The Aquarium will display art by painter Danielle Eubank resulting from her twenty-year quest to capture all the world’s oceans
The Aquarium of the Pacific will display an exhibit of paintings by artist Danielle Eubank from November 5, 2019, to January 5, 2020. Eubank is exploring the relationship between abstraction and realism. For her One Artist Five Oceans project, she has sailed and painted all of the oceans on the planet. Her process of documenting the world’s oceans has included expeditions aboard replica historic ships. In the exhibit at the Aquarium, Eubank’s paintings will be paired with messages about what people can do to help the environment. On November 5 at 7:00 p.m., Eubank will present a lecture as part of the Aquarium’s Guest Speaker Series. She will discuss the process of documenting the world’s oceans and her travels.
Eubank holds a master of fine arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and exhibits widely in the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. She is a former director of the Women’s Caucus for Art, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant awardee, a member of The Explorer’s Club, a 2018 Creative Climate Awards nominee, and the awardee of the 2018 WCA/United Nations Program Honor Roll. Her paintings are on exhibit at C Gallery Fine Art in Long Beach.
WHEN:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â November 5, 2019 – January 5, 2020, 9:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.
WHERE: Aquarium of the Pacific, 100 Aquarium Way, Long Beach, CA 90802
COST:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Free to Aquarium members and included with general admission for the public – General admission: $34.95 adult (12+), $31.95 senior (62+), and $24.95 child (3-11)
AQUARIUM:   The nonprofit Aquarium of the Pacific is a community gathering place where diverse cultures and the arts are celebrated and where important challenges facing our planet are explored by scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders in search of sustainable solutions. The Aquarium is dedicated to conserving and building nature and nature’s services by building the interactions between and among peoples. Home to more than 12,000 animals, Aquarium exhibits include the new Pacific Visions wing, Ocean Science Center, Molina Animal Care Center, and the Tentacles and Ink and FROGS: Dazzling & Disappearing exhibits. Beyond its animal exhibits, the Aquarium offers educational programs for people of all ages, from hands-on activities to lectures by leading scientists. Field trips for schoolchildren are offered at a heavily discounted rate, from $7 to $8.50 per student. The Aquarium offers memberships with unlimited FREE admission for 12 months, VIP Entrance, and other special benefits. Convenient parking is available for $8 with Aquarium validation.
Lead Editor’s note: We will be publishing excerpts from Q18: dis/sustain/ability, guest edited by Bronwyn Preece, in order to make the content accessible to blind readers with audio screen readers. We’ll also be including audio descriptions of the Quarterly’s original layout designed by Stephanie Plenner, described by Katie Murphy. Please stay tuned for future posts and share widely.
In this our fourth chapter, Dee Heddon and Sue Porterdiscuss the reframing of walking practices for wheelchair-bound participants, along with ideas of interdependency.
Audio Description of images in Walking Interconnections
CONNECTIONS
It is the summer of 2012 and Dee is walking across Belgium with The Walking Library, a library filled with books considered good to take for a walk and carried on foot. The Walking Library is an artwork created for Sideways festival, a month- long peripatetic festival aiming to renew attention to the ‘slow paths’ – the underused and thus endangered network of footpaths crossing the country – by walking some 334 km along them. 1
In a tent in a field somewhere in the Flanders region Dee’s phone accesses wifi and emails are downloaded. One of them is from Alison Parfitt, a collaborator with Dee in a 2010 research network which explored site-specific performances’ relationship with environmental change. Alison introduces Dee to her friend and colleague, Dr. Sue Porter, a researcher at the University of Bristol. Sue is in the process of putting together an interdisciplinary research grant application for a project which would explore disabled people’s everyday experiences of landscape and environment to surface everyday wisdoms and expertise. Sue’s interest in using walking as a research method had prompted Alison to connect then, given Dee’s enduring interest in walking art. 2 From the tent in the field in Belgium, battling the erratic internet connection, Dee sends Sue an email, signalling her enthusiasm.
WALKING
In 2014, the project Walking Interconnections: Researching the Lived Experience of Disabled People for a Sustainable Society was launched. Walking Interconnections, led by Sue Porter, was a year-long interdisciplinary study that responded to the demonstrable lack of connection between disability and environmental movements. More pointedly, it was motivated by the marginalization of disabled people within and by environmentalist discourse, which most often presumes, figures and reiterates a normative, undifferentiated and able-bodied subject, revealing what Sarah Jacquette Ray identifies as a “corporeal unconsciousâ€. The ‘environmental subject’ is one who is independent, self-sufficient, fit and healthy. 3 Walking Interconnections took walking as its primary methodology in part because it is immersive and fosters convivial exchanges, 4 but more importantly because placing walking at the centre challenged a corporeal unconscious which figured the ‘walking’ body as a body walking upright on two feet. As one of our co-researchers, Liz Crow – a wheelchair user – commented on the Walking Interconnections blog in June 2013, she bit her ‘tongue at the word walking (because I’m not, am I?)’. Notably, six months further into the project, Crow’s use of the word walking, though still hesitant, indicates an importantly expanded signification:
Speaking personally, so many years of medical history have been of doctors telling me I should walk – that is, functionally, place one foot in front of the other in order to move from one point to another. In almost 30 years of using a wheelchair, I’ve never yet seen a doctor who understood that that’s not what walking ever represented to me. It was moving through space, connecting with natural and social environments, relationships, meditation, relaxation, pleasure, mental health, tactility, and more. Those are the really important features of walking and it remains all of those things when I ‘walk’ with wheels. 5
Walking Interconnections emerged from an earlier scoping essay by Porter and her academic colleague David Abbott. 6 In this, the authors asked whether physically disabled peoples’ experiences might enable them to become valuable contributors to planning initiatives directed towards environmental hazard, rather than marginalized by the dominant perception of disabled people as singularly vulnerable. The authors didn’t deny that disabled people were vulnerable – that is, ‘disproportionately affected by the consequences of all kinds of natural and human made hazards’ 7 – but their contention was that such vulnerability is a product of neglect (for example, structural attitudes position disabled people as the least worth saving) and also by design (the needs – and skills – of disabled people are not fully acknowledged – for example, planning responses are often ablest in their assumptions, privileging normative notions of bodily abilities).
Seeking to problematize the perception of vulnerability, Abbott & Porter proposed an alternative hypothesis, one paying attention to disabled people’s ‘intricate, daily negotiations with risk, hazard and barriers’. 8 As they argue, ‘disabled people may have lived experiences which bestow expertise which could significantly contribute to discussions about and planning for environmental risk’. 9Walking Interconnections aimed to identify such expertise in order that it could be recognized and valued and could contribute to wider discussions around sustainability.
Over the course of a year, a research team worked with 19 co-researchers from Bristol who self-identified as either physically disabled or environmental activist – tellingly, only one co-researcher self-identified as both. Each co-researcher was asked to invite another co-researcher to accompany them on a walk of their choice. Walking pairs were often also accompanied by Personal Assistants and/or assistance dogs. A variety of walking aids were used, from a trike, to scooters and sticks. Each walking pair carried a digital voice recorder. More than 20 hours of audio material, mostly recorded on the move, was transcribed and edited and re-recorded into a 30-minute verbatim audio play-reading, ‘Going for a Walk’. This can be downloaded from the project’s website; here, I offer just a few extracts taken from across different scenes. 10
SCENE 2: PLANNING Jane: Have you got a walk in mind? Hayley: Yes, Baydock Woods. There’s quite a few little walks round there, but there is one on the level up round the top, which you can basically just go round in a circle. Neil: I was thinking about walking round my allotment site. Hayley: Are there places to sit? Neil: Good question. Not readily, no, there are not. Jane: Has it got a path? Neil: Yes, there’s a path. Jane: Tarmacked? Neil: Not tarmacked, ehm, a combination of sort of hard sort of gravel and grass. Hayley: And level? Neil: There’s a very slight incline, as you go up, but nothing. Hayley: Nothing major. Neil: Yeah, pretty much level. Sue: Well what you find with disabled people is that they have to plan very meticulously if they don’t want to get caught out. This is why I chose this walk today. We came and reccied it after our meeting and made sure I could see where I could get on. Sharon: So from the bridge if you go up the hill it takes you somewhere else. But it’s a bit steep and I don’t think the buggy will manage it very well, and it’s a bit rockety so I don’t think we will go up there. Tony: There’s this bridge, that’s a footbridge, so these are all footpaths, these purple colored things on the map, so we could maybe investigate that? Sue: As long as we’ve got some options in case it doesn’t work.
SCENE 6: THE STEPS GOT US Glenise: Ah, there’s steps up here. […] Julie: Sometimes, people take things for granted. All the walks here aren’t fully accessible. Anais: Clearly you wouldn’t go through there? Julie: You wouldn’t, because of the dip. […] We couldn’t go up to the mill. That’s one of the things that we couldn’t access. There’s going to be other things. Anais: For example, going to the path on the left, which is too steep. Julie: Yes, too steep. Liz: Ok, so we’ve come past the nature reserve and got onto a track that we were both getting really quite enthusiastic about, it’s one of those very sustainable tracks, tramped down earth and my trike has coped just about with the loose gravel surface on it. And beyond this gate we’ve come to what looks lovely, real potential for open countryside but we’vecome to one of those kissing gates which is impassable. I would probably get stuck in and left there because I think I would get wedged. And there’s a lovely big gate next to it – but unfortunately that’s padlocked – so that’s the end of this route. So – now we are going to backtrack.
SUSTAINING INTERDEPENDENCY
Key aspects of the transformation towards sustainability are the abilities to cope with and adapt to new challenges arising from changing environments. 11 Going for a Walk reveals repeated practices of planning, mitigation, risk taking, deviation, adaptability, problem solving, persistence, commitment, attentiveness and creativity and interdependency. The dominant discourse of ‘independence’, particularly as this is attached to the field of disability policy and practices, belies the reality and necessity of interdependence – interdependence offering alternative and useful conceptions of ‘sustainable living’. Repeatedly observed in our project were interdependencies’ attendant practices, including trust, negotiation, collaboration, reciprocity, mutuality, and co-operation. The inter, we suggest, is surely part of an environmental ethic, contesting as it does the story of the subject as self-sufficient and singular. Whilst interdependency is perhaps more apparent because more explicit in the relationships of (some) disabled people (some of the time), Judith Butler has insisted that as ‘socially constituted bodies’, ‘we are fundamentally dependent on others’. 12 Vulnerability and interdependency are two sides of the same ontological coin, far removed from the idea of the ‘masterful’, omnipotent subject. Borrowing from Butler again, greater recognition of our ‘inevitable interdependency’ might very well provide the sustaining grounds for what she calls a ‘global political community’. 13 Such sustaining grounds are surely the foundations for sustainability? Acknowledging our vulnerability might just allow all of us to practice our interdependency better, a process of resilience necessary to sustaining a diversity of assembled lives, human ones included.
POST-SCRIPT
Dr. Sue Porter died suddenly on 11 January 2017. Nevertheless, this piece of writing is interdependent, the product of conjoined labor, written and rewritten as a collaborative act. The ‘I’ is a ‘we’. I last saw Sue in July 2016. She gifted me a book for The Walking Library for Women Walking. The book was Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers. 14 Sue wrote:
The reason I chose the Examined Life book was particularly for the chapter that is the walk Sunaura Taylor and Judith Butler take in San Francisco – where we hear what makes a city inclusive and therefore accessible, in city planning terms and, more importantly for me, the exchange between these walkers on the ideas of ‘what a body does’. They speak to me of the importance of ‘belonging’ and the value of asking again and again, ‘who is it that belongs here?’ I also love hearing the relationship that evolves between them, the gaze, the touching, the making of a shared pace.
Dee Heddon holds the James Arnott Chair in Drama at the University of Glasgow. She is the author of numerous books, essays and articles, many of which engage with walking as an aesthetic practice.
Sue Porter was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol. Sue wrote widely about disability, justice and equality. She lived her life as a scholar, an activist and an artist.
The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, Florida Nov 21-24, 2019 Thu: 5:15pm-7:00pm, Fri & Sun: 10am-5pm, Sat: 10:30am-5pm Fee: $250 / $225 museum members / $125 students Leader:Â Chantal Bilodeau
Calling all artists, activists, scientists, and educators who want to engage or further their engagement with the ecology through artistic practices! Join The Arctic Cycle for the Arts & Ecology Incubator, November 21-24, 2019 at the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida. All disciplines are welcome and individuals from traditionally underrepresented populations and communities are encouraged to attend. The Incubator is an inclusive environment that supports diverse perspectives.
During this 3-day intensive, participants interact with accomplished guest speakers from the hard and social sciences, and with local artists who have in-depth knowledge of the Florida ecology. Conversations and work sessions allow everyone to dig deep into the challenges and concerns of working at the intersection of arts and a rapidly changing ecology, such as creating narratives that acknowledge inevitable losses but leave room for the possibility of a thriving and inclusive future.
All sessions take place at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Sarasota, FL 34243. Limited to 20 participants. Availability is on a first come, first serve basis.
Full museum admission, from November 22-24, is included with the Incubator. Parking is free. Participants are responsible for their own travel and accommodation. Discount hotel rates available for out of town participants. For more information, visit the Ringling Museum website.
Artists and Climate Change is a blog that tracks artistic responses from all disciplines to the problem of climate change. It is both a study about what is being done, and a resource for anyone interested in the subject. Art has the power to reframe the conversation about our environmental crisis so it is inclusive, constructive, and conducive to action. Art can, and should, shape our values and behavior so we are better equipped to face the formidable challenge in front of us.
Lead Editor’s note: We will be publishing excerpts from Q18: dis/sustain/ability, in order to make the content accessible to blind readers with audio screen readers. We’ll also be including audio descriptions of the Quarterly’s original layout designed by Stephanie Plenner, described by Katie Murphy. Please stay tuned for future posts and share widely.
In this our second chapter, Jennifer Natalya Fink and Julie Laffin creatively explore chemical sensitivity and disability in The Remote Everyday.
Audio Description of The Remote Everyday Layout and Pictures
Normal Flower
The First Rule is there are no rules. No maps, no guides, no three wise men. You’re on your own, baby.
The Second Rule is I lied. You want a rule? Here’s a rule for you, sweetheart babydoll: no interrogations. Don’t ask me, “Can N do this? How about this? Can’t she even do that?†as you decide whether N is allowed to be a person. When you ask such questions about her personhood, you’re only proving that you’ve forfeited yours, asshole.
Assume competence. It’s tricky, right?
If you pay attention, you will discover who she is and what she can do. And why you think you get to arbitrate.
Jumping swinging running laughing. Explaining everything you don’t want to know about artichokes. The joy and ing of her.
Everyone pays all this money to all these bullshit saints, zen masters, art gods etc to be present. Here. Now. This. Moment. Save your money: N is here. Now. This. Moment.
I used to say, “N is in her own world, and we’re in it, too.†There’s one world though. Hersandours. Watch oh it shimmers.
The Third Rule is also the First and Only Rule: please kindly go fuck yourself with your pity. It’s jagged, rusty. Relentlessly sharp. It will hurt.
You are a visitor. A rule-follower. I am this house, its three. N’s.
Remember: I don’t love you.
Eden
There are days you want normal. You know it’s a fiction, a lie, a cheat. You don’t care. You want that high. The odorless rose, the deathless life. Aren’t we all a little addicted. Don’t you just want a normal child, you whisper. One without any issues. Just like you, right? Oh my parsnip, my pear. You have no ‘issues’, no needs? Ah! So you’re dead. (See Rule #9.)
And remember: I don’t love you.
Begin by shopping carefully. The potential for cross contamination, second-hand or third-hand residue is very high.
The similarity between cologne and pesticide is remarkable. Once you acquire a highly deranged sense of smell, there is a terrible sameness to it all.
Most failures occur during prep because of the high rate of contamination from having to prep in one’s not so clean living space or car.
Take everything out of your bedroom including all the furniture and mattresses.
Begin washing all your bedding and clothing in sanctioned laundry soap months in advance of a visit.
Rip out all carpet and remove draperies.
Don’t enter the house without a respirator for several days until all the volatized substances have been cleared out.
Re-introduce your personal things into the space your body most frequently inhabits– your chemical-free safe room, your oasis.
Make sure there is no pesticide application happening inside your living space or that there has not been for at least several years. Also, make sure herbicides are not being used outside your door.
And though you have gone through numerous, time-consuming and mind-boggling tasks, it will all seem pointless once you put on my clothing. No so! All the preparation has made the chances of my tolerating your presence in my living space in the realm of the possible. Once you have detoxed yourself and then put on my things, then and only then, is there is a snowball’s chance it hell that it will actually work out.
Assholes and Their Mothers(Genetics)
Early on, maybe two months after N’s diagnosis, a friend with a neurotypical brat, I mean kid, called me. She was High WASP, an erstwhile academic who was generously donating her Harvard-educated brain to the PTA. The helicopter of all helicopters. She took her daughter to the ER for a single sneeze. She was one of the first people I told about The Diagnosis. Two days later, she called me: “Do you know of any kids’ theater groups that do a sensory-friendly version of their show? But it has to be free, because there are only two kids with autism, and why should we pay for just those two?†My head exploded. Steam tunneled out of my ears. I was in a comic book. Correction: I was a comic book. Finally, someone to dump my rage upon. You, my friend, are actually less accommodating than the Americans with Disabilities Act. A plain wool Republican coat of a law. So basic even a Bush could buy it. Every child is entitled to an equal education. Every. Child. You’re in violation of the LAW, do you get that? You’re under arrest.
I said none of that. I said I didn’t know of any theater that would perform for free etc. I got off the phone and punched in a wall. That was the last conversation I ever had with her. I never returned the fancy mauve tricycle she’d lent us.
Now I would handle it differently: I would be patient, I would be good. I would punch no wall. I would view it as my duty to explain the concept of equal access, of accommodation and inclusion. The social model: places and people (you) are the obstacle, not the difference itself. Hopefully she would come away with a clear understanding of the ADA and its purpose. Hopefully she would better understand her impairment. I’m so sorry that you suffer from being an asshole. It must be so challenging. I see your daughter inherited your enormous asshole; did you consider how unfair it was to pass along this defect when you chose to have children? Your daughter will go through life an enormous gaping asshole. Is it really fair to ask society to pay for her special needs? There’s no cure for being an asshole, you know. Is she able to imagine other people as human? Is she able to empathize? Is she able to stop staring and shut her fucking mouth? No? Well what can she do? Maybe she can go live in some sort of assisted living home for assholes. I hear there some wonderful places that will take assholes like her.
Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of four novels, including the Dana Award-winning and Pulitzer-nominated The Mikvah Queen. She is a professor of creative writing at Georgetown University. She founded The Gorilla Press, a non-profit aimed at promoting youth literacy through bookmaking, and cofounded the Disability Studies Cluster at Georgetown. jennifernfink.com.
Julie Laffin is an artist living with disabling environmental illness. In anotherlife she made large scale, public performances while wearing overly long gowns. Now living an isolated lifestyle due to myriad environmental triggers, Laffin has turned the camera on herself as a means of navigating her illness and reinventing her artistic practice.julielaffin.com
Lead Editor’s note: We will be publishing excerpts from Q18: dis/sustain/ability, in order to make the content accessible to blind readers with audio screen readers. We’ll also be including audio descriptions of the Quarterly’s original layout designed by Stephanie Plenner, described by Katie Murphy. Please stay tuned for future posts and share widely.
In this our first chapter, Guest Editor Bronwyn Preece gives an overview of the issue to come, and an unpacking of the issue’s title: dis/sustain/ability.
Audio Description of Q18 Letter from the Guest Editor
Dear Reader,
Buried amongst the leaves and lakes, memes and moss, skin and sidewalks, woods and wheelchairs, normal and nuance… dis/sustain/ability begs us to consider,albeit subtly, who can claim disability in this Anthropocenic age of constant climatic flux?
This CSPA special-themed issue offers a diverse array of artistic responses, underpinned with strong critical leanings for interrogating the overlaps of sustainability and disability and the relevance of conjoining these concepts in/for today’s world. Drawing on practitioners and/or scholars from three continents – some self-identifying as ‘disabled’, others not – this issue grapples with the neologistic tensions, hurdles and gifts of our cultural, social, economic and environmental propensities towards and with notions of disability.
dis/sustain/ability embraces transnational intersectionality and the multiple imbrications made accessible through doing so. This issue serves as a catalyst, as gentle invoker, as provocateur, as reflective medium through which a variety of ideas are offered up by contributors. It has inverted blatancy through diverse response. It asks more questions than it does try to form firm answers.
As guest editor, it has been nothing short of inspiring to gather the contributions. The curated call was framed openly, welcoming broad and interpretative possibilities to what was provoked by the notion of dis/sustain/ability. The issue wheels us down new paths and forks in the road, encounters the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, fingers away notions of freaks, examines irreverence, marginalization, activism and policy, adds dimension to crip vernaculars, poeticizes the political, swears at homogenization, artistically interrogates impairment, sews together and performs through the very being of disability, sustainably…
It has been an honor to curate this issue….
Bronwyn Preece,
PhD Candidate, University of Huddersfield: Performing Embodiment: Improvisational Investigations into the Intersections of Ecology and Disability
www.bronwynpreece.com
dis/sustain/ability: DEFINED
Each contributor was asked to ‘define’ dis/sustain/ability in 25 words or less…
Jennifer:
You will never be out of the woods.
You will never be the woods.
You are the woods.
Julie:
At first I was crashing and burning—consumed by loss. Acceptance was arduous; I was being prepared to have all of my perceptions changed forever.
Dee:
Interdependency, vulnerability, co-habitation, across and between, you/i/we/me/us.
Neil:
We each use systems to make our worlds usable and thriving. The bright sun makes our lives work in so many ways. A good joke sheds light on life when we need laughter.
Petra:
Continuing to be in flow, through the years, while living in an ableist society. Searching for connection, taking responsibility, engaging, widening the circle.
Stephanie:
breathe inside fire or water or soil. make like a succulent, plump and adaptable. try on constraints then wiggle. notice movement – micro / macro.
Bree:
arranging human, physical, financial, and environmental resources in such a way that every being can live a meaningful, productive, and comfortable life now and into the future
Susanna:
To separate these three words…though dis is not a word by a slash….makes them read as separate.
Dis is to negate, deem valueless…sustain is to lift up, support for all time and forever…ability is the skill, the life within that understands and knows how. Together…dissustainability…though unrecognized or hidden, is the life within that knows and breaths within us all.
Sandie:
“Disability†and “ability†are not binary terms; making art about Crip/disability experiences is to sustain disability culture and the heritage of resistance and resilience.
Ray:
It’s the long slow note made up of a feast of harmonics, always in flux, ever changing, transforming and subverting.
Bronwyn (guest editor):
… circles with edges, borders with welcome signs, awareness of networks, improvisation, interdependence, adaptation, vitality, necessity, inextricability, knitting/weaving/breathing-being…living in shared uniqueness/norming difference…verbing: …
Page Spread from “One Year of the Blued Trees Symphony” by Aviva Rahmni 2017, layout design byJudith Mayer, 2019.
Aviva Rahmani is pleased to share the upcoming events that will help take Blued Trees to the next level!
This month I begin a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) studio residency on Governors Island where I will work on aspects of the Blued Trees Opera. Next month, a book launch and signing will be held at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island for two new artists books, “50 Years of Work,†and “One Year of the Blued Trees Symphony.†Copies of both will be for sale on site however, the launch will have limited space and require a RSVP. Confirmation of time, date and details will be announced shortly.”Using ecological art to spark environmental conservation” an interview of me by Kamea Chayne of the Green Dreamer podcast, is now available (also on iTunes, Spotify,GooglePodcasts, GooglePlay, Stitcher, and any other podcast app).
This month I begin a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) studio residency on Governors Island where I will work on aspects of the Blued Trees Opera. Next month, a book launch and signing will be held at LMCC’s Arts Center at Governors Island for two new artists books, “50 Years of Work,†and “One Year of the Blued Trees Symphony.†Copies of both will be for sale on site however, the launch will have limited space and require a RSVP. Confirmation of time, date and details will be announced shortly.”Using ecological art to spark environmental conservation” an interview of me by Kamea Chayne of the Green Dreamer podcast, is now available (also on iTunes, Spotify,GooglePodcasts, GooglePlay, Stitcher, and any other podcast app).
“Living Quilt for Santa Rosa” is a public art project by artist Jane Ingram Allen that was installed on Nov. 25, 2018 and funded by a grant from the City of Santa Rosa, CA. This video shows the progress of the “quilt” from installation to blooming flowers over 6 plus months. The photos are by Timothy S. Allen. This installation consists of a handmade paper quilt in the flying gees pattern that was installed on a bed of soil with a headboard and footboard of woven branches. Many local volunteers helped to make the quilt and install it. The handmade paper dissolves as mulch and the seeds sprout and grow to produce a living quilt.
In an era marked by myriad crises (ecosystem collapse, political and social unrest, growing economic inequity), CSPAQ Issue 25: Time and Attention compiles various frameworks, tactics, and propositions for tuning our attention and contextualizing our place in time. An experimental philosopher, prisoners, a child, and others contribute their diverse perspectives, collectively and constructively building a discourse for how we might direct our time and attention. Guest Edited by Ryan Thompson.
Nolan Park at Governors Island New York City, June 1-October 27, 2019
Young people around the world are demanding that society confront the climate crisis with a new level of urgency—the urgency required for them to have a future they can hold in their minds without dread. They are demanding intergenerational justice. Their voices give us all an opportunity to rethink and recommit.
This new youth movement inspires our next exhibition, coming to Governors Island on June 1. Taking Action features hands-on learning about solutions for the climate crisis; a space to understand barriers to their implementation; and a concrete invitation to meaningful civic engagement and collective action.
Taking Action will be staffed primarily by high school students. It will be open 11am-9pm on Fridays and Saturdays and 11am-5pm on Thursdays and Sundays prior to the end of the public school year, with extended hours during the summer months. The exhibition was highlighted by The New York Times in its recent article on climate arts.
This show extends our previous focus on elevating youth voices. Our Youth Advisory Council organized a large contingent at the youth-led Zero Hour march last summer (New Yorker); with Yuca Arts, we created a program for teens to design and paint a climate mural at their school (Grist); and on June 14 at the Apollo Theater, high school students from across the city will perform spoken word pieces on climate in our inaugural presentation of Climate Speaks, organized in partnership with the NYC Department of Education’s Office of Sustainability and with special thanks to Urban Word NYC (click hereto receive notice of the ticket presale).
Taking Action is an important step for us as an organization. We hope that it can also serve as a catalyst for many of you.
Royal College of Art, Kensington, London, SW7 2EUImage:Â Current Climate, 2019.
Image by Claudia Agati
I am delighted to invite you to ART IN FLUX at Event Two, an exhibition I have co-curated and will be exhibiting a number of works in. Event Two at the Royal College of Art is an exhibition of historical and contemporary digital art and a program of events marking the 50th anniversary of the landmark Computer Arts SocietyEvent One exhibition at the college in 1969. The exhibition includes work from The CAS50 Collection of computer art, dating from the 1960s to the present day, together with contemporary media art curated by artist platform FLUX Events, London’s preeminent forum for media artists.Â
A huge thank you to all who came to my FLUX: Radical Ecology exhibition and talks event last month. The event went brilliantly - see more info and video of the event here.
I would also like to thank Ugly Duck for hosting us that evening. They are a fantastic team, always supportive of the media arts and really helped to make the event possible. And of course thanks go to the chair Laura Pando and speakers, Oskar Krajewski, Becky Lyon and Tilly Hogrebe.Images by Sophie le Roux.
Sarah Jaquette Ray, ‘Risking Bodies in the Wild: The “Corporeal Unconscious” of American Adventure Culture’, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, 33 (3), 2009, pp. 257-284, p. 259.
Jonathan Anderson, ‘Talking whilst walking: A geographical archaeology of knowledge’, Area, 36 (3), 2005, pp. 254-261.
Liz Crow, ‘Planning and “Walkingâ€â€™, http://walkinginterconnections.com/blog/
David Abbott & Sue Porter, ‘Environmental hazard and disabled people: from vulnerable to expert to interconnected’, Disability and Society, 28 (6), 2013, pp. 839-852.
Ibid., p. 843.
Ibid., p. 840.
Ibid.
The audio walk can be accessed on the project website. It has also been published in Studies in Theatre and Performance, 35(3), 2015, pp. 177-188.
Beatrice John and Sacha Kagan, S., ‘Extreme Climate Events as Opportunities for Radical Open Citizenship’, Open Citizenship, 5 (1), 2014, pp. 60-75, p. 61.
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, London,Verso: 2004, p. 20; xii.
Ibid., p. 180; xii.
Astra Taylor, Examined Life: Excursions with Contemporary Thinkers, New York: The New Press, 2009.
Deirdre Heddon and Misha Myers, ‘Stories from the Walking Library’, Cultural Geographies, 21(4), 2014, pp. 639-655.