Join CLA as we relaunch our Arts and the Environment initiative rooted in exploring the role of the arts in raising public awareness of the pressing environmental concerns that threaten our global well being. Over the next year CLA will present a series of panel conversations as special topics within our educational workshop series. The first will take place March 30th, 2022 and will feature Douglas McCulloh, senior curator at UC Riverside ARTS: California Museum of Photography and Photographer Noah Berger, who will speak about their recent exhibit Facing Fire: Art Wildfire, and the End of Nature in the West. The event will also feature Leslie Quintanilla and Jessica Ng, members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice, a collective of activists, academics, scientists, and artists, who will discuss decolonial environmental justice efforts.
About Our Speakers:
Douglas McCulloh is senior curator at UCR ARTS: California Museum of Photography.
Noah Berger-Photographer, 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Breaking News Photography
Photos Courtesy of Noah Berger / Associated Press
About Facing Fire: Fire as omen and elemental force, as metaphor and searing personal experience—these are the subjects explored in Facing Fire. California’s diverse ecologies are fire prone, fire-adapted, even fire-dependent. In the past two decades, however, West Coast wildfires have exploded in scale and severity. There is a powerful consensus that we have entered a new era—nature unbalanced, the end of the stable world. The artists of Facing Fire bring us incendiary work from active fire lines and psychic burn zones.
Leslie Quintanilla and Jessica Ng of CIEJ
CIEJ a collective of activists, academics, scientists, and artists working for decolonial environmental justice efforts trans-locally. Our members are in San Diego, CA, San Francisco, CA, El Paso, TX, and Guerrero, MX.We create dialogue/reading circles, political education workshops, panels, film screenings, & spaces for movement organizing, and we re-direct scientific tools and other resources to empower people in their organizing for autonomy and dignity. We approach justice through a lens of decolonization, transnationalism and intersectionality.
CIEJ is resisting the ways in which “green” consumerism reproduces harmful colonial/capitalist extractions of land/water/labor around the world. We are all interested in creating “a world where many worlds fit” (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional 2005)
For more information on the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice, the Facing Fire exhibit, and photographer Noah Berger, please use the following links.
Facing Fire Exhibit
https://virtualucrarts.ucr.edu/facing-fire/
Noah Berger-Fire Photographer
https://noahbergerphoto.com/albums
CIEJ
http://www.the-ciej.org/publications--media.html
Downloadable Toolkit:
http://www.the-ciej.org/anti-greenwashing-toolkit.html
