Program

3 Days | 32 Presentations

by Artists, Scholars, Administrators, Researchers, Students 

The Studio for Sustainability and Social Action (S3A) inaugural symposium and exhibition is organized around five themes: 
Care – Water – Food – Shelter – Cost.
The virtual programming provides opportunities for the exploration of different formats—including virtual workshops, performances, artist lectures, and other modalities of experiential learning and remote participation. Centered on sustainability and social action, the exhibition and symposium will create convergences and collaborations that further intersect with the 
United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals

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Join Main Room (webinar):
https://psu.zoom.us/j/95622081331

 

Thursday April 22

6:00pm-7:00pm
Exhibition Opening & Reception
Rebecca Strzelec, Helen O’Leary, Yvonne Love, Rudy Shepherd & Nichole van Beek

7:00pm-9:00pm
Rudy Shepherd & Brian Alfred

Friday April 23

9:00am-9:30am
Welcome

9:30am-10:45am
Brandon Ballengée

11:00am-12pm
A Walk to Seminar Forest and Thoreau’s Cabin
Rebecca Strzelec & Sandra Petrulionis

1:00pm-2:00pm
Experimental Art and Activism
Brent Green, Sadia Saba & Seamus Heady

2:15pm-3:30pm
Seeds of Influence
Future Farmers

3:45pm-4:45pm
DIY Museum
Helen O’Leary,
Emily Burns &
Jonathan Eburne

5:00pm-6:15pm
Katie Holten
Learning to be better lovers: An ocean walk

Saturday April 24

9:30am-10:45am
Roberto Lugo

11:00am-12:00pm
Living with Worlds As They End
Patricia Watts, Yvonne Love, Darlene Farris-Labar, et. al. 

1:00pm-2:15pm
Stacy Levy

2:30pm-3:30pm
Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art
Irina Aristarkhova & Jorge Lucero

3:45pm-4:50pm
Michael Mann

5:00pm-5:30pm
Closing Remarks
B. Stephen Carpenter II
& Simone Osthoff

Join Care Room
https://psu.zoom.us/j/97515638246

Friday April 23

11:00am-12pm
Looking Local: Rewards of and Resistance to Making Art Where We Are
Steven Rubin & Julia Kasdorf

1:00pm-2:00pm
Empathy as Practice: Understanding Space, Place, and People Through Photography
Erica Quinn

3:45pm-4:45pm
Sustainability in the Digital Arts and Design (DART) Studios
Carlos Rosas, 
Neil Simasek,
Melanie Devon, Caroline Giordano,
Aaron Garcia 
& Sarah McRury

Saturday April 24

11:00am-12:00pm
Disability Studies as Critical Practices of Care in Artmaking, Teaching & Research
Alexandra Allen, Tim Smith & Amanda Newman-Godfrey

2:30pm-3:30pm
Participatory Visual Analysis of Viral Imaginations
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Michele Mekel & Lauren Stetz

Join Water Room
https://psu.zoom.us/j/98371242537

 

Friday April 23

1:00pm-1:40pm
Re-Sku
Eli Andrews

Saturday April 24

11:00am-12:00pm
Resonant Ecologies
Environmental Photographers Collective

2:30pm-3:30pm
Sunrise Movement
Canceled

Join Food Room
https://psu.zoom.us/j/91068110991

 

Friday April 23

11:00am-12pm
Student Farm
Kim Flick & Leslie Pillen

1:00pm-2:00pm
The Nomadic Bread Belt
Christina Dietz

Saturday April 24

11:00am-12:00pm
Matriark Foods
Anna Hammond & Liz Quackenbush

2:30pm-3:30pm
PlantVillage
David Hughes

Join Shelter Room
https://psu.zoom.us/j/94573689894

 

Friday April 23

1:00pm-2:00pm
Land We Care About: Ethical, Artful Disruption to Settler Colonial Territorial Project
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Alexandra Russell, Izzy Healey, Rosemarry Aviste & Luke Meeken

Saturday April 24

11:00am-12:00pm
Higher Education in the time of COVID-19
Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead, Corey Griffin & Margo DelliCarpini

2:30pm-3:30pm
Aviary Workshop
Nichole van Beek

Join Cost Room
https://psu.zoom.us/j/98247019665

 

Friday April 23

11:00am-12pm
Silver Stories: A Tale of regenerative Eco-Solutions
Micaela Amateau-Amato

1:00pm-2:00pm
The History of Trash Lab
Steve Maher

3:45pm-4:45pm
The Reckoning
Emily Steinberg

Saturday April 24

11:00am-12:00pm
DIY Dye Cart & The Sustainable Studio
Kim Flick & Helen O’Leary

2:30pm-3:30pm
The Giving Tree: The Gift of Sticks & Figures
Alex Russell & Zena Tredinnicky-Kirby

Thursday, April 22

Main Room

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Exhibition Opening & Reception
Rebecca Strzelec, Helen O’Leary, Yvonne Love, Rudy Shepherd & Nichole van Beek

Please join us for an Earth Day celebration with the opening of the S3A inaugural exhibition and symposium. Steve Carpenter, the Dean of the College of A&A, and Simone Osthoff, S3A director, will welcome everyone and launch the exhibition catalogue in conversation with the five Penn State Artists showcased: Rebecca Strzelec, Helen O’Leary, Yvonne Love, Rudy Shepherd, and Nichole van Beek. We look forward to seeing you at the opening. Cheers!  

7:00pm – 8:00pm

Rudy Shepherd & Brian Alfred 

This conversation between two artists will be focused on the work of Rudy Shepherd as it relates to the theme of Care. Rudy Shepherd’s work explores the nature of evil through the mediums of painting, drawing and sculpture. This exploration involves investigations into the lives of criminals and victims of crime. He explores the complexity of these stories and the grey areas between innocence and guilt in a series of paintings and drawings of both the criminals and the victims, making no visual distinctions between the two. Going along with these portraits is a series of sculptures called the Black Rock Negative Energy Absorbers. They are a group of sculptures meant to remove negative energy from people allowing them to respond to life with the more positive aspects of their personality.

Learn More

Rudy Shepherd

Rudy Shepherd

Friday, April 23

Main Room

9:30am-10:45am

Brandon Ballengée

Brandon Ballengée (American, born 1974) is a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator based in Louisiana. Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. Since 1996, a central investigation focus has been the occurrence of developmental deformities and population declines among amphibians. In this presentation, Brandon Ballengée will discuss how these and other works relate to the theme of Care.

Malamp Reliquaries

Brandon Ballengée

11:00am-12pm

A Walk to Seminar Forest and Thoreau’s Cabin
Rebecca Strzelec & Sandra Petrulionis

A year of COVID-19 social distancing, constant constraint, and isolation have caused many to return to nature. This presentation seeks to share one example of that return. Visual Artist Professor Rebecca Strzelec will be guided by one of the foremost Thoreau Scholars, Dr. Sandra Petrulionis, as they hike to Penn State Altoona’s Seminar Forest and Thoreau Cabin replica. Their dialog will result in an edited audio and video piece. The audio portion is intended to serve as a private docent tour for future visitors to guide their way. This recorded tour will teach visitors about the land and Thoreau, while simultaneously sharing unique perspectives both scholarly and artistic.

Malamp Reliquaries

Rebecca Strzelec

1:00pm-2:00pm

Experimental Art and Activism
Brent Green, Sadia Saba & Seamus Heady

Artist Brent Green, activist Sadia Saba and filmmaker Seamus Heady discuss using experimental film and art for creating effective activism.

2:15pm-3:30pm

Seeds of Influence 
Future Farmers

“Describable”, “Homogenous” and “stable” are words used by the EU to describe certified seeds. “Unstable, heterogeneous, indescribable” is the the descriptive terrain of “uncertified” “ancient” “peasant” or “farmers” seeds. These are the seeds that have not been patented, lay dormant in seed banks or are kept among the hands of the many who annually save, share and propagate their own seeds. This talk will focus on the seminal work of small- scale grain farmers who are actively planting genetic material (seeds) procured from seed banks to restore their viability and allow them to adapt to changing climate, soil conditions and even the desires of those who are eating them. This work connects to the rebuilding of hyper-regional, grain-based economies that rely on wind, water, and radical trust.

Future Farmers

Malamp Reliquaries

3:45pm-4:45pm

DIY Museum
Helen O’Leary, Emily Burns & Jonathan Eburne

This presentation is a conversation with Helen O’ Leary, Emily Burns, and Jonathan Eburne about re-negotiating tradition, craft, museums, galleries, autonomy and of course, painting.

Helen O’Leary

Malamp Reliquaries

 

5:00pm-6:15pm

Learning to be better lovers: An ocean walk
Katie Holten

What is the language we need to live right now? How can we learn to be better lovers of the world? Together, let’s go for a walk at low tide along the edge of the Pacific ocean, at the very location where Earth day was birthed 51 years ago. We might be joined by dolphins, pelicans, curlews, seals, snowy egrets, and others. We must learn to be better lovers by embracing our non-human neighbors. What can we learn by walking slowly back in time along the ocean’s edge? At low tide we can time travel back 65 million years. Together apart, let’s crack open our human-centered language and invite in the non-human. Our species must open ourselves to meeting species other than our own, and listening to them. What is our common story? Can we create a common language of love? And at what cost if we don’t?

Katie Holten

Malamp Reliquaries

Care

11:00am-12pm

Looking Local: Rewards of and Resistance to Making Art Where We Are
Steven Rubin & Julia Kasdorf

Where do we go, as the world around us changes dramatically…? Our response: go local. This twopart session will 1) invite participants to consider the global/local opposition and its implications for their own values and artmaking practices, and 2) briefly share our own collaborative workinprogress, which joins photography and poetry to document farm life in Centre and Mifflin Counties. This work is motivated by curiosity about our neighbors and a desire to promote sustainability in our own artistic practiceThis session aims to inspire conversation and help to create a network of artists who share interests in working locally, that will extend beyond the conference.

1:00pm-2:00pm

Empathy as Practice: Understanding Space, Place, and People Through Photography
Erica Quinn

This intensive workshop establishes that a poetic exploration of the social and built environment leads to a more nuanced appreciation of the complexities of place. Through a range of activities, students expand their skills of observation to explore photography as a tool of design ideation. Students immerse into their studio site, layering photographs, maps, drawings, text, and physical artifacts. These site studies combine media, the form of which varies—including complex folding collages, handmade books, and three-dimensional maps.

 

3:45pm-4:45pm

Sustainability in the Digital Arts and Design (DART) Studios
Carlos Rosas, 
Neil Simasek, Melanie Devon, Caroline Giordano, Aaron Garcia
& Sarah McRury

Undergraduates students in the Digital Arts and Media Design Program will share their creative work and interests on a range of sustainability related endeavors.

Water

1:00pm-1:40pm

Re-Sku
Eli Andrews

Introducing re-SKU, an ingredient “tag” that tracks the climate change impacts of apparel in the same way a calorie count label does on food. The re-SKU tag reports on science-based metrics like Carbon Emission (KG of CO2eq), Water Consumption (liters of water), and Polluting Energy Consumption (Kilowatts of non-renewable energy) involved in the production and distribution of any given apparel product. The label is adaptable and interactive (currently built around a QR code that can be scanned with any smartphone, like the label on the jacket in the image below), allowing consumers to seamlessly access data on a specific product. In our initial launch, we offer upcycled, deadstock apparel products (such as Levi’s) and tag each item with our label, hoping to inspire consumers to invest in a sustainable future with informed purchase decisions. All profits from re-SKU sales go to the research and development of more sustainable materials and processes.

re-SKU

Food

Christina Dietz

11:00am-12pm

Student Farm
Kim Flick & Leslie Pillen

More information forthcoming.

1:00pm-2:00pm

The Nomadic Bread Belt
Christina Dietz

This artist talk is centered on a piece titled, “The Nomadic Bread Belt”, which is a wearable device that allows you to carry your bread dough and sourdough starter with you wherever you go. The heat from your body provides a warm environment for your starter to grow while also allowing your bread to rise over a series of hours. The “Bread Belt” helps you create a symbiotic relationship with your sourdough bread; provide it with a warm body and it will feed you. As the wearer takes the “Bread Belt” through different environments, wild yeast and bacteria interact and become a part of the sourdough starter that is maturing inside of the glass vessel. This wearable creates a yeast and flour concoction that is site specific, to both its host and the environment they have traversed through.

 

Shelter


1:00pm-2:00pm

Land We Care About: Ethical, Artful Disruption to Settler Colonial Territorial Project
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis, Alexandra Russell, Izzy Healey, Rosemary Aviste, Luke Meeken

This presentation is about a collaborative artbased research with graduate students conducted in the class AED 597 Land Politics and Art Inquiry. Drawing on anticolonial theoretical frameworks, this landbased art research project as a social/ecological action aims to critically investigate unnoticed stories of land that have been repurposed and modified to settler colonial landscape.

3:45pm-4:45pm

Chicken Coop Cam

Take a break from symposium presentations and come check out our local free-range chickens live! 
*Under Review

 

Cost

11:00am-12pm

SILVER STORIES: A Tale of Regenerative Eco-Solutions
Micaela Amateau-Amato

SILVER STORIES is an environmentaljustice presentation intended to generate crosscultural dialogue and interdisciplinary coalitionbuilding. Reclaiming Indigenous and Middle Eastern practices offers practical solutions to systemic infrastructural oppressions inherent in our pandemic of climate crisis, environmental racism, and Covid19. Encouraging individuals and communities to resist industrialized convenienceculture’s selfdestructive habits, the author emphasizes how we transform our capitalistwasteconsumerism through a commitment to symbiosisand transition from extractive petroleumpharmaceuticaladdicted cyberculture to a regenerative ecological convivencia.

1:00pm-2:00pm

The History of Trash Lab
Steve Maher

Steve Maher (Limerick, Ireland) on behalf of Pixelache (Helsinki, Finland) presents the nine-year history of Trash Lab a project which explores experimental art-design-technology practice between hacker and maker cultures, in the context of re/up-cycling and the increased availability of new fabrication tools. The project has manifested in a multitude of iterations, from site visits to functioning recycling centres in Finland,  communal repair cafes and a now-defunct annual event which was called the Recycling Olympic games. The project is the culminative effort of many artists, activists and hackers who have at different times worked together as part of the Pixelache, a registered non-profit cultural association and annual festival established in 2002.  

Emily Steinberg

3:45pm-4:45pm

The Reckoning
Emily Steinberg

This presentation is a book talk on The Reckoning, a 22 page full color visual narrative, that responds to the UnitedNations Sustainable Development Goal of Responsible Consumption and Production. The author offers a perspective from their studio, addressing the research and the questions that drove the project as well as the process of drawing and editing the final book.

Saturday, April 24

Main Room

9:30am-10:45am

Roberto Lugo

Roberto Lugo is an American artist, ceramicist, social activist, spoken word poet, and educator. Lugo uses porcelain as his medium of choice, illuminating its aristocratic surface with imagery of poverty, inequality, and social and racial injustice. Lugo’s works are multicultural mash-ups, traditional European and Asian porcelain forms and techniques reimagined with a 21st-century street sensibility. During this presentation, Roberto Lugo will discuss his work and creative process as it relates to the theme of Shelter.

 

11:00am-12pm

Living with Worlds As They End
Patricia Watts, Yvonne Love, Darlene Farris-Labar, Gabrielle Russomagno, Deanna Day, Nancy Campbell & Britt Dahlberg

This panel explores a collaborative experiment in bringing together international interdisciplinary voices around the climate crisis. What happens when an anthropologist, writer/historian, photographer, poet, sculptor, and installation artist use a journalistic passing of folios to engage a slow-paced conversation over a year? What happened at the end of that year when they came together in a virtual workshop format to have dialogue and make a final response together? What was each person’s process? How did the work relate to each other? How did the intention change when the pandemic interrupted their lives, the weather became more extreme, and racism raged? Join us for a conversation moderated by ecoartspace founder Patricia Watts.

 

1:00pm-2:15pm

Stacy Levy

Interested in watersheds, tides, growth and erosion, Stacy Levy make projects that show how nature functions in an urban setting. As a sculptor making large-scale public installations in rivers, streets, parking lots, airports and nature centers, Levy frequently work as part of a collaborative team seamlessly merging sculpture into the architecture, the topography, and the storm water requirements of the site. For this presentation, Stacy Levy will discuss how her work intersects with the theme of Water.

 

2:30pm-3:30pm

Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art
Irina Aristarkhova & Jorge Lucero

This exciting panel expands the book talk format and explores fresh dimensions of CARE. Dr. Irina Aristarkhova is Professor of the Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and artist Jorge Lucero is Associate Professor and Chair of Art Education in the School of Art & Design, University of Illinois, Chicago. Before having a 20-minute conversation about Dr. Aristarkhova’s 2020 book, Arrested Welcome: Hospitality in Contemporary Art, she and Lucero will give complimentary presentations on their research on a diverse range of contemporary art practices. 

3:45pm-4:50pm

Michael Mann

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). Dr. Mann was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001 and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. In this presentation, Michael Mann will discuss issues of sustainability as they relate to Climate Change.  

 

5:00pm-5:30pm

Closing Remarks
B. Stephen Carpenter II & Simone Osthoff

  

 

 

Roberto Lugo

Care

11:00am-12pm

Disability Studies as Critical Practices of Care in Artmaking,            Teaching & Research
Alexandra Allen, Tim Smith & Amanda Newman-Godfrey

In this panel, three individuals with disabilities reflect on the intersecting identities of educator, student, artist and researcher through the lens of disability studies. Each panelist considers the challenges of pursuing a terminal degree, the complex task of coming out as an academic, and how a theoretical understanding of the disability experience has informed their work as an educator and artist. The discussion then extends to the audience so that we may continue the conversation on the ways in which disability studies not only reframes the way that we see ourselves, but also the ways that we communicate with one another. 

2:30pm-3:30pm

Participatory Visual Analysis of Viral Imaginations
Karen Keifer-Boyd, Michele Mekel & Lauren Stetz 

This bioethics participatory visual analysis of Viral Imaginations art workshop will respond to the prompt: “What kind of arts and culture sustain us through social isolation while bolstering the future we want to live in?” Organized as an intersectional project involving the fields of arts, health humanities, and bioethics, the Viral Imaginations: COVID-19 project went live in April 2020 in the midst of the shelter-in-place phase of the coronavirus pandemic. A collaboration among the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, the Bioethics Program, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, the College of the Liberal Arts, and the College Medicine, Viral Imaginations is an ongoing, web-based gallery and archive that curates and preserves current and former Pennsylvanians’ imaginative and creative reflections on living in pandemic times.

 

Water

11:00am-12pm

Resonant Ecologies
Environmental Photographers Collective: Martina Shenal, Marion Belanger, Dana Fritz, Margaret LeJeune, Judy Natal & Terri Warpinski

Expanding on the intersectional themes of the UN SDG #15: Life on Land, the Environmental Photographers Collective raises questions around how climate change impacts people and ecosystems through naturally occurring forces of nature that become systematically altered in a rapidly warming climate. We examine how the pandemic has changed the ways we consume culture; the innovative ways we communicate, build community, and share resources; and imagine a post-pandemic art world. Through the collaborative potential of the arts, humanities, and sciences, and the innovative knowledge that we can glean from trans-disciplinary partnerships, Resonant Ecologies utilizes photographic powers of observation as profound sources of knowledge. We cultivate mutualism between epistemological systems to draw attention to personal and emotional dimensions of climate chaos.

2:30pm-3:30pm

Sunrise Movement

Canceled

 

Food

11:00am-12pm

Matriark Foods
Anna Hammond & Liz Quackenbush

Matriark Foods is a social impact business to scale access to healthy food for the benefit of people and the environment. Matriark Foods upcycles farm surplus and fresh-cut remnants into healthy, delicious, low sodium vegetable products for schools, hospitals, food banks and other foodservice. The Founder of Matriark, Anna Hammond, will discuss the way her company addresses sustainability regarding the theme of Food.  

 

2:30pm-3:30pm

PlantVillage
David Hughes

PlantVillage is a global knowledge system helping smallholder farmers cope with pests and climate change by using a combined system of AI and local human expertise (the Dream Team comprised of trained youth) to deliver hyperlocal advice to farmers- in their hands via phones, in their fields, and in season when they need it. PlantVillage is a partner with the UN and other organisations and works in over 60 countries, reaching >9 million farmers directly every week.

 

Shelter

11:00am-12pm

Higher Education in the Time of Covid-19
Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead, Corey Griffin & Margo DelliCarpini

This panel highlights the S3A alliance between the visual arts programs at University Park, Abington, and Altoona, by bringing together Margo DelliCarpini, Chancellor of Penn State Abington; Corey Griffin, Associate Dean for Research and Academic Affairs, Penn State Altoona; and Vagner Mendonça-Whitehead, Director of the School of Visual Arts, University Park. They will each introduce their areas of research in relation to the symposium themes, and share some leadership approaches, strategies, and/or anecdotes on COVID’s impact.

2:30pm-3:30pm

Aviary Workshop
Nichole van Beek

This will be an in-person drawing workshop for local participants to visit the Shaver’s Creek Klingsberg Aviary. Attendees will explore this Penn State owned facility and have the opportunity to draw some of the inhabitants there. Masks are required. If interested in participating, please see the link on the Symposium page under Penn State Artists.

Nichole van Beek

Cost

11:00am-12pm

DIY Dye Cart & The Sustainable Studio
Kim Flick & Helen O’Leary

Climate change-sustainability- equality-care-air-shelter-water.

Artists in the field-social action- contemporary conversations around climate change, local geographies and communities- climate grief, equality and access,  ethical sustainability and continuance through farming and visual arts.

2:30pm-3:30pm

The Giving Tree: The Gift of Sticks & Figures
Alexandra Russell & Zena Tredinnicky-Kirby

In this panel, two graduate students from Penn State discuss their artwork and artistic practice as it relates to sustainability. Shifting an arts practice towards more sustainable methods of making is often complicated, because sustainability can be applied in an array of definitions and contexts. Using examples of work that investigate art making through the lens of feminist studies and systems thinking, these artist explore how their artwork intersects through and responds to the theme of Cost.

 

 

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Contact

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Days and Times

Friday – Saturday: 9am – 6:15pm