When I picked it up, my housemate remarked, “You got the digital art piece.” The rather large piece looks somewhat like a QR code. Staring at it in my living room, I parsed through the ink markings to find the form of a deer in tall grass. When I looked closely at it, I noticed the work is slightly wrinkled in its frame, like a piece of paper overinked by a printer.

I began to wonder how it might feel for Art Rental artists like Sheehan to have their work hung on infinite varying walls of faceless students who dwell and breathe with it, completely separated from its creator. I sent my artist an email with the subject line “Press Request” and quickly learned she had no idea her piece was in Art Rental.

“I sold it to Jock Reynolds and Suzanne Hellmuth [OC ’68], and I knew that Jock and Suzanne had donated it to Oberlin,” Sheehan said on our Zoom call later that day. As an Art History major during her time at Oberlin, she had spent a lot of time at the AMAM and in the Clarence Ward Art Library and was excited to see the work return to her alma mater. “Jock had talked to me when he was considering donating the piece; he was like, ‘How would you feel about that?’ I was like, ‘That would be awesome, that’s a great end, a great home for the piece. … I didn’t know it had gone into Art Rental, but that’s super cute. I’m delighted. I myself was a recipient of Art Rental!”

Sheehan  was fun. She had a great laugh and spoke thoughtfully. She told me that in her time at Oberlin she delivered The New York Times on weekends and helped in an initiative to do more prep for meals at Harkness House because “nobody knew how to soak a damn bean!” She has been teaching for around the last 20 years at CUNY Baruch. For fun, she flies a paraglider.

“I don’t remember the exact piece or pieces that I had,” Sheehan said when talking about participating in the Art Rental as a student, “but I had Art Rental pieces and stood out there in line and had them up. I was in Harkness House in my first year, and I had pieces on the wall there. … I know everybody was fighting for the Claes Oldenburg but I don’t remember what I got. If you remember everything you did at Oberlin, you probably didn’t go to Oberlin.”

From our conversation, I learned that the series my piece is a part of — which documents America’s most dangerous things — highlights how we perceive threats. 

“The most dangerous — in that case, animal — turns out to be the white-tailed deer, because so many people are in car accidents with them,” she said. “A lot of it was about your idea of danger and then how that danger is much more banal and human-generated than anything else.”

The other pieces in the series include America’s most dangerous volcano and America’s most dangerous intersection, all centered not on the fear we feel about these things, but on the actual damage they could do specifically to humans. A lot of Sheehan’s work negotiates this idea of the human as the machine and how hand-making can exist in a machine era. In the case of “White-Tailed Deer,” there’s also an interesting effect in how the imperfections of the piece betray its handmade nature.

“To create the pieces, I was starting with a found image on the internet and then did a bunch of manipulations to it in various photo processing stuff and then rendered the result in ink on vellum paper,” she said. “So they’re all handmade, but they’re handmade by an artist becoming a plotter in a machine; in a lot of my work, I was interested in being more machinelike in what I was doing, although not with the accuracy of a machine, but trying to approximate that somehow.”

Part of the intention of my call was to reunite Sheehan  with her piece, to know where her white-tailed deer lived, what it saw. About half an hour into our conversation, I took my laptop on the move, giving her a short tour of my kitchen and living room to show the painting in its full context. When the piece was first in frame, Sheehan  lit up and began to flip the interview on me, asking about life at Oberlin. She was particularly interested in how the younger generation is or isn’t focused on technology — how we separate ourselves from screens. 

“Part of why I resonate a lot with the art that I was looking at on your page is because those things are handmade and then they’re returned to a space that is occupied by machine-made objects, and [they ask] what it means to be making things by hand today,” I said. “My favorite artists here at Oberlin are the ones who when I go to their exhibition and they’re making every element themselves, down to the frame the piece is in, the table that holds up an object; every piece is made by hand. I love that dedication to physical objects and craft.”

Her response stuck with me. 

“It can be a position of extreme control, though,” she said. “Part of that, asserting your hand in every single thing, is like not being able to let go. There’s an anxiety in a lot of that that I recognize in my own self and my own work, but I try and listen to it; maybe that’s a part of sending it off: imbue this with all your anxiety and then send it off.”

This is the second mural from the Oberlin Community Mural Project, after the “We Are Oberlin” mural on the wall behind the bookstore. The group’s organizer, Tanya Rosen-Jones, OC ’97, said the community wanted more public art.

“The first mural we did was in partnership with the City schools,” Rosen-Jones said. “I worked with the high school, brought three mural artists in, did a three-day workshop and got ideas directly from the high school students for what makes Oberlin special. We had a vote for the winning design and a community paint day — it was a real community mural project. It was amazing, but so much work, and people were like, ‘When are you going to do the next one?’”

Having established the Community Mural Project, Rosen-Jones now had a group of people to help make decisions about the content of proposed murals. For the vintage postcard mural, that meant a series of decisions of what iconic elements of Oberlin to highlight in the individual letters of the sign.

“We wanted to have a mixture of things represented for what you would see when you came to Oberlin, or for what Oberlin might be known for,” Rosen-Jones said. “We were limited by what would transfer well to the inside of a letter in the mural and by not wanting to replicate things that were in the mural on the back of the bookstore.”

The letters on the mural contain Oberlin icons, including the historic elm in Tappan Square, the albino squirrel, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Finney Chapel, and a (fictional) street sign showing the intersection of College Street and Main Street.

Jill Sawyer, owner of event venue Mill on Main, volunteered her building for the new mural with the vintage postcard concept already in mind. Mitchell, who painted the mural, said the design of the lettering is partly inspired by a sign inside.

“They came to me with a little bit of an idea; I started working up a couple of concepts, and then eventually, working with a group of individuals, we started focusing in on some of these subjects within the letters,” Mitchell said. “The letter structure itself is inspired by a sign that they found in this building. … It’s very similar in how the ‘B’ has points on the end; the curvature on the ‘R,’ the ‘L’ — it’s all almost identical to the sign, and from there we kind of went forward with just finding other little details, like colors and such.”

The new vintage postcard mural comes from funding from the Firelands Association for the Visual Arts, sponsored by the City of Oberlin, as well as funds from the Bill Long Foundation. The City has begun working with FAVA to support arts in the community, and the mural is one of the first accomplishments of this new collaboration.

“We partnered with FAVA this year to basically develop a grant program for murals in the downtown business district,” City Communications Manager Diane Ramos said. “This was part of our larger goal to bring more art to the city. FAVA’s been a great partner and we both value the arts and understand the reputation that Oberlin has for being kind of an arts hub, and we just wanted to find different ways to highlight what we have here.”

Mitchell, a local artist whose previous work includes the Amherst Public Library logo, was excited by the positive feedback from community members.

“I love the response from the community; everyone’s been really happy to see it,” Mitchell said. “I guess that’s why I’m doing it, not just for me to enjoy the process, but for others to enjoy it in their way too.”

The new mural looks to be a sign of a bright future for Oberlin’s public arts.

“We’re happy the program is getting off the ground and we have our first mural going,” Ramos said. “I only see this partnership growing, and I think that’s a great thing in such an arts-centric town.”

“We are confident that Oberlin College legally acquired Egon Schiele’s ‘Girl with Black Hair’ in 1958, and that we lawfully possess it,” a statement from Oberlin reads. “We are cooperating with the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal investigation. We believe that Oberlin is not the target of the Manhattan DA’s criminal investigation into this matter. Per the search warrant, the artwork has officially been seized, and Oberlin is holding it on behalf of the New York court that issued the warrant.”

Schiele was an Austrian Expressionist artist whose works primarily focused on death and human sexuality. He died of the Spanish flu at 28 in 1918. The pieces central to this investigation were owned by Fritz Grünbaum — a Jewish cabaret artist, comedian, and entertainer from Moravia, now called the Czech Republic, who rose to fame in Vienna. Grünbaum began assembling his art collection in the 1920s and ultimately ended up with more than 400 pieces, 80 of which were by Schiele. Grünbaum was outspoken against the Nazis, and he was sent to the Dachau concentration camp in 1938, after which his wife Elisabeth was forced to surrender the art collection to the Nazis. Grünbaum died Jan. 14, 1941, and Elisabeth died in a concentration camp a year later. Many of the pieces were sold to a New York dealer, Otto Kallir, who sold them to buyers across the country. 

“When owners could not be located because they had fled or were killed in the war or the Holocaust, works were returned to the country from which they had been taken,” the AMAM’s website reads. “Despite these efforts, thousands of works of art looted by the Nazi regime remain unaccounted for. Some may have been destroyed; others may have been purchased in good faith on the international art market by museums and collectors.”

“Girl with Black Hair,” a watercolor and pencil piece, is valued at approximately $1.5 million. It was last displayed at Oberlin in an exhibition called Modern and Contemporary Realisms from Aug. 6, 2013 to June 22, 2014. 

Grünbaum’s heirs have been trying to reclaim these pieces for over 25 years. In 2014, Schiele’s piece “Town on the Blue River” was auctioned off with an acknowledgement that Grünbaum was an owner and the family received a share of proceeds. The heirs won a civil claim in 2018 and received two of Schiele’s pieces due to the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act. The Manhattan state court ruled that the pieces were never willingly sold or surrendered.

The AMAM has a section on Nazi-era provenance research on their website that highlights their dedication to returning these pieces. 

“As a member of the AAM (American Alliance of Museums) and the Association of Art Museum Directors, the Allen is committed to following the Standards Regarding the Unlawful Appropriation of Objects During the Nazi Era agreed upon by both organizations and to examining the provenance of works in its collection to determine whether any may have been unlawfully appropriated during the Nazi era without subsequent restitution,” the website reads.

The site also includes a gallery of Nazi-era works with incomplete provenance. “Girl with Black Hair” is not included in this section. 

On Sept. 20, seven pieces valued at $9.5 million — not including “Girl with Black Hair,” which is being temporarily held by the College — were returned to the Grünbaum heirs in a ceremony in New York. 

“This is of huge importance in our world,” Grünbaum descendant Timothy Reif said. “It sets the tone and the agenda for all future cases.”

Associate Professor of Anthropology Amy Margaris, OC ’96, commented on the situation and noted the diligence that the curatorial staff at the AMAM had for provenance research.

“From my own experience and research, every piece has its own history and has to be looked at individually and very carefully,” Margaris said. “The Allen has been working really hard on provenance research and thinking about … Nazi-looted items in particular, and some other classes of special items, for years. … Just knowing [the curators] personally, all of them, [they are] incredibly thoughtful and part of the larger museum world conversation about ethics and looting.”

This series is part of the solo exhibition “Anna Von Mertens/Henrietta Leavitt: A Life Spent Looking,” which highlights the long relationship between the AMAM and Boston-based artist Anna Von Mertens, whose practice offers a new perspective on events and figures throughout history. Von Mertens’ work combines technology and scientific research with traditional materials such as fabric and thread. Each work represents the position of stars at various points of time, from different points of view in the 10,000 galaxies that comprise our home supercluster, Laniakea.

Von Mertens’ meticulous hand embroidery is captivating. Dots of white light suck visitors into the spiraling, black hole-like quilts displayed around the room. These textiles allow the artist to embody an event, experience, or person’s life through one of the most tangible storytelling methods: textile art.

The relationship between the AMAM and Von Mertens began in 2015, when Driek Zirinsky, OC ’65, and spouse, Michael Zirinsky, introduced the museum to the artist’s work with their donation of “6:01 pm until 7:05 pm, April 4, 1968, from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee (looking in the direction shots were fired)” from the series “As the Stars Go By” (2006). This quilted work, also currently on display in the exhibition, depicts the movement of the stars between the time shots were fired at Martin Luther King, Jr. and the time he was pronounced dead. King was the commencement speaker at Driek’s graduation from Oberlin in 1965, and Driek and Michael donated the piece at the 50th reunion of the ceremony.

“As you’ll have noticed, probably from the Martin Luther King, Jr. quilt, which is part of a series about moments of tragedy in American history, [Von Mertens is] really interested in the intersection between the macro and the micro,” John G. Cowles Director Andria Derstine said. “So she shows these really big, important events or discoveries, such as Henrietta Leavitt’s, on a very personal scale. If you think about her stitch work or her drawing, it’s very intimate, but what she’s dealing with is really vast. I think there’s a really nice interplay between … the huge and the vast, and then the really small and intimate.”

Adjacent to Von Mertens’ work in the Ellen Johnson Gallery is an exhibition titled “Everything is Stardust: Artmaking and the Knowability of the Universe.” This exhibition, organized by Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Sam Adams, expands on Von Mertens’ quote “We are stardust. Everything is.” These pieces were pulled from the museum’s collection to further the conversations on astronomy, science, and observation introduced by Von Mertens’ work on Henrietta Leavitt.

“I really feel like this is a moment to celebrate certainly the pioneering and important work of Henrietta Leavitt, but also, you know, women artists, and we’re trying to do that through showing Anna’s work, but also through a lot of the other things that are on view throughout the museum right now,” Derstine said.

On Oct. 5, Von Mertens will speak at the AMAM about her practice and Leavitt’s life. This presentation will be followed by a reception open to the public.

Everyone has their own notion of what makes art “good art,” and, chances are, that notion has less to do with personal taste and more to do with social and cultural trends. After all, the lens through which we see the world is largely a culturally constructed phenomenon. College fourth-year Henry Wahlenmayer is acutely aware of this fact, so during his second year at Oberlin, he set out to flip the script. This is how BadArtCo, Wahlenmayer’s ExCo brainchild, came about. In many ways, BadArtCo is like an inverted Art History and Studio Art crossover, with the added element of hands-on experimentation. Final projects comprise anything from dissonant music with weird lyrics to a giant hay man with drawn-on tattoos. All in all, Wahlenmayer’s ExCo aims to probe and mimic the smorgasbord that is the contemporary art world, but from the central vantage point of “bad art” with a giant question mark at the end. Members of BadArtCo investigate how, why, and what makes people hate art and then attempt to emulate culturally enshrined definitions of artistic failure in their own work.

Over the course of his two years ideating and teaching the ExCo, Wahlenmayer has developed a fully fleshed out curriculum from which hands-on activities are derived. Wahlenmayer is not an Art History major — his inspiration for BadArtCo began with him and his friends watching the TV show Riverdale and a recurring joke that he would teach an ExCo on “horrible TV.” The bit then snowballed until it wasn’t a joke anymore, and, as Wahlenmayer puts it, he found himself eyeballs-deep in research and critical analysis of what makes “bad art” bad.

“We start all the way back to the Amarna period in ancient Egypt, where there was a pharaoh that took over and decided to completely revamp the artistic style of Egyptian art,” Wahlenmayer said. “Everyone hated it so much that as soon as he died, they destroyed all of the Amarna period art and they went back to the old stuff. That was the earliest example of bad art that I could find… We go up through time all the way to the modern day, and we talk a lot about contemporary art as something that a lot of people think is bad.”

Lessons span from ancient periods to hyper-modern “bad internet culture” and meme-making to “strange art film” iMovies made in 50 minutes. On occasion, these practices and discussions take on a local relevance — from midcentury modern architecture to contact improvisation. Wahlenmayer and his co-teacher of the last two years, College third-year Fiona Giménez-Collins, also bring students on a walking tour of bad art in Oberlin.

“Oberlin art history is really specific and strange because oftentimes the artists here and the artists we host are boundary-pushing people who create spike pits on college campuses,” Wahlenmayer said. “There was a performance artist that visited in the ʼ80s who hung himself naked upside down … Thereʼs just this weird, long history of radical expression at Oberlin. We wanted to kind of tap into that with this class because I think we have gotten a lot more tame as a campus, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is kind of fun to provide an atmosphere for people to just do something really wacky and weird, whether thatʼs creating an absolutely unlistenable song or weird performance art.”

College second-year and BadArtCo student Owen Spina finds that the premise of making something bad allows him to engage with art in a more unfettered manner. He reflected on a portion of the class where members interrogated outsider art, a movement of novice or self-taught artists that emerged from 19th-century European psychiatric hospitals.

“I just remember everything being really messy and very flattened,” Spina said. “I was so interested in the class because I take pride in using the tools of bad art in my own stuff, but I think I realized [there are] a lot of the weird gray areas and also learn[ed] more about the quality system of art … for example, outsider art and how itʼs exploitative in a lot of ways, especially how itʼs in the art world.”

College fourth-year Jason McCauley started taking BadArtCo this semester, but as a close friend and current housemate of Wahlenmayer, he has had an insider perspective on the ExCo’s development from its inception. He noted that for each of the ExCo’s years of existence, Wahlenmayer has created a hay-filled effigy, and now they share a roof with the anthropomorphic creation. McCauley finds that BadArtCo provides a unique space for him and his peers to strike a balance between highfalutin discourse and unadulterated silliness.

“Coming from a TIMARA perspective, I’m very much used to things that are challenging what our definition of music is and what our definition of art is,” McCauley said. “I really enjoy the way that the ExCo simultaneously takes a critical or a kind of poking fun eye to some of the art world and those spaces — in terms of, like, liberal arts speak and intellectualism — and then also does engage in it as well. A  lot of the discussions that we have is looking at different examples of art and then talking about, do we feel it to be art and then what does that mean?”

For his final BadArtCo Gallery Show piece, McCauley could be seen writhing around in fake blood atop a tarp. Spina likewise contributed a video of an “unprepared” comedy act in Azariah’s Café. At the end of the day, I find myself asking: can art really be bad if it looks this fun?

Gallery • 3 Photos

Abe Frato

This past Thursday, the BadArtCo Gallery Show exhibited art created using methods and forms that have conventionally been considered poor.

This Thursday, musicians from Oberlin and other areas of Northeast Ohio performed at the Allen Memorial Art Museum to conclude the year-long Shared Art program. In the courtyard behind the museum, the group of musicians debuted an original composition by Caleb Smith, OC ’19, inspired by this year’s shared artwork; “These Urban City Streets” by Cleveland-based artist Michelangelo Lovelace.

The Shared Art program started in 2021 as a way to introduce incoming students to the Allen and engage them in conversations around a piece of art in the museum’s collection. During orientation, first-year students look at and discuss the shared artwork in their PAL groups and attend the Shared Art Block Party hosted by the Allen, where they can enjoy snacks, crafts, and other activities while viewing the art and exploring the museum. Thursday’s event emerged from the Shared Art program organizers’ desire for another event to bookend the program and conclude the year-long conversation surrounding the work.

“We thought it’d be really fun and exciting to bring in some artists from the Cleveland area since Michelangelo Lovelace, the painter, was born and raised in Cleveland and lived his whole life in Cleveland,” Curatorial Assistant Julia Alexander, OC ’22, said. “So we were thinking, ‘What artist can we bring in?’ And then we kind of landed on music as something that’d be really exciting.”

According to Alexander and Curator of Academic Programs Hannah Wirta Kinney, featuring artists from Cleveland was important because the work, like much of Lovelace’s art, was centered around the city. ‘These Urban City Streets” colorfully depicts a bird’s-eye view of a Cleveland neighborhood, stressing both the vibrancy and the grittiness of the environment and community. The artwork chosen for the program always involves the theme of place and how it affects who people are and the art they create.

“Lovelace has this way of depicting Cleveland in a very honest and raw way but very lovingly,” Alexander said. “I think it really has opened up conversations on what is a hometown and especially for incoming first-years [because] they’re coming to a new place and suddenly Oberlin is their new home.”’

When Alexander reached out to Smith, who grew up in Cleveland, about finding local musicians, Smith said he would not only be willing to perform and assemble an ensemble, but he would also like to write a piece inspired by Lovelace’s work, which the Allen agreed to commission.

While composing, Smith said he listened to recordings of Lovelace, who died in 2021, to better understand Lovelace’s artistic process and the experiences that informed his work. Smith said he also focused on the textures in the artwork and tried to recreate that musically.

“A lot of [Lovelace’s] pieces you’ll see are kind of a bird’s-eye view,” Smith said. “He wanted to gather the entirety of the landscape. A lot of his pieces use rough things like sand and whatnot. So, [I was] thinking about music that spans a wide range of different textures. … You think about the basic textures involved with the piece and then you try to do that musically.”

Alexander and Kinney expressed that including both music and visual art was important to connect to different audiences. Kinney says she feels that the two art forms together can allow for greater engagement from everyone.

“I think when we bring in these different ways to get at questions or ideas that artists are grappling with, we can all find our own entry point,” Kinney said. “So maybe someone who knows how to listen to music much better than me can listen to that composition tomorrow and suddenly see something in the Michelangelo Lovelace that they never saw before. Or the alternative is, I look at the Michelangelo Lovelace, [while] I’m listening to this music, and I can suddenly be like, ‘Oh, so that sound, that rhythm, that pattern is what this is like in paint,’”

Given its accessibility to both music and visual art lovers, Kinney and Alexander said that they hoped that this event would attract people from all parts of the Oberlin community, including both community members, those affiliated with the College, as well as act to help connect Oberlin students to the greater Northeast Ohio region through the participation of local musicians. Alexander added a major goal was to make people feel comfortable in a museum setting.

“I think that it’s easy for the museum to be seen as a quiet space or a space that’s kind of one dimensional, a relationship between a viewer and an object,” Alexander said. “But I think that we’ve been trying to kind of turn that narrative on its head in a lot of ways. … So I think the multimedia approach that we’re trying to use is really just a way of making people feel really comfortable in the museum setting.” 

Still, it’s hard to characterize the results of this year’s theme as anything but random because it hones in so specifically on one man — Karl Lagerfeld and his career — and the figurative catalogue designers pulled from to dress their celebrities being not necessarily accessible for the majority of people, even the most fashion-forward. Perhaps, then, the gala is returning to its roots of celebrating fashion and the museum’s upcoming exhibit and away from the recent surge in influencers at the gala that may have resulted from Instagram sponsoring the event in 2021 and 2022.

Some are calling this a gala full of outrageous looks. This label is thrown around every year, but there are certainly a few contenders for wacky.

The elephant in the room of the gala was shaped like a cat. There were not one, but three homages to Lagerfeld’s cat, Choupette: Doja Cat, dressed in Oscar de la Renta, looked like she was running late to film for the movie Cats; Jared Leto wore an oversized, overly realistic fursuit; and Lil Nas X wore a thong and was literally bedazzled in silver body paint, complete with sparkly ears and whiskers.

One guest whose outfit lost me was Vogue’s live stream correspondent Emma Chamberlain. It was hard not to see her Miu Miu two-piece as another variation on her denim maxi skirts and blazers, though this one was cropped and frayed over some assembly of what looked like a Cartier bejeweled bodysuit. Rihanna, in Valentino couture, had a transforming look that may have overdone the homage to the camellia flower as a symbol of Chanel. However, the larger issue — though it’s hard to get larger than her camellias — may have been how A$AP Rocky looked standing next to her in plaid. That said, maybe he was right to allow her radiant self the entire spotlight while he just looked slightly out of place.

Still, many adhered to the elegance of Chanel haute couture, a longtime speciality of Lagerfeld. One of the co-chairs of the gala, Dua Lipa, had one of the more stunning archival looks, wearing a gorgeous, exquisite, perfect 1992 Chanel fall-winter bridal dress designed by Lagerfeld. With that, she was the first ever to sport the outrageous over 200-carat Tiffany necklace, paying homage to the original yellow Tiffany diamond. Penélope Cruz, another co-chair, was also beautifully composed in a vintage gown, this one from Chanel’s 1988 spring-summer haute couture collection.

Designer Tory Burch dressed Phoebe Bridgers fabulously. One of the most striking parts of Burch’s designs was her adherence to Lagerfeld’s designs within the Chanel archives while incorporating motifs like Bridgers’ staple skeleton.

While there were three Choupettes, there were far more Lagerfeld lookalikes, and attempts at replicating his look. Teyana Taylor, in Thom Brown tweed, looked incredibly elegant despite the difficulty posed by walking more than a few feet in a skirt so tight. Cara Delevigne, a former muse of Lagerfeld’s, dressed like him as well, wearing a platinum wig for the role. Jessica Chastain, however, bleached her hair to pull it off. Kendell Jenner was Lagerfeld if he had nicer legs.

Since this is Oberlin, Kristen Stewart’s look can’t be forgotten. If Chamberlain’s cropped suit-top was effectively a fail, Stewart’s was a win that, quite frankly, would be sacrilegious not to mention — though the shoes lost me just a bit. She, of course, was in vintage Chanel, so perhaps that’s the key.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You just presented your project, The Tree of Life, at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference at Caltech. What is The Tree of Life?

The Tree of Life is a global public art piece that includes a series of living trees around the globe, which we are harnessing to act as living terrestrial antennae that can communicate with a spacecraft we’re designing to push the constraints of obsolescence that are maintained by a capitalist technology structure, to think about technology as long-lasting and sustainable. So that’s the beginning. The trees have sensors on them that are reading data about light, moisture, and temperature, and we are sonifying that data continuously. The tree antennae have been sending out the song about their light, moisture, and temperature experience, and the spacecraft receives that file. Meanwhile, the spacecraft is sending a similar song about its operational experience to the trees. So both songs are put together to make a duet about our life on Earth in conversation with technology that we built.

The whole idea was originally inspired when I was asked to envision an art project to be embedded on an interstellar spacecraft that was conceptually timed to leave Earth in the year 2016. I wanted to create a song or a story from the perspective of trees on earth, rather than from the perspective of humans. A lot of my collaborators are space scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and we formed a nonprofit called The Space Song Foundation to support the project.

Is the focus of The Space Song Foundation to support one project, or was the foundation started to expand on the conversations started by The Tree of Life project?

The mission statement of Space Song is to support The Tree of Life project and explore and expand ideas about design at the intersection of art, science, and technology, to think about sustainable design on Earth and in outer space, because there are a lot of design principles that are designed to do the test or answer a question or finish the experiment, and sometimes that’s just done in a six-month window. The thing that happens to all of that technology when itʼs designed for such a specific function is something we see on Earth all of the time, because we’re dealing with electronics on such an extraordinary scale. The same questions apply to the technology that we’re launching into outer space, and we’re at a point where dead technology is going to create sort of this exoskeleton orbiting our planet. So these questions are super timely. Also, in order to do deep space exploration, to go to another solar system, we need technology that is able to not only travel, you know, 4.2 light years away or whatever, but also operate that entire time. It’ll take decades for a spacecraft to get to a destination that distant, so we also have to be thinking about the long-term operation and technology in order to envision interstellar missions.

So how do we start thinking about sustainable design for space technology?

There’s the spacecraft itself. We have been working with a team of engineers and space scientists since 2018 to develop schematics for CubeSat, a small, toaster-sized spacecraft that can operate for 200 years. The interesting thing about this process is that engineers are trained to think in short timelines, asking, how do we get the data that we need in six months? And so when we made this proposition to them, to design this CubeSat that will last 200 years, they were sort of befuddled — they wanted to know, “Yeah, but what’s it gonna do?” And we said, “Actually, what itʼs going to do is secondary; longevity is the central design intention here.” As soon as the engineers began to embrace that the main test was longevity, it changed the way that weʼre thinking about design.

It often seems that our current culture makes us unable to think long term. Does this make designing with the purpose of longevity difficult? 

I think that our public imaginations about the future, in a way, are being constrained by upgrade culture. I wrote a book that was just published a couple of years ago called Upgrade Available about this idea that because the upgrade is always available, it’s hard for us to think long term into the future without consider- ing constant disruption. And so The Tree of Life project is a way of
putting our imagination on a 200-year time scale so we can commit to a future in a way that technology is antithetical to. And with the trees, part of the question that we were asking is if a spacecraft is trying to send us data in 150 years from interstellar destination, how are we going to receive that data? How do we get a JPEG in the year 2250? So, we started to think about how we really need to look back at earlier technological systems, to think about fidelity in the long term. Radio just kept coming back. You know, a radio wave is a radio wave, it’s not going to become obsolete. We can change the way that we transmit it or receive it, but if the laws of physics are true across the universe, which we think they are, a sine wave is a sine wave. My colleagues who work on NASA projects, they love this project, because it’s so Back to the Future. We have to look back to look forward.

What do you think being an artist doing this work provides to these conversations of technology? Does it take an artistic eye to design something that reimagines current perceptions of longevity?

Recently, somebody was introducing me at a talk and they called me an embedded artist. I’ve never really thought about that term in relation to myself, but I kind of like it because it’s sort of like embedding an artist at the table with people who are trying to solve some other kind of problem. Some of my engineer colleagues say that artists help them think through their thinking, because we can slow things down. We’re like, “Well, why don’t we just make it empty?” Also, I think that having an artist in the room empowers scientists to see the work that they’re doing as creative, you know, and not so analytical. I mean, working with my colleagues in Space Song, I think it helps them see that really, weʼre all kind of on this existential plane of asking these questions about who we are and where we are.

ast week, Professor of Integrated Media and Chair of the Studio Art department Julia Christensen presented her ongoing project, The Tree of Life, at the California Institute of Technology. Christensen’s work explores the intersection of art and technology.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You just presented your project, The Tree of Life, at the Interplanetary Small Satellite Conference at Caltech. What is The Tree of Life?

The Tree of Life is a global public art piece that includes a series of living trees around the globe, which we are harnessing to act as living terrestrial antennae that can communicate with a spacecraft we’re designing to push the constraints of obsolescence that are maintained by a capitalist technology structure, to think about technology as long-lasting and sustainable. So that’s the beginning. The trees have sensors on them that are reading data about light, moisture, and temperature, and we are sonifying that data continuously. The tree antennae have been sending out the song about their light, moisture, and temperature experience, and the spacecraft receives that file. Meanwhile, the spacecraft is sending a similar song about its operational experience to the trees. So both songs are put together to make a duet about our life on Earth in conversation with technology that we built.

The whole idea was originally inspired when I was asked to envision an art project to be embedded on an interstellar spacecraft that was conceptually timed to leave Earth in the year 2016. I wanted to create a song or a story from the perspective of trees on earth, rather than from the perspective of humans. A lot of my collaborators are space scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, and we formed a nonprofit called The Space Song Foundation to support the project.

Is the focus of The Space Song Foundation to support one project, or was the foundation started to expand on the conversations started by The Tree of Life project?

The mission statement of Space Song is to support The Tree of Life project and explore and expand ideas about design at the intersection of art, science, and technology, to think about sustainable design on Earth and in outer space, because there are a lot of design principles that are designed to do the test or answer a question or finish the experiment, and sometimes that’s just done in a six-month window. The thing that happens to all of that technology when itʼs designed for such a specific function is something we see on Earth all of the time, because we’re dealing with electronics on such an extraordinary scale. The same questions apply to the technology that we’re launching into outer space, and we’re at a point where dead technology is going to create sort of this exoskeleton orbiting our planet. So these questions are super timely. Also, in order to do deep space exploration, to go to another solar system, we need technology that is able to not only travel, you know, 4.2 light years away or whatever, but also operate that entire time. It’ll take decades for a spacecraft to get to a destination that distant, so we also have to be thinking about the long-term operation and technology in order to envision interstellar missions.

So how do we start thinking about sustainable design for space technology?

There’s the spacecraft itself. We have been working with a team of engineers and space scientists since 2018 to develop schematics for CubeSat, a small, toaster-sized spacecraft that can operate for 200 years. The interesting thing about this process is that engineers are trained to think in short timelines, asking, how do we get the data that we need in six months? And so when we made this proposition to them, to design this CubeSat that will last 200 years, they were sort of befuddled — they wanted to know, “Yeah, but what’s it gonna do?” And we said, “Actually, what itʼs going to do is secondary; longevity is the central design intention here.” As soon as the engineers began to embrace that the main test was longevity, it changed the way that weʼre thinking about design.

It often seems that our current culture makes us unable to think long term. Does this make designing with the purpose of longevity difficult? 

I think that our public imaginations about the future, in a way, are being constrained by upgrade culture. I wrote a book that was just published a couple of years ago called Upgrade Available about this idea that because the upgrade is always available, it’s hard for us to think long term into the future without consider- ing constant disruption. And so The Tree of Life project is a way of
putting our imagination on a 200-year time scale so we can commit to a future in a way that technology is antithetical to. And with the trees, part of the question that we were asking is if a spacecraft is trying to send us data in 150 years from interstellar destination, how are we going to receive that data? How do we get a JPEG in the year 2250? So, we started to think about how we really need to look back at earlier technological systems, to think about fidelity in the long term. Radio just kept coming back. You know, a radio wave is a radio wave, it’s not going to become obsolete. We can change the way that we transmit it or receive it, but if the laws of physics are true across the universe, which we think they are, a sine wave is a sine wave. My colleagues who work on NASA projects, they love this project, because it’s so Back to the Future. We have to look back to look forward.

What do you think being an artist doing this work provides to these conversations of technology? Does it take an artistic eye to design something that reimagines current perceptions of longevity?

Recently, somebody was introducing me at a talk and they called me an embedded artist. I’ve never really thought about that term in relation to myself, but I kind of like it because it’s sort of like embedding an artist at the table with people who are trying to solve some other kind of problem. Some of my engineer colleagues say that artists help them think through their thinking, because we can slow things down. We’re like, “Well, why don’t we just make it empty?” Also, I think that having an artist in the room empowers scientists to see the work that they’re doing as creative, you know, and not so analytical. I mean, working with my colleagues in Space Song, I think it helps them see that really, weʼre all kind of on this existential plane of asking these questions about who we are and where we are.

Partially due to this recent Supreme Court ruling, this past weekend the Reproductive Justice Alliance held a flea market featuring visual artists and musicians from Oberlin with the goal of raising money and awareness for reproductive rights agencies focused on providing funds and other resources to BIPOC individuals.

In 2021, 48 percent of U.S. adults said they “sometimes” or “often” learn about news from social media, according to Pew Research Center. In order for news to be attention-grabbing on social media, the visual component is most important. Infographics, photos, and visual art are often utilized not only to share actual news but also to discuss systemic issues and promote causes. Infographics have a particularly bad reputation, with some popular social media accounts being viewed as corny and ineffective and as capitalizing off of the issues that they have reduced to a three-slide graphic. Additionally, Instagram activism, which many claim to be “performative activism,” provides an excuse for social media users to simply repost a snappy tweet on their story, wipe their hands, and forget all about the issue at hand, failing to follow up and enact real change. However, the reality is that internet spaces are becoming just as big a part of individual lives as physical spaces, and people are still figuring out how to bring their personal and political values onto these platforms.

In recent political movements, many visual artists have adapted their practice to exist in and collaborate with the digital space. Shirien Damra is a Palestinian-American artist and organizer whose portraits memorializing George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery became visuals most associated with the fight for Black lives in 2020. At the same time that people were taking to the streets to protest police brutality and demand systemic reform, artists were using the tools and language that theyʼd acquired to spread awareness and memorialize the lives lost, as well as spreading awareness about the movement itself. This form of artistic activism involves community organizing, with the internet serving as a resource rather than a platform for virtue signaling. Internet art as activism is certainly not a one-off solution for systemic political issues, but if we care about social and political reform, we cannot exclude digital spaces from the sites of our activism. For many users, this feels unnatural, but many artists are familiar with designing digital spaces as networks for sharing political sentiments and information.

Our issue with what we call “performative activism” makes sense: it seems to reflect a lack of personal responsibility for political and social issues, allowing people to praise themselves for virtue signaling instead of taking direct action. Performative activism often reflects a desire to increase social capital rather than actual concern for the issue at hand. Additionally, many people have concerns that aestheticizing digital movements has changed the landscape of political activism, making it so people will not take part in social reform unless it is “pretty” or can be made into a performance. Although this is a very real threat, as it can prevent actual change, the problem with generalizing in this way is that all forms of social media activism are viewed as equally ineffective. In reality, the artistry behind informative illustrations like Damra’s has a different purpose than the hashtags and black squares that Instagram users posted in 2020, which many people promptly for- got about. Art-making and performance have a longstanding relationship with activism and protest. One of the forms that performance and activism have taken and continue to take is that of political or experimental theater. At times, like the period after World War I, the theater was used as a platform to express anti-propaganda sentiments. Today, experimental theater and larger-scale media often introduce political and social issues through creative development and the art of performing.

Visual artists also use their practices and their methods of performing as stages for sharing political sentiments. During a time in which so many people from various communities are under attack simply for their identity, art has proven to be an effective tool for expressing fears and concerns. Installation design and public art are popular mediums through which many conceptual artists create work motivated by intentional activism. Artists like Ai Weiwei and Jenny Holzer have developed artistic practices that make political statements, bringing conversations about systemic issues into gallery spaces and museum settings.

Contemporary artists and art organizations have been increasingly connecting performance, visual art, and public spaces with activism. For Freedoms is an artist collective that brings the visual aesthetics of Instagram activism into physical spaces, confronting the public with political statements and starting conversations through visual art.

One of For Freedoms’ recent projects was the 50 State Initiative, through which the organization installed artwork along roads in every U.S. state, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. The art behind this activism was the jumping point for the organization, which also facilitated town halls and other community events in partnership with local art institutions to facilitate conversations about regional and national issues in each state. These artworks feature catchy political sayings and minimalistic imagery comparable to the aesthetics of internet activism; however, the work of For Freedoms did not stop with these public installations or even their popular Instagram presence, on which their aesthetic finds its target audience. The digital world has created a demand for striking visual components and aesthetics in activism. This comes with many downfalls, including an increase in performative activism and virtue signaling. Still, many artists and organizations use these changes to continue the long history of activist art. The visual identity of activism and social reform cannot be seen as an easy substitute for “real” political action, but rather as a language through which artists can express political theories, share information, build community, and enact change.