Touch Me Not: 12th Annual Undergraduate Juried Exhibition

About

Presented by the Department of Art & Art History, the 12th Annual Undergraduate Juried Exhibition, Touch Me Not, showcases a campus-wide selection of artwork by twenty-two Stanford undergraduate students.

Touch Me Not: 12th Annual Undergraduate Juried Exhibition On View: October 7 – December 4, 2026 Stanford Art Gallery, 419 Lasuen Mall Gallery Hours: Monday–Friday, 1–5pm Opening Reception: Thursday, Oct. 8, 4–6pm Curated by Gabriel Harrison

Artists: Alison Cao, Amelia Chiu, Bryan Defjan, Patrick Flanagan, Paul Gontard, Alexander Gu, Kaili Hastiin-Nez, Kea Kahoilua-Clebsch, Taz Laursen, Alexi Lindeman, Gregory Medina-Kenyon, Clara Mooney, Bridget Phillips, Zoë Rehnborg, Aileen Rubio, Kyra Standing Crow, Wadei Tadros, Linh Vo, Jude Wolf, Melody Wu, Seiji Yang, and Stephanie Zhang

This exhibition brings together the work of undergraduate artists selected through a process grounded not in a shared subject or predetermined theme, but in the quality, vitality, and distinctiveness of their individual practices. The works arrive from different perspectives and through different forms of making, each reflecting the questions, observations, and ways of seeing of its maker. When considered together, unexpected affinities begin to emerge.

Across the exhibition, many of the artists engage with nature and natural processes, sometimes directly through figurative imagery and at other times through more oblique references to growth, transformation, interdependence, cycles, materiality, and change. Nature becomes both subject and metaphor: a way of looking outward at the world while also looking inward.

These connections are not necessarily the result of a common intention. They become visible through proximity, suggesting a broadening engagement with the world beyond the self. This can be felt immediately upon entering the exhibition, where Taz Laursen’s installation of disembodied hands grasping disembodied feet beneath a wire-frame echo of a living tree creates what the artist describes as an “ironic chimera distorting the boundary between nature and the body.” A similar impulse animates Alexi Lindeman’s lithographic prints, which seek to “entangle relationships between and within humanity and the non-human,” inviting reflection on how one interacts with oneself, with others, and with the world.

Elsewhere, the relationship between the natural and the human-made becomes material. Zoe Rehnborg’s ghostly hanging lanterns, formed from dried SCOBY, a Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast, transform a living microbial culture into an evocative sculptural presence. Nearby, Heber Alvarez, Amelia Chiu, and Blake Charles Pigott re-visit Buckminster Fuller’s ubiquitous geodesic dome, unfolding, stretching and animating its once rigid geometry into a snake-like form. Using imperfect, locally sourced materials, their installation addresses “the material ecology of Northern California and the desire to minimize the carbon expended in the production of the installation.” Across these works, organic forms, biological processes, and material choices become ways of considering where the human body and human emotion sit within larger ecological systems.