroc School of Peace Studies for sponsoring this exhibition.

First published as a book in 2022, From Where Loss Comes amplifies artist Pradip Malde's multi-year project photographing women and activists within their communities in his native Tanzania. Centered on the cultural practice of female genital mutilation and cutting (FGM/C), this exhibition examines experiences of loss and serves as a fulcrum for further conversation about sacrifice in the search for acceptance and belonging. This project is further shaped around questions such as "what are we willing to give up, as individuals, in order to escape solitude; what landscape of personal and cultural priorities is at work in defining identity; what does a person have to lose in order to remain a citizen?"

Malde is a Professor of Art at The University of the South, Sewanee, TN. In 2018, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete his work on From Where Loss Comes. His works are represented in the permanent collections of Yale University Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Princeton University Museum, and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, among others.

Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746-1828) began working on his series The Disasters of War in 1810 during the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. His prints not only captured the barbarities of war and famine but also pushed against eighteenth-century visual traditions. The Disasters of War reveal a sense of urgency and suspense, suggesting a documentary intent within Goya's work. Curated by Zoe Morales Martinez ('21), this exhibition explored Goya's enduring legacy on modern images of warfare

Featuring work by Shivaraju B.S., a photographer from Bangalore, India best known by his nickname “Cop Shiva,” this display includes images from his most celebrated series, On Being Gandhi. These photographs document the performances of a local village schoolteacher, Byagadehalli Basavaraju, as he routinely impersonates Mahatma Gandhi. This exhibition was curated by the Frank Museum of Art at Otterbein University and was presented on USD’s campus in conjunction with the 2019 ASIANetwork conference.

Dorothy Day has been called “an icon of American Catholicism.” Born to a newspaper family in Brooklyn, New York, Day converted to Catholicism as a young woman and shortly afterwards began publishing the Catholic Worker in 1933. Vivian Cherry, a street photographer known for her interest in social issues, chronicled Day’s work starting in 1955. Cherry returned in 1959 to photograph Day’s faith-inspired labor once again. Almost 50 of Cherry’s images from these extended photo-essays were brought together in the exhibition, Love is the Measure. This project was organized jointly by the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture and University Galleries.

Between the Future and the Past marked the first time that Virginia Beahan displayed an entirely new body of work, one rooted in her visits to the country since tentative steps toward normalization of US/Cuba relations were announced in 2014. Beahan’s focus shifted away from the island landscape to produce a series of portraits. These new photographs both recognized the emergent class of resilient, business-minded individuals and the framing of those entrepreneurial efforts within still-uncertain economic circumstances.

Duncan McCosker (1944-2016) was born in Glendale, CA and taught photography at the University of San Diego from the early 1980s until 2016. Beyond his status as a beloved teacher and respected colleague, McCosker's work stands as a tribute to dedicated looking at a wide variety of complex social situations. For decades, McCosker meticulously documented the Del Mar County Fair, the beaches of San Diego County, and the tourist zones of Paris. This memorial exhibition—organized, in part, by USD art history students—surveyed forty years of this talented photographer's work.

This exhibition looked at the powerful photographic work that was produced by Carlos LeGerrette: the personal photographer for Cesar Chavez in the 1960s and 1970s. Over 50 images by LeGerrette demonstrated Chavez’s historic efforts to gain better working conditions and compensation for agricultural workers. This project was conceived by Alberto López Pulido, Professor of Ethnic Studies, in tandem with Jeffrey Mark Burns, Director of the Center for Catholic Thought and Culture at USD, with the close cooperation of LeGerrette.

This exhibition presented the University’s growing collection of images of social justice documentary and street photography practices. Over 20 works spanning historical concerns from the Great Depression and Civil Rights eras to the present day were displayed, along with a select group of works by then current USD students.

This exhibition brought together almost 50 vintage photographs that told the story of the marches for civil rights in Selma, Alabama. Bruce Davidson traveled to Alabama as a young photojournalist to document the circumstances surrounding discriminatory voting rights practiced against African Americans. Davidson's powerful images, along with several other photographers' works, record the efforts of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and thousands of others as they led a non-violent protest from Selma to Montgomery in March of 1965.

Rwanda, 1994-2014 brought together more than two dozen works by leading photographers who were in Rwanda at the time of the genocide or who visited the nation since. Powerful images in black and white by Fazal Sheikh and Robert Lyons suggested insights into a broad spectrum of concerns from the 1990s: from representations of human cruelty, to images attesting to individuals’ determination to survive amidst scarcity. Work by photographers who came to Rwanda in the two decades since 1994 formed another critical aspect of this project by providing a nuanced view of changes still taking place there.