Shannon Goff is associate professor of sculpture and ceramics in Penn State’s School of Visual Arts. In 2015 she taught a special sculpture seminar called “Pulp Fictions,” wherein her students reconsidered sculpture as a vehicle for social and environmental action. On Earth Day, her students created an installation near the HUB-Robeson Student Center titled Plastic Dreadnaught, in which hundreds of plastic bottles collected around campus were re-made into miniature terrariums and given away to passerby. Goff said, “the event truly became about exchange and awareness. Artists are not always and only creating objects for the white cube (gallery) environment.” Her teaching philosophy emphasizes that “everyday detritus serves as a springboard for the creation of objects, installations, experiences, and awareness.”
For more info, visit:
http://www.shannongoff.info
https://sova.psu.edu/story/plastic-dreadnaught-phat-plant-mini-greenhouse-giveaway
By Skype
Nicolas Lampert is a Milwaukee-based interdisciplinary artist and author whose work focuses on themes of social justice and ecology. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, among others. Collectively, he works with three groups: the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative – a worker-owned printmaking cooperative of thirty artists in North America that formed in 2007, ReciproCity – a mobile experimental cultural center that focuses on urban agricultural projects and community activism in Milwaukee and beyond, and Climate Prints – a website/activist infrastructure project that shares downloadable graphics on Climate Justice and puts this work directly into movements. Lampert has collaborated as an artist on past activist campaigns with TAMMS Year Ten, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Voces de la Frontera, the Chicago chapter of the Rain Forest Action Network, and 350.org. His first book A People’s Art History of the United States: 250 Years of Activist Art and Artists Working in Social Justice Movements was published by The New Press in 2013 and is part of the People’s History Series edited by Howard Zinn. Lampert is a full-time faculty member (academic staff appointment) in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee with a joint appointment in Printmaking and Writing and Critical Thinking.