In this talk, Professor Laurie Palmer will introduce The Lichen Museum, and contextualize its framing within practices of land art and histories of museum cultures, while preparing visitors to enter at any time, free of charge.
ADMISSION
Free and open to the public
Attend in person.
COVID-19 protocols required for entry; please view here in advance of the event.
See below for Parking information.
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ABOUT THE TALK
The Lichen Museum is an inside-out institution vastly distributed across diverse surfaces of the earth, locally experienced and multiply constituted. This museum invites audiences to consider “watching” as a practice of reciprocity and exchange with the material world, and to open up a space for imagining the re-distribution of agency and attribution of value between humans and what has been considered passive matter or “lesser” beings. The museum carries the potential to expand our understandings and experiences of time, to broaden our thinking about relational identities, to upset hierarchies of value and visibility, and to counter rhetorics of scarcity, fear and competition at the heart of capitalism’s privatized individualism with a visceral experience of alternative pathways already underway.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
A. Laurie Palmer is an artist and writer, and currently the Director of Graduate Studies for the Environmental Art and Social Practice (EASP) M.F.A. program at UC Santa Cruz. Her place-based, research-oriented artworks take form as sculpture, public projects, and artist books, and she collaborates on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. Her first book, In the Aura of a Hole (2014), explored large-scale material extraction sites in the US; her current book, The Lichen Museum, which will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in early 2023, explores lichen's role as an intimately-scaled anti-capitalist companion and climate change survivor.
Palmer collaborated with the four-person art collective Haha for twenty years on site- and community-based projects, and was a founding member of Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, seeking justice and reparations for survivors of police torture. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally, including at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Grimaldi Forum, Monaco; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Artists Space, NY; Aperto XLV Venice Biennale; Magasin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; MASS MoCA, North Adams.
ABOUT THE SERIES
The annual Visual and Media Cultures Colloquia (VMCC) at UC Santa Cruz are a collaboration between the graduate programs in Film and Digital Media Department and Visual Studies in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department. The series brings an array of cutting-edge scholars to speak on a broad spectrum of subjects.
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PARKING
Purchase a permit in advance or use ParkMobile at the event.
The $5 flat rate for evenings (after 4:30 p.m.) is offered in Lot 112, the Core West Parking Structure, which is closest to the Communications Building.
See Transportation & Parking Services (TAPS) for visitor parking information, ParkMobile instructions, and a campus parking map.