Amanda Boetzkes, University of Guelph
“At the Moraine of the Greenland Ice Sheet: Thinking With Glacier Melt”
Amanda Boetzkes (faculty webpage, personal webpage) is Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on the aesthetics and ethics of art as these intersect with ecology and visual technologies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. She is the author of Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (MIT Press, 2019), The Ethics of Earth Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and co-editor of Heidegger and the Work of Art History (Ashgate, 2014). Her current project, Ecologicity, Vision and Art for a World to Come considers modes of visualizing Arctic environments in the midst of competing global perspectives of climate change. She has published in the journals Afterimage; Postmodern Culture; The Large Glass; Art History; and e-flux among others. Recent book chapter appear in Climate Realism (Routledge, 2020); Materialism and the Critique of Energy (2018); The Edinburgh Companion for Animal Studies (2017); and Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Politics, Aesthetics, Environments and Epistemologies (2015).
Beatriz Cortez, California State University, Northridge
“On Generosity, Becoming, and the Construction of the Future”
Beatriz Cortez (artist website) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador; Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California; and Museo Municipal Tecleño, El Salvador. Her recent group exhibitions include In Plain Sight at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine at Ballroom Marfa in Texas; Unfolding Universes at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Utopian Imagination at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Paroxysm of Sublime at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Ingestion at TEORé/Tica in San José, Costa Rica; Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the Queens Museum, New York; and Chronos, Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Cortez has received the Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Julie Sze, University of California, Davis
“Fugitive Humanism, Humor, and Radical Hope”
Julie Sze (faculty webpage) is Professor and the Founding Chair of American Studies at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (MIT Press, 2007), Fantasy Islands: Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis (University of California Press, 2015), and, most recently, Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger (University of California Press, 2020). Sze edited the collection Sustainability: Approaches to Environmental Justice and Social Power (NYU Press, 2018) and has written over 50 articles and book chapters. Her research is on environmental inequalities, the relationship between social movements and policy implementation, and the areas of public and environmental humanities.
