Exploring a way of seeing expansive meaning in the juxtaposition of important buildings and sculptures, by centering on Alexis Smith’s "Snake Path" sculpture at UC San Diego and her reputation as an "assemblage" or "collage" artist, this article puts the iconic university library designed by William Pereira in relation with other buildings and sculptures to show that a type of religious geoglyph is inscribed into a coastal ridge in Southern California.

Urban Humanities is emerging as a set of academic programs, scholarly approaches, and research agendas. Employing the conceptual tool “immanent speculation” this essay sets forth a proposal for practicing an inherently unknowable future in order to create the conditions for that future to unfold. In contrast to theory-laden speculative philosophy, or to the incrementalism of design in the built environment, or even to the extreme opposite of ungrounded utopianism, immanent speculation rigorously extracts latent alternative realities embedded in a place through the method of making. It does so with the consequence that these other worlds—whether fully realized or not—expand our notion of what could be, and aims to decolonize the future from the forward march of time, from the imperfect conditions of the present, freeing it to become something just beyond what we imagine as possible while pulling from sites and places where we live, requiring ongoing work at all levels of society.

Founded in 1919, UCLA is nearing its first centenary, but the university builds on humanistic and liberal arts traditions that are many centuries long and globally diffused. The core disciplines that we recognize today as comprising the Humanities have deep roots in these institutional, cultural, and technological histories. But yet, for all its grand ambitions for reckoning with the world, the university has remained by and large an isolated institution, walled in and often walled off from its surrounding community, accessible to a chosen few, stratified by economic, social, and racial differences, and perhaps too invested in the security of its storied past. The Urban Humanities initiative is an attempt both to apply conventional tools in unconventional ways and to invent new tools by respecting the fundamental virtue of bricks, namely their porous nature. Is it possible to decolonize knowledge? If so, the studio courses it develops will have profound implications for the role of the classroom, syllabus, and for rethinking and developing new knowledge and practices.

A personal essay about visiting and living in the California desert, the architecture and art created there, and what does and doesn’t “belong” there. There are considerations of homesteader cabins, motels, “villains’ houses” and the author’s own ambivalent urges to own a piece of the desert, with references to Ed Ruscha, Rayner Banham and Noah Purifoy.

A roundup of interesting things to do, see, and read around California in the summer of 2015.

This essay is an exploration of cognitive principles of the liminal in photography as seen through the work of Dutch photographer Marie-José Jongerius and her images of California and the American West.

The author returns to Bakersfield, California to clear out her childhood home and confronts the unsustainable reality of life in today’s San Joaquin Valley. Presented as a series of narratives related by friends and neighbors during trips to Bakersfield’s immense landfill site, Maretich paints a picture of a community struggling under the effects of high crime, increasing poverty, and diminishing expectations in the wake of the Great Recession, which for Bakersfield is far from over. Exploring themes of sustainability, environmental policy, and personal responsibility, Maretich shines a light on one of California’s most important and least understood regions.

This essay is a review of two recent books of criticism: Bill Mohr's account of the Los Angeles poetry scene and Ignacio Lopez-Calvo's account of recent film and fiction set in Latino L.A. The essay argues for a conception of L.A. rooted in understanding the political and economic history of the city, and concludes with some speculation on the future of cultural production in the southern California region.

In this lyric essay the author journeys to the Mojave desert village of Joshua Tree, California, site of an ambitious and idiosyncratic work of assemblage by artist Noah Purifoy, whose career was forged in the crucible of civil rights and the Watts Riots of 1965. Although the work is highly abstract, references to segregation appear in various guises—although simple binaries are constantly disrupted by the sheer complexity of imagery conjured by the profusion of "assembled" objects. The setting for the work—the desert—is itself an integral component of the Purifoy's vision, offering mythic depth and the starkest of landscapes upon which to peer deep into the American psyche.

The main features of the Grateful Dead’s long-term project were formed, in utero as it were, by 1958. This was Jerry Garcia’s annus mirabilis , the twelve short months between his fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays. During this blessed interval, he received his first guitar, smoked his first joint, took courses at the California School of Fine Arts, and read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road . By themselves, none of these events counts for much. Many baby boomers had similar experiences, and most haven’t been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But when we set these experiences against the larger cultural forces that were sweeping through San Francisco at the time, and when we consider their profound effect on Jerome John Garcia, they help us understand not only the Dead’s interest in ecstasy, mobility, and community, but also the source of the band’s sustained appeal.

This article tells the story of artist Todd Gilens' "Endangered Species" project, where four municipal buses in San Francisco were each wrapped with a photograph of a different animal in danger of extinction: a Mission Blue Butterfly; a Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse; a Brown Pelican; and a Pacific Coho Salmon. Besides alerting passersby to environmental degradation, this art project, which ran throughout 2011, reverses the customary tactics of outdoor advertising. Outdoor ads promote products and block our sense of place. By contrast, wrapping images of California's troubled animal habitats on moving buses promotes a complex environmental and historical message: the urban development all around us sits atop what had been the original skin of the earth. In telling the story of the animal-wrapped buses within the greater history of outdoor advertising and mass transit, I connect the fates of endangered natural ecosystems with their cultural counterparts such as the city's bus system.