The Evergreen Art Lecture Series presents a broad range of interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art issues by artists, writers, activists and scholars. The emphasis is to introduce the way in which a variety of practices undertake fields of inquiry in the arts. The series provides a lively forum for the exchange of ideas between the speakers, students, faculty and the public. The series will take place in the Experimental Theater at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA. Most of the talks take place on every other Wednesday, on even weeks, during the quarter from 11:30-1:00 pm and are free and open to the public.
Fall Quarter 2017
Week 2, 10/4 Storme Webber, interdisciplinary artist, writer
A writer, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator, Storme Webber was born and raised in Seattle where she attended Lakeside School. She holds an MFA in interdisciplinary arts from Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont. She has performed and toured her work internationally, and consistently foregrounds the work of other marginalized artists, most recently founding Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture in Seattle. Her poetry collections include Diaspora and Blues Divine. She has been featured in numerous anthologies, including Black Women and Writing: The Migration of Subject, International Queer Indigenous Voices, and The Popular Front of Contemporary Poetry, and in the documentaries Venus Boyz, What’s Right with Gays These Days, and Living Two Spirit.Webber received the 2015 James W. Ray Venture Project Award, which is funded by the Raynier Institute & Foundation through the Frye Art Museum | Artist Trust Consortium. The award supports and advances the creative work of outstanding artists living and working in Washington State and culminates in her current exhibition, “Casino: A Palimpsest,” at the Frye Art Museum.
Week 4, 10/18, Thalia Field, interdisciplinary writer, performer
Thalia Field was born in Chicago in 1966. After attending lycée in France, she graduated with honors from Brown University, where she was awarded the first John Hawkes prize in fiction. Thalia Field’s most recent novel is EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS (A Reality Fiction) from Solid Objects Press. Thalia Field also has three books published with New Directions: POINT AND LINE (2000) and INCARNATE: STORY MATERIAL (2004) and BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD. A performance novel, ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL) was published by Coffee House press in 2008, with film stills by Bill Morrison, and a hybrid essay/poem co-authored with French writer Abigail Lang, A PRANK OF GEORGES, was published by Essay Press. Thalia’s writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Theater, Central Park, Chain, and Conjunctions, where she served as editor and senior editor from 1995-1999. Performance works and plays include THE POMPEII EXHIBIT, composed by Toshiro Saruya, which was awarded an NEA commission grant in 1992, and HEY-STOP-THAT which was published in Theater magazine and produced at various US venues.
Week 6, 11/1, John Feoderov, visual artist
Born in Los Angeles of mixed Navajo (Diné) and European American heritage, John Feodorov grew up in the suburbs of Southern California while making annual visits to his family’s land on the Navajo Reservation. The time he spent with his grandparents on their homestead near the Anasazi ruins at Chaco Canyon New Mexico continues to inform his work. Feodorov is interested in creating art that both engages and confronts the viewer; often utilizing pop culture detritus, as well as sound and video, to create works that question ideas and assumptions about Spirituality, Identity and Place. His work explores the longing for spiritual (re)connection that can be easily exploited by charlatans, corporations and political forces. In addition, his paintings and drawings are experiments in creating hybrid mythical iconographies that respond to issues such as environmental disasters, consumerism, and post-Colonial identity.
Feodorov is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University in Bellingham Washington. In 2001 he was featured in the first season of the PBS television series, “Art 21: Art for the 21st Century” as well as in the companion book published by Harry N. Abrams. His work also appears in such publications as Time and Time Again, by Lucy R. Lippard; Manifestations, edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo; and A World of Art, edited by Henry M. Sayre. He served as an Arts Commissioner for the City of Seattle, worked as an artist/educator for various non-profit youth groups in the Seattle area
Week 8, 11/15 Bonnie Whiting, percussionist, musician
Bonnie Whiting performs and commissions new experimental music for percussion. She seeks out projects involving non-traditional notation, interdisciplinary performance, improvisation, and the speaking percussionist. Recent work includes a series of concerts at the John Cage Centennial Festival in Washington DC, and performance as a soloist in Tan Dun’s Water Passion under the baton of the composer himself. In 2011, she joined red fish blue fish percussion group in premiering the staged version of George Crumb’s Winds of Destiny directed by Peter Sellars and featuring Dawn Upshaw for Ojai Festival.
Whiting has collaborated with many of today’s leading new music groups, including eighth blackbird (the “Tune-in” festival at the Park Avenue Armory), the International Contemporary Ensemble (American premiere of James Dillon’s Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre), Bang on a Can (Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians for the LA Philharmonic’s Green Umbrella Series) and Ensemble Dal Niente (the Fromm Concerts at Harvard.) During the summer, she is a member of the Walden Players, enesmble in residence at the Walden School in Dublin, NH. She performs regularly with percussionist Allen Otte; they have presented concerts at The Stone in New York, The New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, throughout New Zealand, and at colleges and universities around the country. Her debut album, featuring an original solo-simultaneous realization of John Cage’s 45’ for a speaker and 27’10.554” for a percussionist, will be released by Mode Records in 2015.
Week 10, 12/6 Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray, environmental justice educator and scholar
Dr. Sarah Jaquette is Program Leader of their new Environmental Studies program at Humboldt State University. Ray’s interests include environmental justice, cultural studies, critical human geography, disability studies, and issues of power, identity, and discourses of nature. As she engages with each, she is passionate about putting the topics in conversation with each other: “I think it’s valuable to have a variety of activisms dealing with environmental issues,” she explains. “Some people may wonder why we need to be thinking about issues of identity, discourse, and social justice when the planet is at stake, and I hear that critique often. But I think this rhetoric of urgency is problematic, and I genuinely believe that we’re not going to save that planet unless we do so in ways that incorporate—as central to, not just as a byproduct of—concerns of social justice.”
