Opening Reception | 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition | Athenaeum Art Center

May 16–July 3, 2026

CATHERINE AND ROBERT PALMER GALLERY

21st ANNUAL SDSU ART COUNCIL SCHOLARSHIP EXHIBITION

The Athenaeum Art Center is excited to present the 21st Annual SDSU Art Council Scholarship Exhibition, featuring new work by five exceptional graduate and upper-division undergraduate students from the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University. Since 2002, the SDSU Art Council has recognized outstanding emerging artists with scholarships and the opportunity to exhibit their work at the Athenaeum, one of San Diego’s most cherished cultural institutions.

This year’s five recipients gather under a quietly urgent shared theme: the body as a site of history, resistance, and reinvention. Whether mapping chronic pain onto the indifferent American medical system, excavating the layered textures of immigrant memory, or refusing the limits imposed by colonial and binary thinking, these artists use their diverse practices to insist on visibility—for their communities, their experiences, and themselves.

Andrea Mendoza is a Mexican American painter and metalsmith whose oil paintings draw on the vibrant color traditions of Mexican art and her indigenous heritage. Working through a feminist lens, she reclaims narrative space for overlooked communities, presenting cultural identity with power and pride, and extending the canvas itself into wearable jewelry through metalsmithing. Tina Mardan, an Iranian American interdisciplinary artist, works across photography, painting, drawing, and installation to explore how memory, displacement, and the domestic environment shape a person’s sense of belonging. Her layered compositions find the political embedded in the everyday. Todd Bradley is a San Diego–based mixed-media artist whose C7 Series confronts chronic pain, neurodivergence, and American cultural mythology head-on, using collaged medical imagery, book pages, X-rays, and embroidery thread to transform vulnerability into visual power. Ana Saad works in clay and fiber to investigate queerness, gender performance, and communal existence, distorting the natural world into something liminal and uncanny where trees and manufactured spikes carry the weight of growth, defense, and becoming. Isa Ybarra, a mixed-media painter and printmaker, channels Chicanx muralism, skate culture, and DIY activism into works that critique the racial, bodily, and gendered borders born of colonization, creating visibility for the queer Latinx community while challenging the systems that constrain it.

Together, these five artists make the case that art is not merely aesthetic; it is an act of presence and of claiming space.

The exhibition can be viewed in the Catherine and Robert Palmer Gallery at the Athenaeum Art Center (1955 Julian Avenue, San Diego, CA 92113) during open gallery hours, Tuesdays through Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and every second Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m., during the Barrio Art Crawl, and by appointment.