ecofeminism(s) 

PUBLIC PROGRAM ONLINE: ZOOM CONVERSATIONS WITH THE ARTISTS
moderated by ecofeminism(s) curator, Monika Fabijanska

Wednesdays, July 8, 15, 22 & Sept 16, 2020 at 6:30 PM EST

July 8, 6:30 PM EST
Lynn Hershman Leeson
Mary Mattingly 
Hanae Utamura
Julie Reiss, Ph.D., Christie’s Education

Lynn Hershman Leeson (American, b. 1941) is artist and filmmaker acclaimed for the pioneering use of new technologies through which she addresses issues such as trauma, identity loss, and the relationship between the real and the virtual. Her work in media-based technology pioneered digital art forms. She also made some of the earliest works that used artificial intelligence, biological computing, and DNA manipulation. As a film director she wrote, directed and produced Strange Culture, Conceiving Ada, and Teknolust, all starring Tilda Swinton, which screened at the Sundance, Toronto and Berlin festivals; and a 2011 groundbreaking documentary !Women Art Revolution. Leeson’s 2014 retrospective organized at the ZKM Karlsruhe traveled to Yerba Buena Center, 2017. Her works are in the collections of MoMA, Whitney Museum, ZKM, LACMA, SFMoMA, Walker Art Center, Berkeley Museum of Art, and National Gallery of Art of Canada. She received Siggraph Lifetime Achievement Award, Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, Guggenheim Fellowship, USA Artist Fellowship, NEA, and College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Mary Mattingly (American, b. 1978) is a photographer and sculptor. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City to circumvent public land laws. Currently, Mattingly is artist in residence at the Brooklyn Public Library and preparing to launch "Public Water" – a public sculpture about NYC's drinking watershed with More Art. In 2018 she worked with BRIC Arts to build "What Happens After" which involved dismantling a military vehicle and deconstructing its mineral supply chain. Her work has been exhibited in museums such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de la Habana, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brooklyn Museum, Storm King, the International Center of Photography, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Palais de Tokyo. Her work has been featured in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Le Monde Magazine, New Yorker, and on BBC News, NPR, on Art21.

Hanae Utamura (Japanese, b. 1980) is multimedia artist, working in video, performance, installation, and sculpture. She received her MA from Chelsea College of Art and Design, and her BA from Goldsmiths, University of London and exhibits extensively in Asia, Europe and the U.S. Numerous international residencies and fellowships include Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Art Omi (Hudson, NY), Santa Fe Art Institute Residency, Aomori Contemporary Art Center (Aomori), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Changdong Art Studio (Seoul), Seoul Art Space_GEUMCHEON (Seoul), Florence Trust (London). She has been awarded NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, Shiseido Art Egg Award, Japanese Ministry of Culture Grant, Pola Art Foundation, UNESCO-Aschberg Bursary Award, and Axis/Florence Trust Award. In 2019 she was a visiting scholar at New York University as a part of Japan – U.S. Exchange Friendship Program in the Art. Utamura is based in New York and Buffalo, NY.

Julie Reiss is a pioneering scholar in the field of Installation art. She is the author of From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (MIT Press, 1999), in addition to numerous articles and reviews. Julie has spoken on panels related to art and the climate crisis including “Shifting Domains: Artists Respond to the Threatened Ecological Commons (Marfa Ballroom Dialogues, 2013), and “Landscape and Anthropocene” (College Art Association, 2016). She chaired a panel on art in the Anthropocene at the 2017 Conference for the Council for European Studies. She is the editor of Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene (Vernon Press, 2018). In 2019 she organized the symposium “The Role of Art in the Environmental Crisis” at Christie’s Education, and was the guest critic on the same theme at The Brooklyn Rail. She directs Modern and Contemporary Art and the Market, an accredited MA program at Christie’s Education. 

July 15, 6:30 PM EST
Aviva Rahmani
Sonya Kelliher-Combs 
Jessica Segall
Candice Hopkins, curator and writer and a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation

Pioneering ecological artist Aviva Rahmani (American, b. 1945) exhibits, publishes and presents internationally. Her project, The Blued Trees Symphony (2015-present), legally challenges expanding fossil fuel infrastructures with copyrighted and sonified installations across miles of North America. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Independent Museum of Contemporary Art, Cyprus; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Colorado; the Hudson River Museum, NY; the Cincinnati Center for Contemporary Art, Ohio; and the Joseph Beuys 100 days of Conference Pavilion, for the Venice Biennale, Italy. Her work has won numerous grants, fellowships and been written about internationally. She is an Affiliate with the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder; gained her PhD from the University of Plymouth, UK and received her BFA and MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. She is currently completing a residency with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governors Island.

Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Native American, b. 1969) is an artist of mixed decent: Iñupiaq from the North Slope of Alaska, Athabascan from the Interior, German and Irish. She uses imagery and symbols that speak about culture and the life of her ancestors, and marginalization and the struggles of Indigenous peoples. She participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., 2020; Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2019; Korundi Museum, Rovaniemi, Finland, 2018-19; John Jay College, NYC, 2018; Northern Norway Art Museum, Tromsø, 2016; Nordamerika Native Museum, Zurich, 2015; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 2013; National Museum of the American Indian, NYC, 2010; Museum of Art & Design, NYC, 2005; Cheongju International Craft Biennial, South Korea, 2005. Solo exhibitions include Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY 2019; the Northern Norway Art Museum, Svalbard, Norway, 2018; Institute of American Indian Art, Santa Fe, 2006; Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, 2005; and Alaska State Museum, Juneau, 2001.

Jessica Segall is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally including The Fries Museum, the Havana Bienal, The National Gallery of Indonesia, The Queens Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Inside Out Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Vojvodina, The Mongolian National Modern Art Gallery, The National Museum of Jewish American History and The National Symposium for Electronic Art. Segall received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The Harpo Foundation and Art Matters and attended residencies at Princeton University, The Van Eyck Academie, The MacDowell Colony and Skowhegan. Her work has been featured in Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times, Sculpture Magazine, Mousse Magazine and Art in America. She received her BA from Bard College and MFA from Columbia University.

Candice Hopkins is a curator and writer and a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation. She lives between Albuquerque, New Mexico and Toronto, Canada. She is Senior Curator of the 2019 and 2021 editions of the Toronto Biennial of Art. Hopkins was co-curator of major exhibitions including the Canadian Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennial featuring the media art collective Isuma; the 2018 SITE Santa Fe biennial, Casa Tomada; documenta 14 in Athens, Greece and Kassel, Germany; Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art; and Close Encounters: The Next 500 Year. Her writing is published widely and her recent essays and presentations include "The Appropriation Debates (or The Gallows of History)" for MIT Press; “Outlawed Social Life," for South as a State of Mind; and "The Gilded Gaze: Wealth and Economies on the Colonial Frontier," for the documenta 14 Reader. 

July 22, 6:30 PM EST
Betsy Damon
Eliza Evans 
Carla Maldonado
Eleanor Heartney, art writer, contributing editor, Art in America

Betsy Damon (American, b. 1940) is water artist whose public work and living systems have received widespread acclaim. She created important feminist ritual performances in public space in New York: 7,000 Year Old Woman (1976-79), Blind Beggar Woman (1979-81), A Rape Memory (1981-83), The Shrine for Everywoman (1985-1990), and A Mediation With Stones for the Survival of the Planet (1983-89), and exhibited at P.S.1 in the 1980s. The installation The Memory of Clean Water shown at the Everhart Museum, traveled to many museums, 1986-91. At the age of 50, Damon changed the focus of her art to center on water, its conservation and protection, and its impact on the society. Among her large scale projects mobilizing art, science and communities around local water problems, are those on the Cheyenne River, ND (2019), in Larimer, PA (2012-2016), Olympic Forest Park, Beijing, China (2002-06), for the Beijing Bureau of Hydraulic Research & Engineering, China (2001-2003), and Living Water Garden, Chengdu, China (1996).

Eliza Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. The initial parameters of each work are carefully researched and then evolve as a result of interaction with people, time, and weather. Evans was born in a rustbelt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between New York City and the Hudson Valley. Her work was exhibited at the Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), Chashama Sculpture Field, Pine Plains, NY (2018), BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and Purchase College, Purchase, NY (2017). Residencies include the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), Bronx Museum AIM, and Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN (both 2019). Evans holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase College in visual art and a Ph.D. in economic sociology from the University of Texas at Austin.

Carla Maldonado (Brasilian, b. 1986) is a multimedia artist, working in photography, film and installation. Her work responds to socio-political issues; patriarchy and the environmental crisis, and explores the struggle of progressive movements in Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and her immigrant experience in Trump’s era U.S. Maldonado's intuitively observational process is based on photographic and video documentation of environments she navigates and people she encounters – focusing on rebels, misfits and revolutionaries. She showed at the Satellite Art Show in Miami and Brooklyn; Film Fest at the Farm, Rhinebeck, NY; School of Visual Arts, NYC, SoMad Studio, NYC (all 2019); Barcelona Planet Film Festival, Spain (2018); and The Knockdown Center, Brooklyn (2017). She has BFA in Fashion Design from Senai Cetiqt, Rio de Janeiro, 2007; and MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media, SVA in New York, 2019. Maldonado lives and works in New York City and is currently AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum.

Eleanor Heartney is an art critic and author and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for many publications, including Art in America, Artpress, Artnews, Art and Auction, The New Art Examiner, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Her books include Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads, Postmodernism, Defending Complexity: Art Politics and the New World Order, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, Art and Today and Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art, and The Reckoning: Women Artists of the New Millennium. She is past President of AICA USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. Her awards include the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award and the French government’s Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres

September 16, 6:30 PM EST
Raquel Cecilia Mendieta, niece and goddaughter of Ana Mendieta
Mira Friedlaender, daughter of Bilge Friedlaender

Raquel Cecilia Mendieta is a filmmaker, writer, and video artist most known for her recent films on her aunt, artist Ana Mendieta. Her films have screened at film festivals and art museums world-wide. She is the Associate Administrator for the Estate of Ana Mendieta Collection and was responsible for overseeing the digital restoration of the artist’s works on film and video. She is currently working on a feature length documentary about the life and art of Ana Mendieta.

Mira Friedlaender is an artist living in New York City, and has exhibited  locally and internationally. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and Bomb, she is a recent fellow in the Art & Law Program and has held public facing residencies at the American Center in Bangladesh and Recess in New York City. She is the Director of the Bilge Friedlaender Estate and co-curated Bilge Friedlaender: Words, Numbers, Lines at Arter in Istanbul (2016).