Dear Friends and Colleagues,
As part of the University’s strategic plan, we’re seeing a focus on
Energy and the Environment as a strategic research area at UT. Our faculty, curators and guest artists are thinking deeply about the environment, both as theme and as material, in our research, creative practice, invited guest artists and our public programming, and I wanted to use this issue of Dean’s Insider to highlight some examples of the innovative ways our community is exploring and discussing this important topic.
- I recently attended a performance of FOOD by Geoff Sobelle, hosted by Texas Performing Arts. The performance was staged as an intimate dinner party that explored our relationship with food, the origins of our food and how our appetite has reshaped our environment.
- On a recent trip to San Antonio, I visited Ruby City’s group exhibition Water Ways, which brings together works that make direct reference to water and art that uses water metaphorically. Our own faculty members Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler had work featured in the exhibition. Their two photographs, derived from their film House with Pool (2004), render human interaction through objects and environments, like the pool. Their newest piece, Past Deposits from a Future Yet to Come, a large-scale video installation premiering this weekend at Austin’s Waterloo Park, expands on this theme by pursuing objects found on the grounds and underwater along the adjacent creek, and the community histories they illustrate may account for and the futures they may foretell.
- In the Visual Arts Center, our spring artists-in-residence are Afroborikua sibling duo Las Nietas de Nonó, whose work involves pursuit of community across registers (from microscopic cultivation of material to traversed landscapes) that tell the stories and animate the possibilities of Black life.
- Studio Art Associate Professor Will Wilson was recently interviewed by The Met about his ongoing series Auto Immune Response (AIR), which “takes as its subject the quixotic relationship between a post-apocalyptic Diné (Navajo) man and the devastatingly beautiful, but toxic environment he inhabits.”
- Performance as Public Practice Associate Professor Rosemary Candelario joined our faculty this fall as part of our Expanding Approaches to American Arts initiative. She recently traveled to the UT Marine Science Institute to meet with faculty members about how they might collaborate to explore science, climate and geopolitical issues through their combined lenses of performance/performance studies, anthropology and marine science. They hope to develop a hybrid transdisciplinary course to tackle these complex issues.
- Studio Art Professor Beili Liu has traveled throughout the Arctic in the past couple of years, researching and creating new work that explores the “complex ecological, political, and environmental concerns facing the Circumpolar North and the urgency of the climate crisis on a planetary scale.” She’s incorporated performance, video and site-specific three-dimensional works around climate themes into recent exhibitions in Norway and the United States.
I’ve been impressed with both the breadth and depth of work coming out of our college around the environment. Planet Texas 2050 is the university’s Bridging Barriers project, which brings together expertise from across and beyond campus to explore climate resilience, and our faculty have been
well-represented alongside scientists and engineers — a testament to the role the arts can play as we work collectively to imagine a more resilient future for our planet.
Sincerely,
