Activism

David Gilbert

Environmental Anthropologist

David Gilbert is an environmental anthropologist with a special interest in social movements, ecological change, and post-development theory.

David has published on topics ranging from critiques of capitalism to explorations of communities-in-mobilization as their landscapes and climates change.

His book with University of California Press was released in March 2024: Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography....

Shannon Flattery

Artist, Cultural Worker, Activist

Shannon Flattery is an Artist, Cultural Worker, and Activist based in Santa Fe. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Touchable Stories, an organization that uses art to take community oral history onto the main stage of civic dialogue. Flattery is also the Co-Director of The Bobby Mendes Peace Legacy, an anti-violence program of Touchable Stories, co-directed by peace activist Isaura Mendes. The program was initiated during the Upham's Corner community history/exhibit project 1999-2000. Previously, She was a Multimedia Fabricator at Meow Wolf, Artistic Director at the New...

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poet, Painter, Social Activist, Co-Founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers

Poet, playwright, publisher, and activist Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born Lawrence Monsanto Ferling on March 24, 1919 in Yonkers, New York. His father, an Italian immigrant, had shortened the family name upon arrival in America. When Ferlinghetti discovered the lengthier name as an adult, he took it as his own. He had a tumultuous youth, parts of which were spent in France, an orphanage in Chappaqua, New York, and in the mansion of the wealthy Bisland family in Bronxville, New York. He attended Riverdale Country Day School, Mount Hermon, a preparatory academy in...

Julia Bryan-Wilson

Former ARC Director, Professor & Scholar of Modern and Contemporary Art
History of Art

Julia Bryan-Wilson's research interests include feminist and queer theory, theories of artistic labor, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of four books: Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009, named a best book of the year by the New York Times and Artforum); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson,...

Leslie St Dre

Artist, Organizer, Educator

Leslie St Dre (formerly Dreyer) is an artist, organizer and educator dedicated to building joyfully militant and intersectional movements for land and housing justice. They’ve spent the past decade honing a tactical arts organizing practice utilizing integrated narrative and media strategies. This work merges popular education, on-the-ground organizing, direct action, performance and visual art towards specific goals to change our collective situation. The actions become ephemeral multigenerational community spaces where unhoused and housed...

Jen Delos Reyes

Artist, Educator Community Arts Organizer

Jen de los Reyes was born in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and educated first in its local music scene of the mid-90’s infused with the energy of Riot grrrl and DIY, and then in its university. [1] How she works today is rooted in what she learned in her formative years as a show organizer, listener, creator of zines, and band member. Graduate work at the University of Regina made the space possible for her to see her work as an organizer as a key component of her continued creative work.

Jen de los Reyes is a 'farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts'[2],...

Beatriz da Costa

Interdisciplinary Artist, Tactical Media Practitioner

Beatriz da Costa (1974 – 2012) was an interdisciplinary artist and tactical media practitioner working at the intersection of contemporary art, science, engineering, and politics. Her work takes the form of public participatory interventions, locative media, conceptual tool building, and critical writing. Issues addressed in her work include the use of emergent technologies to investigate context-specific configurations of social injustice, the politics of transgenic organisms, and the social repercussions of ubiquitous surveillance technologies. Da Costa made...

C. Greig Crysler

2014 ARC Fellow

C. Greig Crysler completed his professional training in architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, UK. He teaches courses in the History, Theory and Society of Architecture. Through his leadership as Arcus Chair (2012-2022) and his role as Program Director of the CED’s Arcus Endowment, Crysler has translated his commitment to equity and social justice in design education into frameworks for student and faculty engagement, public discussion and alternative forms of pedagogy related to issues such as...

Douglas Crimp

American Art Historian, Critic, Curator, AIDS activist

Douglas Crimp (1944-2019) was the Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester and the author of On the Museum's Ruins (1993), Melancholia and Moralism: Essays on AIDS and Queer Politics (2002), "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol (2012), and Before Pictures (2016). He died in July 2019, as reported by ...

Tania Bruguera

Artist, Activist

Tania Bruguera was born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.