In this column, I’d like to provide an update on the next phase of our work: the implementation of IVC Inspire 2035 Tactics. As previously shared, we have made significant progress in developing IVC Inspire 2035, including key milestones such as College Council's approval of our institutional values on March 4, 2026, and the adoption of our revised Vision and Mission on May 6, 2026.
IVC’s new Arts Promenade and Café opened on September 30, giving students, employees and visitors a welcoming place to gather, study, recharge and experience the arts. Spanning approximately three acres, the project brings together outdoor gathering spaces, sustainable landscaping and a café inspired by Irvine’s agricultural history.
On September 30, IVC officially dedicated its new Arts Promenade and Café, marking the completion of a transformative project designed to create more places for students and the community to gather, connect, recharge and experience the arts.
Nainoa Rosehill is a painter, photographer, and new media artist based in Hawaii. His work is oriented towards the mysterious and the hidden, the geographies of waste, and archeological ruin, uncovering the limits and potentials of the image in an epistemology of disaster. His work focuses on the nature of image-making, and how iconolatry, the worship of images, is inseparable from iconoclasm, the destruction of images, and their role in producing new relations and shaping images, landscapes, objects, and meanings.
Alina Kawai is a visual artist born in Hyōgo, Japan, and currently based in Los Angeles, California. She received her MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2021 and her BFA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 2016. Her work explores color and shape to examine connections between personal identity and broader cultural experience, creating spaces for contemplation. Kawai’s paintings are held in private collections, as well as the Hawaiʻi State Art Museum and the Ke Kilohana Building in Honolulu.
Anela Ming-Yue Oh (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based on the Big Island of Hawai’i. She holds a BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She uses materials that have a life of their own such as clay, paper, and fiber to feed her studio practice and create environments full of hope.
Dane Hiʻipoi Nakama (b. 1999, Honolulu, Hawai‘i) is a Japanese-Uchinanchu ceramicist, painter, and educator whose work bridges local aesthetics, folklore, and decolonial critique. Raised on O‘ahu and currently based on Tongva land, Nakama’s interdisciplinary practice is both highly referential and disarmingly tender—addressing settler colonialism, ancestral memory, and island identity through a visual lexicon that includes AstroTurf, li hing mui, jalousie windows, sand, seashells and clay geckos.