San Diego Union Tribune
By George Varga
June 23, 2025
UC San Diego’s new ArtPower season features Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winners
The lineup includes Rhiannon Giddens, The Klezmatics, Punch Brothers, Julian Lage, the Escher String Quartet and Susie Ibarra & Steven Schick
UC San Diego’s ArtPower has grown steadily since it debuted in 2004 seeking to engage diverse audiences with multidisciplinary performances by artists who explore both familiar and unfamiliar creative vistas. This plucky nonprofit’s upcoming 2026-27 season underscores that quest with the tagline: “Follow curiosity. Find connection.”
“Follow curiosity, Find connection is really an invitation to the audience,” said Colleen Kollar Smith. She is the executive director of UCSD’s Campus Performance and Events Office, under whose auspices ArtPower operates.
“If an artist or performance intrigues someone, if a sound or idea draws them in, we want them to follow where it leads,” Smith elaborated.
“That curiosity opens the door to experiencing something new, or to experiencing something familiar in a way they never have. And when they do that in a room full of other people doing the same, curiosity turns into connection. Connection to the art, to the artist, to the community sitting right there with them.”
The suitably eclectic lineup features 2025 Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and percussionist Susie Ibarra and at least four Grammy Award-winning mavericks.
They include: banjo-championing multi-instrumentalist and singer Rhiannon Giddens and her band; the socially conscious Latin music group La Santa Cecilia; veteran klezmer-music torchbearers The Klezmatics; and the bluegrass-and-way-beyond Punch Brothers, led by mandolin master and San Diego native Chris Thile.
Giddens shared the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for music with composer Michael Abels for their opera, “Omar.” Her performance here will follow the Sept. 18 release of her compelling new album, “Hope Is The Thing With Feathers,”
The season will also offer two distinctly different tributes to the late Irish singer-songwriter and cultural provocateur Sinéad O’Connor.
On Nov. 7, choreographer Sonya Tayeh will lead the California premiere of “The Surge: An Ode to Sinead O’Connor” with a 10-woman dance troupe whose members’ collective age exceeds 500. The work, which is set to OConnor’s music, was co-commissioned by ArtPower.
On April 22, self-described “anti-disciplinary artist” Dorian Wood will perform O’Connor’s 1990 album, “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” in its entirety in a stripped-down piano and voice format.
“There are so many amazing artists out there that fitting them all into one season is impossible,” said ArtPower Director of Artistic Programing Liz Bradshaw. “But that’s a good problem to have!”
The new season opens with a Sept. 24 concert by acclaimed Malian guitarist and singer Vieux Farka Touré at the La Jolla campus’ Epstein Family Amphitheater. It will conclude with a May 21 performance by the Brooklyn-based contemporary chamber-music ensemble Sandbox Percussion at the Department of Music’s Conrad Prebys Music Center.
Touré and Sandbox’s concerts will bookend several dozen performances by such disparate artists as the Escher String Quartet, Emmy Award-winning TV cook and author Ina Rosenberg Garten, fast-rising young jazz vibraphonist Sasha Berliner, and the Montreal ice-skating dance troupe Le Patin Libre.
ArtPower mainstay Albert Agbayani expertly oversees all of the season’s jazz bookings. He also plays a key role in student outreach.
At least 16 of ArtPower’s uopcoming performers will be making their UCSD debuts. So will a number of the artists performing in ArtPower’s third annual summer series at the Epstein. It opens with a July 10 concert by Maruja Limón, a six-woman flamenco-pop band from Barcelona, and concludes with an Aug. 9 dance and music performance by the Siudy Garrido Flamenco Company and an Aug. 12 concert by Helado Negro & Reyna Tropical.
‘Friendly landscape’
ArtPower strives to present programing that appeals to students and members of the general public alike. It presents events at multiple venues on the UCSD campus, including the $70 million Epstein Family Amphitheater, which opened in 2022 and has a capacity of 2,650.
Despite the proximity of La Jolla Music Society, the La Jolla Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, performing arts centers in Poway and Escondido, and such nearby music venues as the Belly Up and The Sound, ArtPower has been able to carve out a distinctive niche for itself.
“I think the size and the fact the Epstein is an outdoor, all-ages venue makes us unique,” said Smith.
“It’s important for us to present the right artists in the right venues,” Smith stressed. “And it’s important for us to be good partners with other arts presenters. The competition is here, but it’s a pretty friendly landscape and we look at what we can do that’s different.”
The budget for the new ArtPower season, which is funded in part by donors, is approximately $2 million. That’s slightly less than the $2.3 million budget for the recently concluded 2025-26 season, which followed a record-breaking 2024-25 season.
“Attendance held strong at just under 45,000 and we exceeded our revenue target by about 5 percent,” Smith said. “We’re doing our best to tighten our belts and do as much as can with less. So, we are strategically reducing out expenses.”
This will be the fourth consecutive year ArtPower offers UCSD students free tickets for every performance it presents. Funding comes from multiple donors, including philanthropist and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, who — with his late wife, Joan — is a former trustee of the UC San Diego Foundation. The couple has given more than $460 million to UCSD over the past five decades.
‘A balancing act’
Over the past year, nearly 10,000 students took advantage of ArtPower’s free-ticketing initiative. It was launched to give students the opportunity to experience a broad array of prominent and lesser-known artists, who students may not otherwise have access to see and hear. The bottom line for doing so is a matter of aesthetics as well as economics.
“It’s a balancing act,” Smith said.
“We find ways to balance new and emerging artists with artists who — I don’t want to say will be guaranteed sellouts — but who fit well with the mission of ArtPower and will help us hit our sales goals. The challenge is having accessible ticket prices, with a middle ground of $40.
“We are constantly crunching numbers to see how we can get to that. We really think about how we can keep the prices accessible while still being able to maintain the bottom line. It comes down to seeing how we can use high-generating performers to bring in other artists who aren’t as big a draw.”
The public performances are the most visible facet of ArtPower for UCSD campus visitors. But students are given additional opportunities to interact with — and learn from — the artists.
As often as possible, ArtPower arranges for performers to spend extra time on campus, be it an afternoon or several days.
“There are so many ways we engage with students,” said Bradshaw.
“We work with the UCSD dance, music and literature departments. Many times, dance students have a chance to see their work performed or attend master classes — especially when we have tie-ins on campus.”
Those sentiments are shared by ArtPower Associate Director of Marketing and Communications Joanna Christian. She helps to curate programing and build outreach to students.
“In the 11 years since I started here in 2015, student engagement has increased 300 percent,” said Christian, who is herself a UCSD alum.
“We have a number of students on our marketing team. And we talk to students a lot throughout the year as we chat about future seasons. Students are more likely to take risks and check out new artists because the events are free to them. We’ve seen, for example, an increase in the number of students attending our global music and chamber-music concerts.”
Beyond free tickets, what draws students to chamber music, a genre with a markedly low profile on streaming platforms and social media?
“The programing is important,” Bradshaw said. “When we have new composers and performers, I think students really can see themselves (reflected). A lot of our chamber-music artists are younger and spend time with students in master classes, so students can learn more about them. Giving students access to performers, in formal and informal settings, is very important.”
Team work
UCSD works closely with arts presenting organizations at other campuses within the UC system. Doing so is an effective way to coordinate programing and get more bang for their respective season budgets by lowering costs to bring in artists from across the nation or abroad.
“We rely heavily on our partners in routing performances, not just at other UC schools but on at arts centers up and down the coast,” Smith said.
“Especially when we’re looking at bringing in international acts or large dance ensembles, it behooves us to work together. so a number of conversations take place. It’s a wonderful network.”
ArtPower also partners with a number of student organizations for events held at the Epstein, The Loft and other venues on campus.
“Our goal is always to strike a balance between different types of events that draw different types of audiences,” Smith said.
“Some artists,” Bradshaw added, “who embody what ArtPower does, draw multigenerational audiences. We want to give students and the greater San Diego community the best programing we can.”