Undergraduate Awards

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Lily Nash

Faculty Advisor: Karolina Karlic 

This Natural History and climate grief-focused quilting bee is a community practice arts project, to bring students and community members across disciplines on campus together through quilting. 

“The Norris Center Art + Science Undergraduate award has allowed me to facilitate a climate grief focused quilting bee, bringing students and community members across disciplines together through quilting. With help from the Ken Norris center and my faculty sponsor, Karolina Karlic, we were able to create a safe space for budding researchers. It is vital that students and researchers today learn to grieve in conjunction with their studies. This project aims to provide community support as we envision our evolution and the future of our natural environments together.” – Lily Nash 

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Maria Hele

Faculty Advisor:

Watercolors in Solidarity is a multi-layered project that combines archival research, embodied observation, and art to explore collaborations between humans, plants, and history that are solidaristic rather than extractive. With this project, I engage closely with a selection of native plants of the Santa Cruz area through a practice of being in-place with these plants. By “being in-place,” I am describing a methodology that disrupts a dominant/subordinate dichotomy of observer/subject that merely reproduces visual representations in order to open up space for a more complex relationship with the plants as co-artists.

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Linnea Gullikson

Advisors: Rick Flores and Chairman Valentin Lopez

This collaboration builds on an existing ethnobotany project through the Amah Mutsun Land Trust (AMLT). Ethnobotany is the study of the traditional knowledge of people and the medicinal and cultural uses of plants. Together with the AMLT and the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, have created an ethnobotanical guide booklet sharing Amah Mutsun indigenous uses and knowledge of a selection of local native plants.

Ethnobotany of the Amah Mutsun
By Linnea Gullikson(Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), Chairman Lopez (Chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band) and Rick Flores (Director of Horticulture and Steward of the Amah Mutsun Relearning Program (AMRP) at the UC Berkeley Botanical Gardens).

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Sarah Gutierrez

Advisor: Ana Valenzuela Toro (PhD Candidate, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology)

Trapped in Time: The Unfading Life History of an Elephant Seal. Taphonomy is a discipline that addresses the processes that occur between the death of organisms and their eventual fossilization, providing critical information for interpreting the fossil record. Among marine mammals, pinnipeds (seals, fur seals, sea lions) have an amphibious lifestyle, meaning that they depend on water for foraging and land for breeding and nursing. Due to this dual lifestyle, these animals are exposed to unique taphonomic processes, depending on where they die – at sea or on land – that will influence how their remains preserve and eventually fossilize.

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Ty Brown

Advisor: Chris Lay, and CAMINO program

Ty created a calendar that highlights eleven local pollinator and plant relationships (and a twelfth biological process), all of which you may likely observe during the month they are illustrated. I worked digitally to render the images and narrated each relationship pairing. The species pairings were chosen using data from the Randall Morgan Insect Collection, an extensive local pollinator collection created from 1989-1999. But it may already be out of date as climate change reconfigures ecosystems worldwide. Ty created this calendar for people like themselves who are new to entomology, or even lifelong fans, everyone can enjoy and learn all year long.