Undergraduate Awards

Art + Science Undergraduate Awardee: Freddie Torres

Faculty Advisor: Jorge Menna Barreto

My project, Re-natureing the art department, will create an ecological and conceptual garden for the art department using California Native plants and metal block sculptures. It will be situated in between L101 and M101 studios underneath the existing California Buckeye tree. I will weld three metal blocks of varying sizes out of sheets of metal that will be the centerpieces of the garden installation. I will place a durable mirror finish stainless steel inside of them that will reflect the branches of the tree and the faces of whoever looks in it. There will be two pea gravel paths that lead to the centerpiece of the basin from opposite sides of the garden, engrained with concrete slab stepping stones. The people who interact with the piece will be encouraged to interact face-to-face when they both reach the middle, something that is often ignored in regular gallery interactions. The rest of the open space will be filled with native plants strategically placed by size. Once established, native plants are hearty and drought tolerant so they will not need much care, which will allow the garden to maintain itself with minimal care, and it will bring the California natural environment into the art department. This project is a part of my desire to bridge the gap between horticultural knowledge and art. I hope to contribute to a future that values artistic and plant knowledge as mutually beneficial practices for mankind.

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.