HUGH M. DAVIES, Ph.D.
The David C. Copley Director – Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Hugh Davies has served since 1983 as director of the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, museum with dual facilities in La Jolla and downtown San Diego, and an international reputation for its exhibitions, programs, and permanent collection. In 1998, his directorship was endowed by David C. Copley. In addition to his leadership of the administrative and artistic activities of MCASD, Davies has served as curator or co-curator for numerous exhibitions including Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953 (1999), William Kentridge: Weighing and Wanting (1998), John Altoon (1997), Blurring the Boundaries: 25 Years of Installation Art (1996-97), and John Baldessari (1996). In 2004, he received the California Arts Council Director's Award, recognizing his more than twenty years of service to the arts in California. He was one of six co-curators who organized the Biennial 2000 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Davies has worked on numerous books and exhibition catalogues over the years and is recognized internationally as a scholar in the field of contemporary and modern art.  Since 1984, he has been a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors (representing over 170 of the largest art museums in North America), a Trustee from 1994-2001, and served as President from 1998-1999.

Davies received his A.B., Summa Cum Laude, (1970), M.F.A. (1972), and Ph.D. (1976) from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. His dissertation on British painter Francis Bacon was later expanded and published by Garland Press; he also co-authored another volume on Bacon, published by Abbeville Press in 1986, and more recently authored Francis Bacon: The Papal Portraits of 1953.  Since the early 1970s, Dr. Davies' interests have focused on contemporary art. In 1976, he was Guest Director of the U.S. Pavilion at the 37th Venice Biennale in Italy. From 1975 to 1983, he was Founding Director of the University Gallery at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego »

MARY BEEBE
The Stuart Art Collection Director

Since the inception of the Stuart Collection in l981, Mary Livingstone Beebe has been its director. The collection is an ongoing program commissioning outdoor sculpture for UCSD.

Locally, it has received two awards from the San Diego Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. It was featured on CBS's Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt in August '93 and received a National Honors Award from the American Institute of Architects in May 1994 prior to moving to San Diego, Beebe was Director for nine years of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts in Portland, Ore. where she oversaw an important program of exhibitions, installations, performance art, music, dance and other major forms of artistic expressions in the '70s.

Beebe serves on numerous boards and committees, including the Board of Directors of Art Matters, Inc., New York, the Art Advisory Board for the University of California, San Francisco's new Mission Bay campus and the Public Art Committee for the San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture.

Stuart Collection »

ANYA GALLACCIO
Artist & Professor of Visual Arts, UC San Diego

Anya Gallaccio emerged in the late '80s as part of the group of young British artists from Goldsmiths College in London. Since her first appearance in the historic 1988 Freeze exhibition, she has become established internationally, having exhibited at the Sculpture Centre, New York and Palazzo Delle Papesse, Sienna, and completed major commissions, including 'Motherlode' where she collaborated with vintner Zelma Long to make six zinfandel wines in Sonoma Valley. She has exhibited widely in the UK including Camden Art Centre, ICA, and Serpentine in London; the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and Bluecoat, Liverpool. Gallaccio was nominated for the Turner Prize and received the prestigious Sculpture Commission for the Duveen Gallery at Tate Britain in 2003. In 2009 she prepared a major new work for 'Radical Nature' at the Barbican, London. Gallaccio’s works are held in a variety of public collections including Tate; the Arts Council; The British Council Collection; South London Gallery; Victoria and Albert Museum; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Seattle Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Gallaccio is known for her early projects employing natural materials, including a room painted with chocolate (1994), an enormous ice block which melted over the duration of the exhibition in the Wapping Pumping Station (1996) to her intricate lawn design at Compton Verney, (2000). Gallaccio’s work paradoxically shifts between minimal approaches to form and a highly intuitive process. Often using the strategies of minimalism, the grid and modular units, and overturning them through the perishable organic materials she sources, such as fruit, trees, flowers, ice and sugar. The elemental quality of these materials results in natural processes of transformation and decay, often with unpredictable results which are dialogue with land artists 60's including Robert Smithson and Walter de Maria and their interest in entropy.

Lehmann Maupin Gallery – Anya Gallaccio »

ERNEST SILVA
Artist & Professor of Visual Arts, UC San Diego

Ernest Silva joined the faculty of the Visual Arts Department in 1979. Silva studied at the University of Rhode Island where he received a BFA and obtained an MFA from Tyler School of Art of Temple University in 1974. Silva has been exhibiting his paintings and sculptures since 1972. His work is concerned with the use of vernacular references to construct a visual language. He has been included in over 45 one-person exhibitions that include New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego and Europe, as well as numerous group shows. Reviews of his work have appeared in Arts Magazine, Art News, the Los Angeles Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, Artweek, The Publication, the Providence Journal, Images and Issues, La Stampa, Il Centro and Art in America. He received a NEA Fellowship in Painting in 1989 90 and an Excellence in the Arts Award from the University of Rhode Island in 2001. Silva's work appeared in Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Along with his work as an artist, Silva was co-creator and co-curator of a bi-national project called InSite 92. He has been a member of the curatorial committee for Design World, a project for the San Diego Children's Museum of San Diego, CA (1999).  He was also part of the planning team funded by the National Endowment for the Arts to foster "artistically excellent, high-visibility projects that encourage innovative thinking about the future of the arts," called the New Millennium Grant Award. Selected One-Person Exhibitions range from Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA to Art in Embassies Program, United States Embassy, Switzerland to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Visual Arts Faculty Lectures: Ernest Silva »