Art Dean Lecture Series 2016

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle will weave together stories of their love/art adventures as they discuss their environmental art and activism. Beth is a punk dyke sculptor turned art professor, and Annie is a sex worker turned performance artist. They fell heels-over-head in love and have collaborated non-stop ever since. In 2008 they invited the Earth to be their lover and launched the ecosex movement. This movement continues to engage a diverse and interdisciplinary group of outsider activists, theorists, artists, and sex workers as it creates spaces for imagining other kinds of futures in the midst of global climate change.

Not An Alternative is an arts collective with a mission to affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history. Through engaged critical research and design, the group curates and produces interventions on material and immaterial space, bringing together tools from art, architecture, exhibition design, and political organizing. All these efforts are enacted through the occupation and redeployment of popular vernacular, semiotics, and memes. Not An Alternative’s most recent, ongoing project is The Natural History Museum, a mobile and pop-up museum that highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature, yet are excluded from traditional natural history museums. Yates McKee is an art critic based in New York. His writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, South Atlantic Quarterly, and The Nation. He is co-editor of the anthology Sensible Politics: The Visual Cultures of Nongovernmental Activism, and the author of Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition.

William (Will) Wilson is a Diné photographer who spent his formative years living in the Navajo Nation. Born in San Francisco in 1969, Wilson studied photography at the University of New Mexico (Dissertation Tracked MFA in Photography, 2002) and Oberlin College (BA, Studio Art and Art History, 1993). In 2007, Wilson won the Native American Fine Art Fellowship from the Eiteljorg Museum, and in 2010 was awarded a prestigious grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Wilson has held visiting professorships at the Institute of American Indian Arts (1999-2000), Oberlin College (2000-01), and the University of Arizona (2006-08). From 2009 to 2011, Wilson managed the National Vision Project, a Ford Foundation funded initiative at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, and helped to coordinate the New Mexico Arts Temporary Installations Made for the Environment (TIME) program on the Navajo Nation. Wilson is part of the Science and Arts Research Collaborative (SARC) which brings together artists interested in using science and technology in their practice with collaborators from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia Labs as part of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts, 2012 (ISEA). Currently, Wilson’s work can be seen at the Portland Art Museum in: Contemporary Native American Photographers and the Edward S. Curtis Legacy, Zig Jackson, Wendy Red Star and Will Wilson. He is the Photography Program Head at the Santa Fe Community College.

Ricardo Dominguez is a co-founder of The Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT), a group who developed virtual sit-in technologies in solidarity with the Zapatistas communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1998. His recent Electronic Disturbance Theater 2.0/b.a.n.g. lab project with Brett Stalbaum, Micha Cardenas, Amy Sara Carroll, and Elle Mehrmand, the Transborder Immigrant Tool (a GPS cell phone safety net tool for crossing the Mexico / United States border) was the winner of “Transnational Communities Award” (2008), an award funded by Cultural Contact, Endowment for Culture Mexico–US and handed out by the United States Embassy in Mexico. It also was funded by CALIT2 and the UC San Diego Center for the Humanities. The Transborder Immigrant Tool has been exhibited at the 2010 California Biennial (OCMA), Toronto Free Gallery, Canada (2011), The Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands (2013), ZKM, Germany (2013), as well as a number of other national and international venues. The project was also under investigation by the United States Congress in 2009-2010 and was reviewed by Glenn Beck in 2010 as a gesture that potentially “dissolved” the United States border with its poetry. Dominguez is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Visual Arts Department, a Hellman Fellow, and Principal/Principle Investigator at CALIT2 and the Performative Nano-Robotics Lab at SME, UCSD. He also is co-founder of *particle group*, with artists Diane Ludin, Nina Waisman, Amy Sara Carroll, whose art project about nano-toxicology entitled *Particles of Interest: Tales of the Matter Market* has been presented at the House of World Cultures, Berlin (2007), the San Diego Museum of Art (2008), Oi Futuro, Brazil (2008), CAL NanoSystems Institute, UCLA (2009), Medialab-Prado, Madrid (2009), E-Poetry Festival, Barcelona, Spain (2009), Nanosférica, NYU (2010), and SOMA, Mexico City, Mexico (2012), Cornell University (2104).

Gopal has been involved in fighting for social, economic, environmental and racial justice through organizing and campaigning, teaching, writing, speaking and direct action since the late 1980s. He currently serves on the Staff Collective of Movement Generation (MG): Justice and Ecology Project, which inspires and engages in transformative action towards the liberation and restoration of land, labor, and culture. MG is rooted in vibrant social movements led by low-income communities and communities of color committed to a Just Transition away from profit and pollution and towards healthy, resilient, and life-affirming local economies. Gopal serves on the boards of The Center for Story-Based Strategy, The Working World, and The ETCgroup, and is on the advisory board of the Catalyst Project. Gopal works at the intersection of ecology, economy, and empire.

Claire Pentecost’s work engages collaboration, research, teaching, writing, lecturing, drawing, installation and photography in an ongoing interrogation of the institutional structures that organize knowledge. Her projects often address the contested boundary between the natural and the artificial, focusing in recent years on food, agriculture and bio-engineering. She has collaborated with Critical Art Ensemble and the late Beatriz daCosta, and since 2006 she has worked with Brian Holmes, 16Beaver and many others organizing a series of seminars to articulate the interlocking scales of our existence in the logic of globalization. In the Midwest, she collaborates with Compass, initiating a series of public hearings on the activities of the Monsanto Corporation. Recently Pentecost has exhibited at dOCUMENTA(13), Whitechapel Gallery, and the 13th Istanbul Biennial. She is represented by Higher Pictures, New York, and is Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Amy Balkin is an American artist whose projects propose a reconstituted commons, considering legal borders and systems, environmental justice, and equitable sharing of common-pool resources in the context of climate change. These include clean-air park “Public Smog”, “A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting” (Amy Balkin, et al.), and “This is the Public Domain”, an ongoing effort to create a permanent international commons. She was a collaborator on Invisible-5, an environmental justice audio tour of California’s Interstate-5 freeway corridor. Her work and project documentation have been included in DUMP! at Kunstal Aarhus, Anthropocene Monument at les Abattoirs, Public Works at Mills College Art Museum, dOCUMENTA (13), Globale: Infosphere at ZKM, and in Sublime at the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

Emily Eliza Scott is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, and former park ranger who is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the architecture department at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich). Her work focuses on contemporary art and design practices that engage pressing ecological and/or geopolitical issues, often with the intent to actively transform real-world conditions. She has published in The Avery Review, Art Journal, American Art, Third Text, and Cultural Geographies as well as multiple edited volumes and online journals; and her first book, Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, coedited with Kirsten Swenson, was published by UC Press last year. She is a founding member of two long-term, collaborative projects: World of Matter (2011-), an international art and research platform on global resource ecologies, and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers (2004-), a group that develops guided hikes, campfire talks, field kits, and other interpretive tools to spark creative explorations of everyday habitats in their home megalopolis and beyond.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of English at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. He is the author of Extinction: A Radical History (O/R Press, 2016), The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (2013), and Mongrel Nation: Diasporic Culture and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Michigan, 2007). He is also co-editor of four essay collections: Against Apartheid: The Case for Boycotting Israeli Universities (Haymarket, 2015), Democracy, the State, and the Struggle for Global Justice (Routledge, 2009), Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (Michigan, 2009), and Exceptional State: Contemporary U.S. Culture and the New Imperialism (Duke, 2007). A former editor of Social Text Online and of the American Association of University Professors' Journal of Academic Freedom, he is currently completing work on a book entitled Extreme City: Climate Change and the Urban Future for Verso.

William Talen is an activist, author and stage performer. As Reverend Billy, he pursues these parallel careers with the 35-voice Stop Shopping Choir under the direction of Savitri D. Talen and company lead a movement of nonviolent dramatic action, belting out their freedom-fighting lyrics on tour with Neil Young in 2015, in JP Morgan Chase bank lobbies, Wal-marts and at Monsanto’s corporate properties. Reverend Billy has been arrested more than 50 times advocating for Earth Rights and Human Rights. Talen's new book and the group's new album, both titled The Earth Wants YOU!, will released in April, 2016.

David Solnit uses arts with communities and movements to win positive social change. Over the last 25 years, he has used culture, art, creative actions and theater in mass actions, popular education, and celebrations. He has worked with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers–Florida tomato pickers, who won dramatic changes for workers, and recently co-coordinated large-scale arts and visuals for the Climate Justice mobilizations in Paris, and the Peoples Climate March in NYC. Solnit is a nonviolent direct action organizer, co-organizing the shutdown of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, the shutdown of Financial District of San Francisco the day after the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and the Flood Wall Street in conjunction with the People’s Climate March. He is the editor/co-author of Globalize Liberation: How to Uproot the System and Build a Better World, Army of None, and The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle.