Martabel Wasserman // TJ Demos // Laurie Palmer // Being Together in Radical Ways

CAA Conversations

Professor T.J. Demos, Professor Laurie Palmer, and artist and curator Martabel Wasserman talk about art, pedagogy, and environmental justice. We discuss the formation of new networks of collaborative learning in and beyond the university. What can academia learn from activist pedagogies? Note: This conversation was recorded in autumn 2020. Martabel Wasserman is a scholar, artist, writer, and curator who has an interdisciplinary practice at the intersections of art, activism and academic research. She writes on the aesthetics of solidarity and feminist art and environmentalism, and she has curated numerous exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Van Gallery in Los Angeles, and elsewhere. TJ Demos is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. He is also the director of the Center for Creative Ecologies at UC Santa Cruz. He has published numerous articles and books, and his research focuses on modern and contemporary art and its politics, particularly amid the growing biopolitical conflicts around ecology and climate change. His most recent book is Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing which was just published by Duke last month. Laurie Palmer is Professor in the Department of Art at UC Santa Cruz. Her sculpture, installation, public art, and writing is often concerned with questions of materiality, collaboration, and social and environmental justice. Among her recent projects are the book In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction (published in 2014) and her work on the collaborative public project Chicago Torture Justice Memorials.