Owning Earth Closing Reception
An open dialogue with the curator and artists to discuss what we learned as a community from this show and what comes next.
Owning Earth Re-Opening Reception & Catalog Release Party
Join us in celebration of the spring reopening of Owning Earth, an outdoor sculptural exhibition at Unison Arts. Come meet the artists, experience the artworks, and get your copy of the exhibition catalog, which we will be launching at the event. Light refreshments provided.
In the Woods at 3am
An Owning Earth performance event lead by artists Michael Asbill and Derek Stroup of Owning Earth, is a session of deep listening and sensing at Unison Arts as night gives way to day.
On Community-Based Art and Catastrophe
A roundtable discussion featuring Adiene Jenik, Li Sumpter, and Tal Beery exploring recent works that address grief, grievance, and healing during global pandemic and social upheaval.
Faiths in Mourning
Traditional expressions of grief and loss have been severely restricted during covid. Our panel of speakers will discuss how different faiths are facing these challenges and are adapting their traditions in these troubled times.
Virtual Opening: in the absence of a proper mourning
Join us virtually at JMM as we officially open our latest project, in the absence of a proper mourning. This installation asks us to confront numerous difficult questions related to our connections to one another and transforms the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s public-facing facade into a site for collective mourning and communal care.
Educating for a Just Ecological Transition: Building Higher Educational Alliances in a Time of Climate Crisis
A virtual summit engaging with emerging responses to the climate crisis in higher education—with particular attention to the roles higher education institutions can play in building alliances with social movements, community organizations, artists, intellectuals, and informal educational structures.
Burial for White Supremacy by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
A free outdoor public performance by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak preparing the ground for his work in Owning Earth, an outdoor exhibition opening at Unison Arts in Spring 2021. he artist encourages individuals to participate in this performance by bringing objects they own—personal or public symbols of White Supremacy—to include in the burial.
Art for Non-Humans
Michael Asbill and Derek Stroup, Sketch for "Sacred Hearts," Mixed Media, 2020
Join us via Zoom Thursday, September 24 at 8pm EST for Art for Non-Humans, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at "Owning Earth," opening Spring 2021 in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.
Our panel will feature artists Eleanor King, Lucy Pullen, Michael Asbill, Derek Stroup, and Sarah Max Beck. They will discuss the ways their pieces for Owning Earth seek to expand aesthetic practices and notions of kinship by engaging non-human audiences with human-made artworks. The panel will be introduced and moderated by Tal Beery.
About Owning Earth
Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.
More info:https://www.unisonarts.org/owning-earth
About the Panelists
Eleanor King
Eleanor King is an interdisciplinary artist working in installation art that responds to our physical, social, and economic landscape. Her works have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, Nuit Blanche, Franklin Street Works, Spring/Break Art Show, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, and Diaz Contemporary, among others. She attended residencies at The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, SOMA Mexico, the Banff Centre, and A.I.R. Gallery. Her work has been featured in Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Art in America. Eleanor is a Fulbright fellow, and received grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and Arts Nova Scotia. Eleanor holds a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA form Purchase College, SUNY, where she works in the School of Art+Design.
Lucy Pullen
Lucy Pullen is a Canadian artist based in New York. Her work was the subject of exhibitions at The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver; Art Metropole in Toronto; and survey exhibitions at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Tate Modern in London England among others. Current site- specific installations include The University of Victoria, North in Kitchener and The Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. In 2019 she formed Level Foundation, a platform for public art in Brooklyn, with a large-scale work by Eleanor King.
Michael Asbill
Michael Asbill weaves arts advocacy, community engagement, environmentalism, and curatorial endeavor into his installation and public art practice. His work has been experienced in venues such as Sporobole and Galerie Zybaldone (Sherbrooke, QC), Flux Factory (Long Island City, NY), The Oregon City Elevator, and the Poughkeepsie Train Station. As a core collaborator with Habitat for Artists, Michael contributed to eco and social engagement projects for Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Arts Brookfield (New York, NY), Washington DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Michael is the founder and director of CHRCH Project Space (Rosendale, NY), a residency for the development of pioneering, community-based, participatory artworks. Michael is a visiting lecturer, and currently head of the sculpture program, at the State University of New York in New Paltz.
Derek Stroup
Derek Stroup is an artist based in New York. He studied with Helen Harrison and Eleanor Antin, and was an assistant to Robert Irwin. In addition to sculptural and photographic projects, he is the author of six artist books and was co editor of Field magazine, a print-only magazine of contemporary art. Publications include photographs in Kalle Lasn’s Meme Wars: The Creative Destruction of Neoclassical Economics, and Various Small Books (Referencing the Work Of Ed Ruscha) by the MIT press.
Sarah Max Beck
Sarah Max Beck’s body of work builds on symbiotic, closed-loop human nutrient systems; redefining waste as resource; and comments, often wryly and self-consciously, on the parallels of current elective human influence on the planet and a parasitic infection of a host. A background in agriculture became tangled up with a sculpture degree until a creative practice with compost, resource recovery, fermentation, permaculture, and post-consumer plastics all amalgamated into bioart. Beck is co-founder of studioHydrostatic, a collaborative bioart lab in NYC.
“a-Historical Landscapes” by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
An online discussion with artist and educator Jean-Marc Superville Sovak about his “a-Historical Landscapes” series.
In Conversation: Eliza Evans
Join us for an online interview featuring artist Eliza Evans in conversation with Tal Beery of Arts and Ecology. This discussion will focus on Evans' latest project, All the Way to Hell, an activist art project for disrupting fossil fuel development on private land in the US.
On Precarity
Sam Spillman, Terminal (2017)
On Precarity: Owning Earth Panel Discussion
Our panel will feature artists Eileen Wold and Sam Spillman. We will discuss the ways art practice can help us embrace experiences of uncertainty and vulnerability. The panel will be facilitated by Tal Beery.
About Owning Earth
Owning Earth is an ambitious, two-year outdoor exhibition in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts. It will help bring critical attention to an emerging movement of creative practitioners undertaking outdoor installations and land-based projects that problematize notions of control, confront systems of domination, and prepare the soil for futures guided by mutuality and reverence.
Speaker Bios
Eileen Wold
Eileen Wold received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and currently teaches a critical studies course in the Studio Art MFA program there. Wold is the co-founder of the online artist publication Black Bucket Essays and has been organizing group exhibitions through a pop-up gallery space she created in her studio building outside of Seattle. Her research and art practice examines the issues of power production, environmental conservation, and ecological vulnerability.
Sam Spillman
Sam Spillman is an artist who creates architectural environments that embody anxiety and suspense through an exploration of psychological states in physical space. Spillman’s site-specific installations use existing architecture as a point of departure for interactions that make the familiar unfamiliar. He has an MFA from the School of Art + Design at Purchase College SUNY, where he is currently a Lecturer in the Sculpture Department. His work has been included in exhibitions in New York City, Westchester, Pine Plains and Ithaca NY.
On Visibility and Restoration
Image courtesy of how to perform an abortion (Maureen Connor, Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton)
Join us for On Visibility and Restoration, a panel discussion featuring five artists exhibiting pieces at Owning Earth, opening this fall in the Sculpture Garden at Unison Arts.
Our panel will feature artists jackie sumell, Maureen Connor, Eugenia Manwelyan, Landon Newton, and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. They will discuss the ways their land-based proposals for Owning Earth aim to expose, and perhaps heal, deep-seated injustices.
Speaker Bios:
jackie sumell
jackie sumell is a multidisciplinary artist and abolitionist inspired most by the lives of everyday people. Her work has been successfully anchored at the intersection of activism, education, mindfulness practices and art for nearly two decades, and it has been exhibited extensively throughout the world. She has been the recipient of multiple residencies and fellowships including, but not limited to, a Source Fellowship, A Blade of Grass, Robert Rauschenberg Artist-as-Activist Fellowship, a Soros Justice Fellowship, an Eyebeam Fellowship, a Headlands Residency and a Schloss Solitude Residency Fellowship. sumell’s collaboration with Herman Wallace (a prisoner-of-consciousness and member of the Angola 3) was the subject of the Emmy Award-Winning documentary Herman’s House. sumell’s work with Herman has positioned her at the forefront of the national campaign to end solitary confinement and seek humane alternatives to incarceration.
Landon Newton
Landon Newton (she/her) is a Brooklyn based artist and gardener. She is interested in the relationships between plants and people. Her current research-driven practice explores the history of herbal medicine, specifically the use of plants and herbs for birth control and abortion. She has participated in the EcoFutures, Deep Trash and Queer-feminist Ecocriticism conference, London, UK, Open Engagement, SUSTAINABILITY, Featured Project: The Abortion Herb Garden, Queens Museum, Queens, NY, and is a member of the collaborative how to perform an abortion. In 2018 she was a visiting artist fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has held residencies at the Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA and Elsewhere Studios, Paonia, CO. She has a BA from Smith College, an MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and studied horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden.
Maureen Connor
Working in NY as artist and educator since 1970, Maureen Connor’s collaborative projects have focused on human relationships and social change for more than 20 years. Internationally recognized for her feminist work from the eighties and nineties, she received grants from the Guggenheim, the NEA, NYFA and Anonymous Was a Woman, among others. Co-founder (2016) of reproductive justice collaborative how to perform an abortion, they recently created Reproductive Justice Garden and Waiting Room, ongoing on SUNY Purchase campus. Her podcast Shouldn’t We Talk, launching in Summer, 2020, features interviews and discussions about the beginning of the end of patriarchy.
Eugenia Manwelyan
Eugenia Manwelyan (she/her) is a director, choreographer, and planning practitioner who arrived in the US from Russia at the age of six. She is the founder of Eco Practicum desk-free school for arts and ecology, founding faculty of School of Apocalypse, and a member of collectives and working groups including Bodies Intersect Buildings, Choreographies for Survival, and how to perform an abortion. As a visiting faculty at Columbia University, Eugenia has worked on environmental planning and arts projects in the New York bioregion as well as India, Vietnam, and Jordan. She was a recent SU CASA fellow and her work has been supported by NYSCA, LMCC, Pioneer Works, Columbia University and shared at venues including the Martha Graham Dance Studio, New Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and AIR Gallery.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
Jean-Marc is a multidisciplinary artist whose work deeply involves the community around him. Among an array of public art projects, Jean-Marc has built and toured a Tiny House of Steel, staged a neighborhood portrait drawing-as-oral-history storefront, constructed a brick wall with a built-in hole, produced videos of his doppelgangers and given guided tours of NYC housing projects. His work has been exhibited at the Samuel Dorsky Museum, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Manifesta 8 European Biennial. He is the illustrator of several award-winning novels by Julie Chibbaro. He lives and works with Julie in Beacon, NY.
Don't Call It a Pivot: Performing Arts in the Pandemic
Don’t Call it a Pivot: Performing Arts in the Pandemic is an online panel discussion bringing together the leaders of respected performing arts organizations in the Hudson Valley and Catskills of various sizes to discuss how they are responding to the pandemic and how they think this moment will (or will not) have a lasting impact on the performing arts sector in the region.
Panelists Include:
Eric Frances, CEO, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts
Liza Parker, Executive Director, Fisher Center for the Performing Arts
Adrienne Willis, Executive and Artistic Director, Lumberyard Center for Film and Performing Arts
Alex Baer, Executive Director, Unison Arts
Sherma Williams, Owner/Operator, Main Street Dance
Introduction by:
Erin Dudley, Executive Director, The Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre
Discussion Moderated by:
Tal Beery, Chief Development Officer, The Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre
Material Worlds: Owning Earth Panel and Discussion
Our panel will feature artists Alex Young, Matthew Friday, Brooke Singer, Colin Lyons, and Robert C Beck. They will discuss the ways their proposals for Owning Earth explore the connections between art and science, and complicate popular solutions to existing environmental challenges. The panel will be facilitated by Tal Beery.
Im/Possible Futures: Owning Earth Panel Discussion
Our panel will feature artists Erin Antonak, Christy Gast, Emilie Houssart, and Sariah Park. They will discuss the ways their proposals for Owning Earth challenge existing paradigms and open new realms of possibility. The panel will be facilitated by Tal Beery.
Learning Our Way Out of This Mess: Education and the Climate Crisis
A workshop to envision new ways of teaching and learning to confront environmental crisis. Workshop participants will work together to distill a set of educational principles from their own personal experiences and use them to develop plans for new programs on campus that can mobilize the student body. We will also explore the many roles artists can play in instigating profound learning experiences for a wide variety of audiences.
Education as a Tool for Food System Transformation
We will mine our personal experiences to co-generate a list of elements of impactful learning, review best practices in community-based education, and use the Eco Practicum curriculum building tool to begin designing action-oriented educational programs to address North Country food system challenges.
Currency: What do you value?
Currency: What do you value? is a group exhibition that asks questions about the relationship between art and money, exploring the flaws of our current economic reality. The featured artists expose the complex relationships between currency and how society values or doesn’t value art, work and time.
A Slow Pedagogy for Instituent Practice
This lecture considers how art schools might adjust to accommodate those artists undertaking new instituent practices. It distills principles for the slow multidisciplinary pedagogy required for these practices to thrive in the academy by drawing on frameworks developed by Nomad9 MFA, Beespace, and School of Apocalypse.
Occupying the Museum
Occupying the Museum begins with a 45 minute lecture to define and illustrate each of these tactics through the work of the Illuminator, Natural History Museum, Fossil Free Culture NL, Gulf Labor, Liberate Tate, MTL+, and Occupy Museums. We then divide into smaller groups to develop actions aimed at addressing a particular target, namely, the Van Gogh Museum.
How Will Art Survive Us?
A lecutre on two artist-run institutions he has co-founded to help address what we have become.
How does your economic reality affect your activism?
As social capital seems to rise for protest art in the Trump era, actual resources needed to do our work remain scarce while many channels of potential financial support are considered vulgar in relation to the purity of our practice. This is the razor thin line that activists walk within a hyper-market city and globe. So we ask, how do you make your decisions from both an ethical and practical standpoint in order to sustain? As our practices are more urgent and harder than ever, we propose this question as a pathway to deepen our analysis of the picture of power in which we are included.
Citizen Participation: Directives and Diagrams
Continuing the focus on economic realities from our Debtfair campaign — where artist’s works are presented alongside information about their debts, jobs, and daily financial struggles— we turn to the economic realities of arts activist groups and the issue of the institutional capture of our work along with strategies for long-term sustainability.
Debtfair Bundle: artists affected by the Puerto Rican debt crisis
This project, first shown at the Whitney Museum’s Biennial 2017, is here reconceived by the artists of Occupy Museums to focus on the Puerto Rican debt crisis and the art-related debt of artists on the island. This project features works by artists Yasmin Hernández, Sofía Maldonado, Celestino Junior Ortiz, Norma Vila Rivero, Gamaliel Rodríguez, Adrian Viajero Román, Melquiades Rosario-Sastre, Nibia Pastrana Santiago, Jose Soto, and Gabriella Torres-Ferrer.
What Works on Water: Artists Define a New Field
We will meet with two members of the curatorial team behind Works on Water, the new triennial exhibition and performance series of art on, in, or with the water. We will discuss the relationships between art and the future of our waterways, and learn about the flourishing water art movement.
Utopia Planitia
The show puts to the test a deep exploration of value systems and an inversion of the art market pyramid.
Whitney Biennial
The 2017 Whitney Biennial, the seventy-eighth installment of the longest-running survey of American art, arrives at a time rife with racial tensions, economic inequities, and polarizing politics. Throughout the exhibition, artists challenge us to consider how these realities affect our senses of self and community. The Biennial features sixty-three individuals and collectives whose work takes a wide variety of forms, from painting and installation to activism and video-game design.
Making Progress
The artists in Making Progress confront the complacency of hopelessness with keen observation of the facts and a need to create different, better futures — from small and actionable to fantastical and utopian. Exhibiting a wide range of approaches and responses, from a top-down re-envisioning of institutions to more personal reactions, the works in this exhibition go beyond institutional and cultural critique. Whether realistically possible, or wishful thinking, or escapist, they not only critique systems of power and control but also devise creative strategies for survival. Making Progress demonstrates a tempered optimism: that amidst the chaos and uncertainty of the moment, art can expand our perception of what is possible.