This exhibition showcases the work of Humanities Core students who submitted artworks for the Humanities Core Arts Competition. Students created original works of art that are centered on the UC Irvine Humanities Center’s 2023-24 theme: “Care and Repair.” Now in its eighth year, the Arts Competition encourages students to engage in creative, experiential learning; to extend their understanding from art as objectual to art as experiential. Understood in this way, the creative experience of art helps students connect to humanistic inquiry, their own humanity, and diverse communities. It occasions creative connections between students, their ideas, and the public.

The theme “Care and Repair” is a springboard for students to expand upon Humanities Core ideas, texts, visual images, artists, narratives, and experiences that have inspired their curiosity, creativity, and sense of connection. Care can be seen as a gesture of communion, belonging, health, and well-being, or serve as a signifier of value and importance. When one cares for something or someone, one cultivates its physical, conceptual, or spiritual growth. Care need not extend only to other beings, but to ideas, processes, histories, creative works, and even to the natural world. Repair is an extension of this process, a particular kind of taking care that reimagines the past as leading to more just, compassionate, or generative outcomes. It often involves processes of preservation, reconciliation, realignment, and sometimes regret.

Themes of care and repair pervade the works we are studying in Humanities Core. Characters such as Lauren Olamina in Parable of the Sower seek care through the formation of principled communities or are driven to repair their personal histories. Artists such as Sanford Biggers and Carrie Mae Weems use quilts and daguerreotypes to rework Black histories, acts of care with the potential to repair the holes in our cultural fabric that have resulted from the invisibilizing of Black experience. Even Humanities Core as a whole cultivates care in its focus on the theme of Worldbuilding, and through this care, builds a world of community, intellectual exchange, and compassion for others.