April 21 - May 15, 2009
Fine Arts Gallery. George Mason University
Public Reception - April 21, 5:00 - 7:00
agriART brings together an array of art works that critically engage with cultures of food production and consumption. The exhibition features projects that represent where we are and what we can do to (re)create sustainable relationships with our sources of nourishment and the communities in which we live.
Participating Artists
Fritz Haeg
Beehive Design Collective
Nance Klehm
Ted Purves & Susanne Cockrell
Critical Art Ensemble & Beatriz Da Costa & Claire Pentecost
The Center for Urban Pedagogy with Amanda Matles
Deena Capparelli & Moisture
Lisa Tucker
Philip H. Howard
Amy Franceschini
Essays by:
Curatored by:
Mark Cooley flawedart[at]gmail.com
Ryan Griffis ryan.griffis[at]gmail.com
Fritz Haeg
www.fritzhaeg.com
Like a system of crop rotation, Fritz Haeg works between his architecture & design practice Fritz Haeg Studio (though the currently preferred clients are animals), the happenings & gatherings of Sundown Salon (now Sundown Schoolhouse), the ecology initiatives of Gardenlab (including Edible Estates) and his role as an educator. He studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his B. Arch. He has variously taught in architecture, design, and fine art programs at CalArts, Art Center College of Design, Parsons, and the University of Southern California. In 2006 he initiated Sundown Schoolhouse, the alternative educational environment based in his geodesic dome in Los Angeles. He has produced projects and exhibited work at the Tate Modern, London; the Whitney Museum of American Art; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Casco Projects, Utrecht; 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 on-going series of projects called Animal Estates debuted at the Whitney Biennial in 2008 with installations in front of the museum. It is followed by five other editions in 2008, commisioned by museums and art institutions in the U.S. and abroad. His first book, "Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn", was published by Metropolis Books and distributed by D.A.P. in spring 2008.
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Beehive Design Collective
www.beehivecollective.org
The Beehive Design Collective is a wildly-motivated, all-volunteer, art-activist collective dedicated to “cross-pollinating the grassroots” by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images for use as educational and organizing tools. We work anonymously as word-to-image translators of complex global stories, gathered through conversations with affected communities.
We got our start addressing bioengineering and agriculture and have since tackled issues from globalization and the drug war to free trade and colonialism. We are currently working on two megagraphics detailing popular resistance to corporate resource grabs -- one grounded in Central America, one in the Appalachian coalfields here in the US. (Works in progress: www.beehivecollective.org/gallery2/main.php)
Since 2000, we have disseminated more than 60,000 posters throughout the Americas, entirely by grassroots, hand-to-hand distribution! We also reproduce our graphics as large-scale portable murals on fabric, and use them as the centerpiece for workshops and picture-lectures on the issues.
A committed group of mostly women, we are working to create holistic,
accessible, and educational images that inspire critical reflection and
strategic action.
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Nance Klehm
www.spontaneousvegetation.net
Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria.
She works with Simparch to create and integrate soil and water systems at their ‘Clean Livin’ at C.L.U.I.’s Wendover, UT site. She uses decomposition, filtration and fermentation to transform post-consumer materials generated onsite (solid and liquid human waste, grey water from sinks and shower, food, cardboard and paper) as well as waste materials gathered offsite (casino food waste and grass clippings, horse manure from stables, spent coffee grounds) into biologically rich soil. The resulting waste-sponge systems sustain or aid: a habitat of native species of plants, digestion of the high salinity of the indigenous soils and the capturing, storing and using of precipitation.
She has shown and taught in Mexico, Australia, England, Scandinavia, Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States. Her regular column ‘WEEDEATER’ appears in ARTHUR magazine.
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Ted Purves & Susanne Cockrell
www.fieldfaring.org
Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves create social art projects that investigate the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. They ask questions about the nature of people and place as seen through social economy, history and local ecology. Their two and a half year project (2004-2007), Temescal Amity Works, facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce, conversation, and collective biography within the Temescal Neighborhood of Oakland, CA.
In the spring of 2008, they created Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery as an original project for the exhibition This Show Needs You at the San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art. Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, which drew upon the participation of San Jose gardeners, was a bio-active installation made from a half-ton of yard-grown lemons, preserved with salt, that cured over the course of the exhibition.
They have received a Creative Work Fund grant from the Elise and Walter Haas Foundation, a Visual Arts grant from the Creative Capital Foundation, an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, as well support from the Oakland Office of Cultural Affairs and California College of the Arts.
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Critical Art Ensemble
www.critical-art.net
(CAE) is a collective of five artists of various specializations (book art, performance, computer, film, video, photography and critical theory) dedicated to exploring the intersections of art, technology, radical politics, and critical theory. CAE's critically-engaged performances draw inspiration from various historical manifestations of resistance performance such as Radical American Theatre, Berlin Dada, Guerrilla Art Action Group and the Situationists. CAE has published four books on culture and society in the age of electronic media including Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other Unpopular Ideas, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media, and the recently published The Molecular Invasion.
Critical Art Ensemble has performed and lectured internationally at such festivals and institutions as Documenta X, Kassel; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the Museum of Photography, Antwerp; The New Museum, New York and The Kitchen, New York. Their work is included in the collections of several institutions such as The Whitney Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Gallery, London.
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Beatriz da Costa
www.beatrizdacosta.net
Beatriz da Costa is a machine artist whose research and artistic practice is engaged in the use of robotic behavior. Her most recent project, Cello, consists of an automated interactive acoustic instrument that varies its behavior depending on the presence and position of visitors in the space. She is currently collaborating with Critical Art Ensemble on the GenTerra and Contestational Biology projects, and on developing Tactical Gizmology workshops. She has just completed an appointment as an Associate Researcher at The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at State University of New York at Buffalo.
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Claire Pentecost
www.clairepentecost.org
Claire Pentecost is Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she teaches photography, drawing, critical theory and interdisciplinary seminars. She also has extensive experience as a visiting artist and lecturer in many other schools and institutions. She has exhibited her photographs and sculptural installations in the U.S., Europe and South America. Her background is in painting but she engages a variety of media to interrogate the imaginative and institutional structures that mediate our relations with the natural world. Her most recent work investigates the corporate control of almost every facet of our food system. She has worked as an Exhibits Specialist for the Bronx Zoo and for three years was co-organizer/curator of Four Walls, a non-profit forum for artist-initiated projects in Brooklyn. In addition to her work in the visual arts, she has published fiction and art criticism and produced interviews and reviews for radio.
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The Center for Urban Pedagogy
www.anothercupdevelopment.org
The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization,
began working in 1998 and was incorporated in 2001. CUP investigates the
built environment by facilitating collaborations among advocates, architects,
artists, city workers, educators, policy makers, residents and students.
By examining spaces as they are, CUP imagines how they could be different
and how residents can participate in shaping them. Investigations begin
with questions about how communities work: Who built public housing? How
are prisons designed? Where does garbage go? Why are there abandoned buildings?
Project participants use a research-based, design-driven process to develop
inventive tools for community participation and change. CUP projects take
many forms: architectural proposals, board games, comic books, exhibitions,
films and videos, maps, models, posters, walking tours and workshops.
CUP’s mission grows from the belief that the power of imagination is
central to the practice of democracy and that the work of governing must
engage community residents’ dreams and visions. CUP distributes its
work through community-based organizations, education and design institutions,
public installations, television shows and free programs. CUP projects are
executed by a network of participants who are supported by CUP’s staff,
board of directors and volunteers.
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Amanda Matles is an artist whose artistic practice investigates our peculiar relationship to the natural environment. Her work explores the social, political, religious, mythological, and economic impulses that have shaped our various relationships to and roles within the environs of the earth. She has exhibited her artwork and executed ecologically driven projects in the U.S. and Europe. She is currently working on a Certificate in Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and lives in Brooklyn, NY.
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The physical environment feeds the curiosity and drives the work of Los Angeles artist, Deena Capparelli. Exploring systems that include the climactic, geographic, ecological, and social, Capparelli’s activities bridge metaphor and fact. Her past work has been exhibited in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces in California and the Midwest, but in more recent years, she’s connected her interests as a California native plant enthusiast, garden designer, and outdoor adventurer to her art. Her sharpened focus has led to a working collaboration with a collective of artists exploring a new creative framework. Involved with Moisture, a two-year project in the Mojave Desert co-coordinated with Claude Willey, her work in the Mojave has paralleled her role as founding partner and arts coordinator in the successful interdisciplinary Science and Art Block program now in it’s third year at Pasadena City College were she is a Tenured Professor of Drawing and Sculpture.
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Lisa Tucker
http://sartfood.blogspot.com
Lisa Tucker is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. Recent
projects include Food Forever, an installation exhibited in the University
of California, Irvine Art Gallery and Bioneering: Hybrid Investigations of
Food, an exhibition and symposium interrogating food production and consumption.
Both collaborations were in partnership with scientists, plant pathologists
and artists at three University of California campuses. Lisa serves as assistant
curator of exhibitions at the UCR/California Museum of Photography and teaches
courses in the history of photography, multimedia, and art appreciation.
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Philip H. Howard
www.msu.edu/~howardp
Philip H. Howard began studying consolidation in the food industry while earning his PhD in Rural Sociology at the University of Missouri. He started this project as a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (University of California, Santa Cruz), using semantic networks. In his current position as assistant professor of community, food and agriculture at
Michigan State University he has expanded his visual work to include, cladogram/timelines, treemaps, and a network animation (the latter in collaboration with Skye Bender-deMoll)
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Amy Franceschini
www.futurefarmers.com
Amy Franceschini creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature. Her work manifests as websites, installations, open-access laboratories, and educational formats that often take form as long-term engagements with a specific place and public. Her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists. Futurefarmers hosts an artist in residency program that offers a platform for collaboration and research. The program has hosted over 22 artists from 12 countries and forms the basis of a distributed network of artists who make up the collective. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Free Soil has exhibited internationally and received funding from the Danish Arts Council, and Zero One, San Jose to create temporary public art projects. Amy’s solo and collaborative work have been exhibited internationally at ZKM, Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University and her MFA from Stanford University. Amy is a professor of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco and a visiting artist at California College of the Arts Fine Arts Graduate program.
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Ron Graziani has written numerous articles on twentieth-century art and critical theory. His book ‘Robert Smithson: and the American Landscape’ was published at Cambridge University Press in 2004. He teaches the histories and theories of twentieth- century art at East Carolina University, North Carolina. All of this professional activity deals with esthetics or artisitc form as if engaged to a political economy.
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Mark Cooley
www.flawedart.net
Mark Cooley is an interdisciplinary artist interested in exploring the intersections of art, activism, popular culture and institutional critique in a variety of contexts. Subjects of particular interest are U.S. foreign policy, the fine art culture industry and the political economy of new technologies. Mark’s work has been featured internationally in online and offline venues such as Exit Art, NY, Rhizome.org, Furtherield.org, the World Social Forum, MediaLabMadrid, and many other international venues. Mark is currently a professor in the Department of Art and Visual Technology at George Mason University.
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Ryan Griffis
www.yougenics.net/griffis
Ryan Griffis mostly works under the pseudonym "Temporary Travel Office."
The Temporary Travel Office produced what could be called "critical
tourism".
Ryan also frequently writes, under his own name, about art that he thinks
tells important stories for publications like ArtUS, Rhizome.org and others.
Sometimes he curates shows of such work. Currently, Ryan is an assistant
professor in the School of Art & Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
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