CHAIRS: Elizabeth Demaray

EcoArt Salon — Collective Healing: Alexandra Chang in conversation with artists Jean Shin and Mary Ting

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For this EcoArt salon, artists Jean Shin and Mary Ting invite us to think about the importance of community, grieving, and healing in relation to our current eco crisis. Shin’s work underlines the impacts of mass consumption that has become ubiquitous to our everyday lives and our often invisiblized ties between both each other and our environment around us. Ting’s work addresses the exotic animal trade, the current mass extinctions, and our globally entangled relationships with animals and zoonotic diseases like Covid-19. The artists will present their projects and practices and be in close discussion with the audience during the salon with breakout sessions.

They will explore how their work engages audiences and communities to take the time to reflect on our complex cultural and social relationships to the larger systems, networks, and infrastructures impacting our environment, lives, and futures.

The EcoArt Salon is a monthly gathering that is free and open to the public for those interested in EcoArt and the environment to share their projects, discuss issues, network, and collaborate together.

The ongoing salon gatherings bring together artists, writers, curators, scholars, and the public from the NJ/NY and larger interconnected global community interested in the topic of EcoArts and its potential during a time of environmental degradation and ecological crises.

The EcoArt Salon is hosted by Rutgers University-Newark Paul Robeson Galleries and we are proud to be co-presenting this EcoArt Salon with LASER New Brunswick.

The EcoArt Salon is sponsored by the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience at Rutgers University-Newark.

About the artists:

Mary Ting is a Chinese American artist, cultural thinker, educator and writer. Solo exhibitions include Lambent Foundation; Dean Project; metaphor contemporary art; Kentler Drawing Space; Wake Forest University, NC; and her current retrospective, Our Hive is Sick at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Augusta Savage Gallery.  Ting has received grants and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Gottlieb Foundation, Pollack Krasner Foundation, Joan Mitchell Center/NOLA, LMCC Governors Island; and the MacDowell Colony among others. Recent highlights include: public presentations on Ecological Loss into Action; “Plant Cures II”, “Residents of 14 Street Past “and her upcoming 21^st Century Tree of Life project and the ongoing, Daffodil Ashes: On Grief and Artmaking workshops.

Her research on wildlife demand and modern history has been presented at the Jane Goodall Institute, Nepal; UC Davis; The New York Explorer’s Club, NY, The Wolf Conservation Center; Turtle Survival Alliance and at numerous wildlife organizations during her 2019 South African conservation lecture tour.

Mary teaches in both the art department and the environmental justice program at John Jay College, New York City. Mary is also a certified master composter, citizen pruner, and avid gardener. maryting.com

Jean Shin Born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea and raised in the United States, Jean Shin lives and works in Brooklyn and upstate NY. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1999 and received a B.F.A. and a M.S. from Pratt Institute. She is a tenured Adjunct Professor of Fine Art at Pratt and a recipient of Pratt’s 2017 Alumni Achievement Award. She serves on the Board of the Joan Mitchell Foundation and National YoungArts Foundation.

Shin is nationally recognized for her monumental installations that transform everyday objects into elegant expressions of identity and community engagement. She has had numerous solo exhibitions at prestigious institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; and Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Her work has been featured in more than 150 exhibitions at major cultural institutions such as the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Asia Society, Barnes Foundation, and Museum of Art and Design.

As an accomplished artist practicing in the public realm, Shin has received commissions for large-scale, permanent installations from major public federal and city agencies. She recently completed a landmark commission for the MTA’s Second Ave Subway at the 63rd Street station in Manhattan.

Shin has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, among others. She has been featured in Art in America, Sculpture Magazine and the New York Times.

Moderator: Alexandra Chang

Alexandra Chang is Associate Professor of Practice with the Art History program at the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and Interim Associate Director of the Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience and Associate Director fo the American Studies Program at Rutgers University-Newark. She also organizes the Climate Working Group and the EcoArt Salon at Paul Robeson Galleries, bridging Science, Humanities, and the Arts. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Climate Advocacy, Urgency, and Context in the Arts and Humanities with Routledge.

The Team: Elizabeth Demaray (Associate Professor of Fine and Performing Arts RUC, Facilitator New Brunswick LASER), Jessica Mazzeo (Digital Media and Communications Coordinator), Kathleen Parrish (student, RUNB, Head Chair of Rutgers Sustainability Coalition)

New Brunswick Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) is a initiative of Leonardo/ISAST and is an international program of evening gatherings that brings artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversations.

SPONSORS:

The Leonardo/ISAST LASERs are a program of international gatherings that bring artists, scientists, humanists and technologists together for informal presentations, performances and conversations with the wider public. The mission of the LASERs is to encourage contribution to the cultural environment of a region by fostering interdisciplinary dialogue and opportunities for community building to over 40 cities around the world. To learn more about how our LASER Hosts and to visit a LASER near you please visit our website. @lasertalks