Institute of Contemporary Art Miami ICA Miami

This one-day free mini symposium features two presentations by art historian Joshua Shannon (University of Maryland) and geographer Stephanie Wakefield (Florida Atlantic University), followed by a conversation between speakers led by Associate Curator Donna Honarpisheh  around the role of contemporary art in climate discourse. Talks will include a discussion of the human and nonhuman in contemporary art history as well as the relationship between art and design, nature and technology in the current climate crisis.

Symposium Schedule:

Joshua Shannon: Trees and Fungus, or Living Relationally: The Art of Wangechi Mutu

This talk considers contemporary art’s preoccupation with trees and fungus, focusing on works in which the human-nonhuman relationship is defined by dialogue and exchange. The talk focuses especially on what we can learn from the recent collages and sculptures of the Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu, which depict creatures who are at once human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, male and female, and beyond racial categorization.

Stephanie Wakefield: Art Against Man: A Postmortem on Climate Art and Design

While climate change art is at the epicenter of the ‘painted protest,’ the past decade’s reduction of culture to a medium of social activism in the service of ‘the resistance,’ the roots of this aesthetic phenomenon are much deeper. In fact, since the 1960s art, design, and nature have been welded into an ideological tool —martial, didactic, and imaginal— to overturn Western frameworks and enforce alignment with anti-humanism, including through design of physical environments. Considering this operationalization philosophically and technically, the lecture explores the role nature-related art and design played in constructing the global imaginary of climate crisis and vulnerable cities. Declaring that sequence finished and the 21st century begun, the lecture outlines another relationship between art and design, nature and technology, one more appropriate for our accelerating, networked present of spiritual rebirth and Martian cities and AI hallucinations.