ART + ENVIRONMENT CHAT
Art And The Environment
Join us for this conversation on different ways of observing, measuring, and interacting with environments at the new Gray Center Co-Laboratory for Art and Science. For this event, we have gathered three scholars and practitioners who work in different ways and to different degrees with aesthetic/artistic and environmental issues. Liz McTernan (artist and Visiting Assistant Professor of art at the University of Iowa) will give insights into the interdisciplinary and research-oriented process of her art practice, in particular her conception of “anti-map.” By (anti)mapping environments, she problematizes and plays with methods of empiricism and media ecologies. David Keith (Professor of Geophysical Science and Founding Faculty Director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative, University of Chicago) brings his perspective from his research on climate science, energy technology, and public policy, in particular his research on public and expert perceptions of risky technologies. Jennifer Scappettone (Professor of English, University of Chicago) will speak about her scholarship on ecopoetics, environmental justice, the environmental humanities, and art and activism. We look forward to a lively discussion about how our thinking about and acting in environments is influenced by phenomenological encounters, scientific models, and communal practices.
Thursday, April 10, 2025, 6 pm, Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry
University of Chicago
929 E. 60th St.
Chicago, IL. 60637
Free and open to the public
Food and drinks will be served (6:00-6:30)
About the panelists:
Liz McTernan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of art at the University of Iowa. She earned her MFA from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, MD. Working regularly with scholars across fields, McTernan is a core member of the research group Experimenting, Experiencing, Reflecting (EER), an art-science collaboration led by artist Olafur Eliasson and scientist Andreas Roepstorff of Aarhus University in Denmark. Her work has been exhibited at Documenta 15, and her academic texts have been published in the MIT Press Leonardo Journal and ScienceOpen. She has been granted numerous awards across Europe and the US, including a Big Field Fund grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation (Iowa City, US); nomination to the Long List of the Preis der Nationalgalerie 2021 (Berlin, Germany); the Danish International Visiting Artist (DIVA) Grant; and residencies such as Ars Bioarctica in Arctic Finland and Leitrim Sculpture Centre in Ireland.
David Keith has worked near the interface between climate science, energy technology, and public policy since 1990. He took first in Canada’s national physics prize exam, won MIT’s prize for excellence in experimental physics, and was one of TIME Magazine’s Heroes of the Environment. David is Professor of Geophysical Sciences and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative at the University of Chicago.
Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts. She is the author of Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice(Columbia University Press, 2014) and of the forthcoming Poetry After Barbarism: The Invention of Motherless Tongues and Resistance to Fascism (Columbia University Press, 2025). Her poetry collections include FromDame Quickly (Litmus, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (Atelos, 2016); her poetry has been exhibited and installed at venues ranging from 6018North to the Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art. She is currently working on the second book of a diptych scoring the environmental, health, and affective impacts of transnational mining and waste economies: this project devoted to the “copper lyre” subtending modern telecommunications networks, Pennies from Nether, began at the Gray Center and was a finalist for the 2024 Creative Capital Award in Literature. She is curating a series of floating workshops devoted to the geopoetics of urban rivers comparing the fraught dynamic of water within the built environment in Paris with that of Chicago, the would-be “Paris on the Prairie.” She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she founded the Environmental Humanities + Arts Lab.
