The 60th Annual UCLA Graduate Symposium will take place on November 14, 2025 at 9:30am at the UCLA Hammer Museum and features keynote speaker Dr. Sohl Lee. This year’s theme is entitled “Revolution” and will examine revolution as a mode of imagining new ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the field of art history. The 3:30 PM keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr. Sohl Lee, whose work explores the nexus of art, activism, and institutional critique in contemporary Korea and East Asia more broadly. This event is open to the public and all are welcome to attend. Visit event website for full details.
Every sixty years, a cycle closes and begins anew. In East Asian cosmology, the completion of a sexagenary cycle marks renewal and revolution—a cosmic reset that reorganizes time, structure, and possibility. This year, the UCLA Department of Art History will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its graduate symposium as an opportunity to reflect on origins and what it means to enter a new era. The symposium was born of and within revolution. The first of its kind, it emerged amidst the Watts riots’ calls against racial discrimination and police brutality alongside fierce opposition to the Vietnam War. These revolutionary parallels with the present moment, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and the crackdowns on the Palestine Solidarity Encampments, invite people to consider revolution as more than a historical event, as a theme. Revolution embodies both remembrance and progression: a critical lens through which to rethink history and art. After all, art and artists have always been at the heart of revolution—from ancient Egyptian artists’ protests against poor working conditions to young students around the world creating revolutionary posters in the sixties.
What new questions arise when approaching revolution as both subject and framework? How do visual ruptures, political resistance, and shifts in knowledge illuminate art’s role in broader movements of change? What past and ongoing revolutions continue to reshape the histories constructed through visual culture? How can art spur people to revolutionary action today? With keynote speaker Dr. Sohl Lee, whose work explores the nexus of art, activism, and institutional critique in contemporary Korea and East Asia more broadly, this symposium considers revolution as a mode of imagining new ways of seeing, knowing, and acting in the field of art history. The symposium calls for a push to reexamine revolution within the discipline itself: challenges to canonical timelines, methodological shifts, and the rethinking of interpretive frameworks. Revolution, far from being a thing of the past, must return as a possibility in the present.
This symposium is an inclusive platform for emerging scholars whose work reconsiders what is revolutionary in art through subject matter, form, theory, practice, or institutional critique.
Event Program (TBD)
This event is presented by the UCLA Department of Art History and co-sponsored by UCLA Asia Pacific Center.