Art + Environment Conference Speakers
In 1987 Cheryl Haines opened the Haines Gallery, which has since become internationally known for working with place-based artists such as Andy Goldsworth, James Turrell, Dennis Oppenheim and Joel Sternfeld. With a desire to deepen the conversation regarding place she founded the FOR-SITE Foundation, an artist-in-residency program dedicated to the creation, understanding and presentation of art about place. In 2001 she secured a 47-acre parcel in Nevada City and built a facility there to house both a residency and arts educational program. Since then, the foundation has facilitated museum exhibitions as diverse as Richard Long at SFMOMA, Cornelia Parker at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and Shi Guorui at the de Young Museum.
Vito Acconci earned an M.F.A. in writing at the University of Iowa, and then went on
to develop a diverse body of work that ranges from performance art to film and video,
photography and sculpture. Since the late 1980s he has worked with Acconci Studio in Brooklyn, a collaborative group that develops artworks and architectural projects. Acconci has taught at numerous institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the San Francisco Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University.
Lita Albuquerque is an installation and environmental artist, painter, and sculptor. In the 1970s she won acclaim for ephemeral pigment pieces created for desert sites. In 1996 she garnered international acclaim for her installation Sol Star at the Great Pyramids, where she represented the United States at the International Cairo Biennale. Albuquerque has worked with architect Cesar Pelli on a sculptural floor installation for the New Minneapolis Central Library, and recently created a site-specific work for the California Institute of Technology. Her newest ephemeral Earth Art work is Stellar Axis: Antarctica, a star map of blue orbs installed on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2006, a project that is also slated for the North Pole in the near future.
Will Bruder earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He supplemented his studio art education with studies in structural engineering, philosophy, art history and urban planning, followed by an architectural apprenticeship under Gunnar Birkerts and Paolo Soleri. Subsequent to becoming registered, Will opened his own studio in 1974, and has completed more than 450 commissions, the largest of which is the 280,000 square-foot Central Library in Phoenix. He has lectured at the School of Architecture at Arizona State University, and been awarded the Rome Prize.
Matt Coolidge directs the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research-based nonprofit founded in 1994 that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States. Its interdisciplinary approach draws on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. The work of the Center has been presented in museums, universities, and exhibit spaces across the United States, as well as in the institution’s own network of facilities. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the author and editor of several books, including Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation’s Nuclear Proving Ground.
Chris Drury has exhibited widely, made outdoor site-specific works all over the world, and has three permanent works in the US. His work seeks to connect different phenomena between nature and culture, the inner and outer, the microcosmic and macrocosmic. He works extensively with other disciplines, particularly science and medicine, looking at systems in the body and on the planet. His work has taken him to many wild places in the world–last year he spent two months working in Antarctica, inquiring into the science being carried out on the ice.
Lynn F. Fenstermaker has been the director of the Nevada Desert FACE Facility and the Mojave Global Change Facility since 1999, both of which are examining the impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 and other climate change parameters on the Mojave Desert ecosystem. Her most recent research has addressed scaling of plant physiological responses to climate change treatments and basin-wide assessments of evapotranspiration in semiarid regions. Dr. Fenstermaker has an M.A. in agronomy and a Ph.D. in biology, and is an Associate Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute’s Division of Earth and Ecosystem Science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Kianga Ford, who lives and works between Los Angeles and Boston, studied English and Theater at Georgetown University, did postgraduate work in film at New York University, and received her M.F.A. in 2003 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a doctoral candidate in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is completing a dissertation on articulations of race and identity in contemporary exhibitions,
and is Assistant Professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Ford works with sound and environment as her primary media, creating immersive narrative experiments that query the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Ford was one of thirty artists selected for the 2006 California Biennial.
William L. Fox, conference moderator, is the museum’s lead strategist for developing its initiatives in Art + Environment. He has published numerous books about the topic, lectures internationally, and is the recipient of assorted grants and awards, among them fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a visiting fellow at the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, and most recently the National Museum of Australia.
Bill Gilbert holds the Lannan Chair as director of the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico, where he is also cofounder of the new art and ecology emphasis in studio art. He has exhibited his place-based, mixed media installation and video works internationally since 1981, and has curated numerous exhibitions and written essays regarding the work of indigenous artists. He is currently working on a physio-cartography series for exhibitions in Albuquerque to open in the summer of 2009. In 2001 Gilbert founded Land Arts of the America West, an interdisciplinary mobile research laboratory at the University of New Mexico dedicated to investigating and making work about cultural interventions in the southwestern United States and north-central Mexico from pre-contact Native American to contemporary dominant cultures.
Creating a pipe organ out of soda pop bottles, gardening at the Huntington Gardens and designing four-dimensional objects have lead Dan Goods to his current position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. There, he develops ways of communicating to the general public as well as creating spaces for scientists and engineers that foster innovation. In 2001 he received a SURF Fellowship to the California Institute of Technology to work with the conceptual artist David Kremers. He has produced the installations The Hidden Light, The Big Playground and Faraway Does Not Exist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was recently commissioned to create a centerpiece artwork for the extension of the Mineta San José International Airport in San Jose, CA.
Author and journalist Jeff Gordinier is the Editor-at-Large at Details magazine and a regular contributor to PoetryFoundation.org. He graduated from Princeton University, and has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, GQ, Fortune, Elle, Spin, Cookie, the Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly. In 2006 he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for two music stories in Details; in 2007 he won the award a second time for a Details feature story. His work has been published in anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Best Food Writing 2006, and Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 1. Viking published his first book, X Saves the World, in March 2008.
Fritz Haeg rotates work between his architecture and design practice, Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates) and his role as an educator. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Mass MoCA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wattis Institute; the Netherlands Architecture
Institute, Maastricht; and the MAK Center, Los Angeles, among other institutions. His new ongoing series of projects, Animal Estates, debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 with a commissioned installation in front of the museum. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, was published by Metropolis Books in spring 2008.
Katie Holten lives in New York City. In 2003 she represented Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale and in 2007 had her first solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. She is currently developing public art projects for the Bronx Museum (2009) and The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, New York (2009). She has been commissioned in the last three years to make new works for museums and galleries in France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Ireland, and the United States. Holten is a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of an award from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Jason Houston is an independent documentary photographer who works with a variety of social and environmental themes, and who serves as picture editor for Orion, the internationally prominent nature writing magazine. His images have appeared in print, online, and broadcast media around the world as well as in many exhibitions, including solo showings at Yale University, Spike Gallery NYC, and Ferrin Gallery. His current work includes a decade-long project on local and sustainable food and farming, a personal series on the social landscape of suburban American family life, and a long-term, multimedia project documenting the community-based grassroots campaigns of Rare Conservation in the developing tropics around the world.
Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and book artist whose work investigates how contemporary American culture relates to the environment. He earned his B.A. in American studies from Amherst, and his M.F.A. in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His three books are Ranch, Full Moon, and 100 Suns. His curation and printing of NASA images in Full Moon have been hailed as the most important exploration photography project since the nineteenth century. His work is exhibited and published internationally, and he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his recent aerial photographic work over the United States.
Geoff Manhaugh is Senior Editor of Dwell magazine and the author of BLDGBLOG. He has been called “the world’s greatest living practitioner of ‘architecture fiction’” by Bruce Sterling, and one of the 50 “most influential architects, designers, and thinkers” in the field today by Icon magazine. Manaugh received an M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in such publications as Domus, Metropolis, Space and Culture, and Volume. He is a frequent guest on National Public Radio and has lectured internationally. Manaugh is also the author of The BLDGBLOG Book, forthcoming from Chronicle Books in 2009.
W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, and a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature. He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Charles Rufus Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious
Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His books include What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Landscape and Power, among many others.
Described by San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker as a curator “of demonstrated acumen and ambition,” Joanne Northrup has served as the San Jose Museum of Art’s Senior Curator since 2001. Her exhibitions fuse popular culture with contemporary art and include Domestic Odyssey; the nationally touring survey Jennifer Steinkamp; Il Lee: Ballpoint Abstractions; and most recently Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon. Northrup’s essays appear in publications including Artweek and AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (2005). She authored the 2006
monograph Jennifer Steinkamp published by Prestel, and is currently organizing a survey exhibition and book on New York-based light sculptor Leo Villareal.
Crimson Rose majored in theater, and has worked as a fine art model, fire dancer and performance artist for 27 years. She is one of the founding directors of both Black Rock City LLC and the Black Rock Arts Foundation. She works as an art curator, the Performance Safety Director for Open Fire, Flame Effects and Pyrotechnics, and Creative Director of the Fire Conclave, the largest gathering of fire performers in one place at one time in the world.
Ann Wolfe is Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Nevada Museum of Art, where her scholarship is focused on art and environment, with particular focus on the American West. Her book Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl was co-published in 2006 by the Center for American Places and the San Jose Museum of Art and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Her forthcoming book Chris Drury: Mushrooms|Clouds will appear in 2008.
Vito Acconci earned an M.F.A. in writing at the University of Iowa, and then went on
to develop a diverse body of work that ranges from performance art to film and video,
photography and sculpture. Since the late 1980s he has worked with Acconci Studio in Brooklyn, a collaborative group that develops artworks and architectural projects. Acconci has taught at numerous institutions, including the California Institute of the Arts, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the San Francisco Art Institute, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Yale University.
Lita Albuquerque is an installation and environmental artist, painter, and sculptor. In the 1970s she won acclaim for ephemeral pigment pieces created for desert sites. In 1996 she garnered international acclaim for her installation Sol Star at the Great Pyramids, where she represented the United States at the International Cairo Biennale. Albuquerque has worked with architect Cesar Pelli on a sculptural floor installation for the New Minneapolis Central Library, and recently created a site-specific work for the California Institute of Technology. Her newest ephemeral Earth Art work is Stellar Axis: Antarctica, a star map of blue orbs installed on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica in 2006, a project that is also slated for the North Pole in the near future.
Will Bruder earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He supplemented his studio art education with studies in structural engineering, philosophy, art history and urban planning, followed by an architectural apprenticeship under Gunnar Birkerts and Paolo Soleri. Subsequent to becoming registered, Will opened his own studio in 1974, and has completed more than 450 commissions, the largest of which is the 280,000 square-foot Central Library in Phoenix. He has lectured at the School of Architecture at Arizona State University, and been awarded the Rome Prize.
Matt Coolidge directs the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a research-based nonprofit founded in 1994 that produces public programs about the built landscape of the United States. Its interdisciplinary approach draws on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. The work of the Center has been presented in museums, universities, and exhibit spaces across the United States, as well as in the institution’s own network of facilities. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the author and editor of several books, including Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation’s Nuclear Proving Ground.
Chris Drury has exhibited widely, made outdoor site-specific works all over the world, and has three permanent works in the US. His work seeks to connect different phenomena between nature and culture, the inner and outer, the microcosmic and macrocosmic. He works extensively with other disciplines, particularly science and medicine, looking at systems in the body and on the planet. His work has taken him to many wild places in the world–last year he spent two months working in Antarctica, inquiring into the science being carried out on the ice.
Lynn F. Fenstermaker has been the director of the Nevada Desert FACE Facility and the Mojave Global Change Facility since 1999, both of which are examining the impact of elevated atmospheric CO2 and other climate change parameters on the Mojave Desert ecosystem. Her most recent research has addressed scaling of plant physiological responses to climate change treatments and basin-wide assessments of evapotranspiration in semiarid regions. Dr. Fenstermaker has an M.A. in agronomy and a Ph.D. in biology, and is an Associate Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute’s Division of Earth and Ecosystem Science at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.
Kianga Ford, who lives and works between Los Angeles and Boston, studied English and Theater at Georgetown University, did postgraduate work in film at New York University, and received her M.F.A. in 2003 from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a doctoral candidate in the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she is completing a dissertation on articulations of race and identity in contemporary exhibitions,
and is Assistant Professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art. Ford works with sound and environment as her primary media, creating immersive narrative experiments that query the psycho-physical dimensions of social identity formation. Ford was one of thirty artists selected for the 2006 California Biennial.
William L. Fox, conference moderator, is the museum’s lead strategist for developing its initiatives in Art + Environment. He has published numerous books about the topic, lectures internationally, and is the recipient of assorted grants and awards, among them fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. He has been a visiting fellow at the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, and most recently the National Museum of Australia.
Bill Gilbert holds the Lannan Chair as director of the Land Arts of the American West program at the University of New Mexico, where he is also cofounder of the new art and ecology emphasis in studio art. He has exhibited his place-based, mixed media installation and video works internationally since 1981, and has curated numerous exhibitions and written essays regarding the work of indigenous artists. He is currently working on a physio-cartography series for exhibitions in Albuquerque to open in the summer of 2009. In 2001 Gilbert founded Land Arts of the America West, an interdisciplinary mobile research laboratory at the University of New Mexico dedicated to investigating and making work about cultural interventions in the southwestern United States and north-central Mexico from pre-contact Native American to contemporary dominant cultures.
Creating a pipe organ out of soda pop bottles, gardening at the Huntington Gardens and designing four-dimensional objects have lead Dan Goods to his current position at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. There, he develops ways of communicating to the general public as well as creating spaces for scientists and engineers that foster innovation. In 2001 he received a SURF Fellowship to the California Institute of Technology to work with the conceptual artist David Kremers. He has produced the installations The Hidden Light, The Big Playground and Faraway Does Not Exist for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and was recently commissioned to create a centerpiece artwork for the extension of the Mineta San José International Airport in San Jose, CA.
Author and journalist Jeff Gordinier is the Editor-at-Large at Details magazine and a regular contributor to PoetryFoundation.org. He graduated from Princeton University, and has written for a variety of magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, GQ, Fortune, Elle, Spin, Cookie, the Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly. In 2006 he won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for two music stories in Details; in 2007 he won the award a second time for a Details feature story. His work has been published in anthologies such as Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, Best Food Writing 2006, and Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 1. Viking published his first book, X Saves the World, in March 2008.
Fritz Haeg rotates work between his architecture and design practice, Fritz Haeg Studio, the happenings and gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates) and his role as an educator. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Mass MoCA; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Wattis Institute; the Netherlands Architecture
Institute, Maastricht; and the MAK Center, Los Angeles, among other institutions. His new ongoing series of projects, Animal Estates, debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 with a commissioned installation in front of the museum. His first book, Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn, was published by Metropolis Books in spring 2008.
Katie Holten lives in New York City. In 2003 she represented Ireland at the 50th Venice Biennale and in 2007 had her first solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. She is currently developing public art projects for the Bronx Museum (2009) and The Fields Sculpture Park at Art Omi, New York (2009). She has been commissioned in the last three years to make new works for museums and galleries in France, Germany, Austria, Holland, Ireland, and the United States. Holten is a Fulbright Scholar and recipient of an award from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. Jason Houston is an independent documentary photographer who works with a variety of social and environmental themes, and who serves as picture editor for Orion, the internationally prominent nature writing magazine. His images have appeared in print, online, and broadcast media around the world as well as in many exhibitions, including solo showings at Yale University, Spike Gallery NYC, and Ferrin Gallery. His current work includes a decade-long project on local and sustainable food and farming, a personal series on the social landscape of suburban American family life, and a long-term, multimedia project documenting the community-based grassroots campaigns of Rare Conservation in the developing tropics around the world.
Michael Light is a San Francisco-based photographer and book artist whose work investigates how contemporary American culture relates to the environment. He earned his B.A. in American studies from Amherst, and his M.F.A. in photography from the San Francisco Art Institute. His three books are Ranch, Full Moon, and 100 Suns. His curation and printing of NASA images in Full Moon have been hailed as the most important exploration photography project since the nineteenth century. His work is exhibited and published internationally, and he is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for his recent aerial photographic work over the United States.
Geoff Manhaugh is Senior Editor of Dwell magazine and the author of BLDGBLOG. He has been called “the world’s greatest living practitioner of ‘architecture fiction’” by Bruce Sterling, and one of the 50 “most influential architects, designers, and thinkers” in the field today by Icon magazine. Manaugh received an M.A. in art history from the University of Chicago. His articles have appeared in such publications as Domus, Metropolis, Space and Culture, and Volume. He is a frequent guest on National Public Radio and has lectured internationally. Manaugh is also the author of The BLDGBLOG Book, forthcoming from Chronicle Books in 2009.
W.J.T. Mitchell is Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, and a scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature. He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Charles Rufus Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious
Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. His books include What Do Pictures Want? (2005); The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon (1998); Landscape and Power, among many others.
Described by San Francisco Chronicle art critic Kenneth Baker as a curator “of demonstrated acumen and ambition,” Joanne Northrup has served as the San Jose Museum of Art’s Senior Curator since 2001. Her exhibitions fuse popular culture with contemporary art and include Domestic Odyssey; the nationally touring survey Jennifer Steinkamp; Il Lee: Ballpoint Abstractions; and most recently Robots: Evolution of a Cultural Icon. Northrup’s essays appear in publications including Artweek and AfterBurn: Reflections on Burning Man (2005). She authored the 2006
monograph Jennifer Steinkamp published by Prestel, and is currently organizing a survey exhibition and book on New York-based light sculptor Leo Villareal.
Crimson Rose majored in theater, and has worked as a fine art model, fire dancer and performance artist for 27 years. She is one of the founding directors of both Black Rock City LLC and the Black Rock Arts Foundation. She works as an art curator, the Performance Safety Director for Open Fire, Flame Effects and Pyrotechnics, and Creative Director of the Fire Conclave, the largest gathering of fire performers in one place at one time in the world.
Ann Wolfe is Curator of Exhibitions and Collections at the Nevada Museum of Art, where her scholarship is focused on art and environment, with particular focus on the American West. Her book Suburban Escape: The Art of California Sprawl was co-published in 2006 by the Center for American Places and the San Jose Museum of Art and distributed by the University of Chicago Press. Her forthcoming book Chris Drury: Mushrooms|Clouds will appear in 2008.
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