Visual Arts Open Lecture: Heather Davis
The Visual Arts Lecture Series presents talks by leading Canadian and international artists, curators, and academics.
Join Heather Davis, lead faculty for the program, Ecologies of Precarious Abundance: Queer Life and Natures, for this talk.
Heather Davis is a writer, researcher and teacher whose work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her most recent book, Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), re-examines materiality in light of plastic’s saturation. Davis is also a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College, and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020). Davis has written widely for art and academic publications on questions of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and has lectured internationally, including at the MoMA and Columbia, both New York; MIT, Cambridge; Sonic Acts Academy, Amsterdam; Transmediale, Berlin; Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Yinchuan Biennale. She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017). Davis' work has been supported through numerous fellowships including the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, a GIDEST faculty fellowship at The New School, a Mellon Visiting Scholar in the Environmental Humanities at the Center for Environmental Futures, University of Oregon, a Critical Studies Teaching Fellowship at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University.
This program is generously supported by the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Outstanding Artist program.
