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Critic and curator Lucy Lippard once asked, “How well does culture stand up for nature?” Throughout 2020, Amplify’s Alternate Currents Working Group investigated, collaborated, and developed project based work that returned to that question time and time again. On November 19th at 7pm Corson Androski, Travis Apel, Erin Foley, Dawaune Lamont Hayes, Rynn Kerkhove, Alex O’Hanlon, Sarah Rowe, Angie Seykora, and Molly Toberer will be in conversation to discuss their work as multiple propositions offered in response to that question.
From water filtration systems, to legal interventions, to relational exercises designed to reveal complex webs of human and other-than-human interdependencies, learn more about how these 10 artists and culture workers center ecological and environmental justice in their work.
Join us for this conversation, moderated by Annika Johnson, Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum, by registering here. You will receive a confirmation email with a link to join the discussion on Zoom after registering. And don’t forget to visit the Alternate Currents Blog to learn more about Amplify’s 2020 Alternate Currents Working Group before the discussion!
Alternate Currents opens space for conversation, ideation, and action around national and international discussions in the arts that have a profound impact at the local level. Alternate Currents exists both on- and off-line in the form of a dedicated online resource, conversation series, and collaborative working group.
Free and open to all. Virtual programming is presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About the Panelists:
Corson Androski is a researcher, conservationist, software developer, and photographer/filmmaker from Hutchinson, Kansas. Their work uses the concept of care—as labor, affect, and ethic, given/received by humans and other-than-humans, individuals and systems—to consider subjects like institutional medicine alongside state ecological regulation, and beyond their respective margins, emergent communities of illness alongside informal conservation of the small, overlooked ecosystems of weeds and fungi that spring up in the seams of our patchwork flyover states.
Travis Apel was selected as a Work In Progress Fellow through Amplify Arts. He is an Outstanding 3D Artist nominee in 2018 and 2019 through Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards. Apel has focused his work through artist residencies at BarkerArt Hot Shops Art Center in, Kimmel Harding Nelson Arts Center in, El Museo Latino, and Mary Our Queen Catholic School. He was selected for a Friends of UNO Artslam+ presentation in 2015, and was honored through partnership with Mid-America Arts Alliance and formerly Omaha Creative Institute for a professional development fellowship in Artist INC Live Omaha in 2014. Apel is a 1994 Missouri Silver Scholarship recipient from Kansas City Art Institute. Apel has exhibited throughout the midwest and his work is represented in collections nationally.
Erin Foley earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005 and MFA from the University of Southern California in 2012. Foley taught art and design + build classes for Urban Gateways and Afterschool Matters in Chicago, adjunct instructed Critical Studies and Art History at USC and Iowa Western Community College, managed Michael Rakowitz’s studio (Chicago) and assisted Andrea Zittel (Joshua Tree). In 2019 Foley earned her BSBA with an emphasis in Accounting at the University of Nebraska Omaha where she currently adjuncts a Sculpture class. She guest lectures on tax and finances at Amplify Arts and is the Finance Manager at Film Streams in Omaha.
Dawaune Lamont Hayes is an inter-disciplinarian working at the intersections of performance, social design, sustainability, and journalism. Hayes is a trained dancer, working journalist, and visual artist focusing on long-term community impact. By challenging conventional spaces through nontraditional means, Hayes synthesizes supposed opposites into new forms and processes.
Rynn Kerkhove is an urban environmental planner with backgrounds in food systems, affordable housing, and community engagement. While getting her degrees in Global Resource Systems and Urban Planning at Iowa State, she was fortunate to have many opportunities to explore the complexities of urban environments. In 2016, she was the Gerhardt intern at 1000 Friends of Oregon, writing a report on Oregon’s food system. 2018 was a busy year: Rynn interned at Iowa State Extension’s Community Visioning Program to work with small Iowa communities to plan transportation improvements; spent time during the summer working in the Cuenca, Ecuador Planning Department to gain a different perspective on planning abroad; and cofounded the Ames Tenants Union to give renters and houseless people an organized voice in her college town. Rynn currently works in the City of Omaha Planning Department.
Alex O’Hanlon is a community leader who is committed to supporting resident-led projects that enhance their quality of life. She’s worked as a Garden Manager for City Sprouts South where she coordinated programs, workshops, and events. Currently she works as Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/History from UNO and travels to California every fall to harvest olives.
Sarah Rowe is a visual and performance artist in Omaha, Nebraska. Her work addresses issues of self-identity and exploitation of natural resources. She re-imagines traditional Native American symbology to fit the narrative of our modern cultural landscape. Her work opens meaningful cross cultural dialogues by utilizing methods of painting, casting, textiles, performance, and Native American rituals in unconventional ways. Rowe is of Lakota and Ponca descent. She cofounded Sweatshop Gallery and has exhibited her work nationally.
Angie Seykora creates installation, sculpture, drawing, and painting that repurpose industrial and found materials. Through process driven, almost mechanical methods of assembly, she emphasizes accumulation and tactile materiality to produce work that references the history of minimalism, bodily systems, and "thinking through making". She received an MFA in Sculpture from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. In 2018 Seykora was the recipient of an Unrestricted Artist Grant from Amplify Arts and in 2016, was recognized as a Distinguished Artist by the the Nebraska Arts Council through the award of an Individual Artist Fellowship. In 2013, she was presented with the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture award from the International Sculpture Center, where she was selected for the Art-St-Urban Sculpture Residency in St. Urban, Switzerland. Angie Seykora is an instructor of drawing and sculpture at Creighton University. Her work is exhibited and collected on a national and international level.
Molly Toberer earned her MFA from University of Minnesota, School of Art and Art History (2000) and her BFA with honors from University of Kansas College of Visual Art & Design (1994). Her professional visual art research includes advocating for visual artists in the international art fair market, conducting workshops as a visual artist-educator, garnering civic public-art projects, and acting in artist-curator roles for the Department of Cultural Affairs of Los Angeles and Los Angeles World Airports [LAWA]. Toberer currently lives and works in Omaha, Nebraska restarting her sculpture practice creating hand-made objects and mediating public spaces utilizing the metaphors of industrial and repurposed materials such as metal, plastic and light that speak to human empowerment and transformation against the forces of humanity’s accelerated impact on the earth.
About the Moderator:
Annika Johnson is Associate Curator of Native American Art at the Joslyn Art Museum where she is developing installations, programming, and research initiatives in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Her research and curatorial projects examine nineteenth-century Native American art and exchange with Euro-Americans, as well as contemporary artistic and activist engagements with the histories and ongoing processes of colonization. Annika received her PhD in art history from the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 and grew up in Minnesota, Dakota homelands called Mni Sota Makoce.