Episode 38: Beverly Naidus - Rewilding Our Muses

BIO

Beverly Naidus's art life has straddled the socially engaged margins of the art world, artful activism collaborations, and community-based art projects. Her audience participatory installations, artists books, photo-text and multimedia projects have dealt with the anxieties of being unemployed, nightmares about nuclear war, ways to transform body hate, using consumerism to numb ourselves from the extractive insanity of our capitalist economy, how grief and gratitude weave together in the climate emergency, the epigenetic trauma of living under white oppression and the joyful resilience of the marginalized. She often collaborates to develop creative strategies that might heal trauma, to plant seeds of activism, and imagine different outcomes. Early on, she discovered that her vulnerable story telling could generate stories from others, sometimes catalyzing positive actions. She has shared her work in city streets, alternative spaces, public parks, university galleries, community centers, and major museums. Her work has been written about in many books and journals and has developed an international following. After vibrant chapters in the New York and Los Angeles art worlds, including fruitful periods in other parts of North America, she has made a home in the Pacific Northwest since 2003. 

Naidus received her BA from Carleton College, and an MFA with a full teaching fellowship from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She taught art as a subversive activity at NYC museums, the Institute for Social Ecology, California State University, Long Beach where she had tenure, Goddard College, Hampshire College and Carleton College. From 2003 until 2020, she was the only tenured artist on the UW Tacoma faculty where she shaped an innovative, interdisciplinary studio arts curriculum in art for social change and healing. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (a book that helped to shift studio arts curriculum in many places). She has written & published many essays on eco-art and social practice as well as a few works of speculative fiction, and she is currently writing, Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating the “End of the World” and is looking for a publisher. While co-directing the non-profit, SEEDS (Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School) with her husband, Dr. Bob Spivey, they are leading workshops online with a focus on art that deals with climate and racial justice and have formed an international collective. They are currently facilitating an in-person “story hive project” with neighbors and are planning more “pandemic processing and dreaming into the future we want” art workshops to happen in coming months. Her solo show, “The Dead Ocean Scrolls and other Possible Futures” will be on exhibit at the Tacoma Community College Gallery in November 2021.

For more information visit her website: www.beverlynaidus.net, Instagram: #utopias4all Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/92685388277 or Beverly Naidus

BIO

Beverly Naidus's art life has straddled the socially engaged margins of the art world, artful activism collaborations, and community-based art projects. Her audience participatory installations, artists books, photo-text and multimedia projects have dealt with the anxieties of being unemployed, nightmares about nuclear war, ways to transform body hate, using consumerism to numb ourselves from the extractive insanity of our capitalist economy, how grief and gratitude weave together in the climate emergency, the epigenetic trauma of living under white oppression and the joyful resilience of the marginalized. She often collaborates to develop creative strategies that might heal trauma, to plant seeds of activism, and imagine different outcomes. Early on, she discovered that her vulnerable story telling could generate stories from others, sometimes catalyzing positive actions. She has shared her work in city streets, alternative spaces, public parks, university galleries, community centers, and major museums. Her work has been written about in many books and journals and has developed an international following. After vibrant chapters in the New York and Los Angeles art worlds, including fruitful periods in other parts of North America, she has made a home in the Pacific Northwest since 2003. 

Naidus received her BA from Carleton College, and an MFA with a full teaching fellowship from the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design. She taught art as a subversive activity at NYC museums, the Institute for Social Ecology, California State University, Long Beach where she had tenure, Goddard College, Hampshire College and Carleton College. From 2003 until 2020, she was the only tenured artist on the UW Tacoma faculty where she shaped an innovative, interdisciplinary studio arts curriculum in art for social change and healing. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame (a book that helped to shift studio arts curriculum in many places). She has written & published many essays on eco-art and social practice as well as a few works of speculative fiction, and she is currently writing, Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating the “End of the World” and is looking for a publisher. While co-directing the non-profit, SEEDS (Social Ecology Education and Demonstration School) with her husband, Dr. Bob Spivey, they are leading workshops online with a focus on art that deals with climate and racial justice and have formed an international collective. They are currently facilitating an in-person “story hive project” with neighbors and are planning more “pandemic processing and dreaming into the future we want” art workshops to happen in coming months. Her solo show, “The Dead Ocean Scrolls and other Possible Futures” will be on exhibit at the Tacoma Community College Gallery in November 2021.

For more information visit her website: www.beverlynaidus.net, Instagram: #utopias4all Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/92685388277 or Beverly Naidus https://www.facebook.com/utopias4all

COCA: Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle: CoCA serves the Pacific Northwest as a catalyst and forum for the advancement, development, and understanding of Contemporary Art. 

ONCA gallery in Brighton, England: O N C A is a Brighton based arts charity that bridges social and environmental justice issues with creativity.

EXTREME MAKEOVER: Reimagining the Port of Tacoma Free of Fossil Fuels 2018 to the present.: This community-based art project reimagines the Port of Tacoma, an industrial port built on tribal land in violation of the Medicine Creek Treaty of 1854. The soil and water been contaminated by years of dumping and now hosts several designated superfund sites. In recent years, the community has been fighting the installation of new and dangerous fossil fuel projects in the Port and Extreme Makeover arose out of that resistance.

Joanna Macy, author & teacher, is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and postmodern science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her thirteen books, which include three volumes of poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke with translation and commentary.Thich Nhat Hanh: Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh is a global spiritual leader, poet, and peace activist, renowned for his powerful teachings and bestselling writings on mindfulness and peace. A gentle, humble monk, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called him “an Apostle of peace and nonviolence” when nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Exiled from his native Vietnam for almost four decades, Thich Nhat Hanh has been a pioneer bringing Buddhism and mindfulness to the West, and establishing an engaged Buddhist community for the 21st Century.

adrienne maree brown is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, and author of Grievers (the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint), Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation, We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements and How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World, Octavia’s Parables and Emergent Strategy podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.

Cuban missile crisis: The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis of 1962 (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre), the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, tr. Karibsky krizis, IPA: [kɐˈrʲipskʲɪj ˈkrʲizʲɪs]), or the Missile Scare, was a 1-month, 4 day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar ballistic missiles in Cuba. Despite the short time frame, the Cuban Missile Crisis remains a defining moment in U.S. national security and nuclear war preparation. The confrontation is often considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into a full-scale nuclear war.[3]

Blue Mountain Center “ offers a unique refuge to artists, activists, organizers and cultural workers who produce transformative work for their times. We trust residents and conference attendees to choose the rhythm they need to counter the pressures of the world, whether through collaboration or solitude, work or rest, in a nurturing environment where they can connect to themselves, local and global movements, the land and story of the Adirondacks, and the growing BMC community?”

Grace Lee Boggs (June 27, 1915 – October 5, 2015) was an American author, social activist, philosopher, and feminist.[4] She is known for her years of political collaboration with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya in the 1940s and 1950s.[5] In the 1960s she and James Boggs, her husband of some forty years, took their own political direction.[6] By 1998, she had written four books, including an autobiography. In 2011, still active at the age of 95, she wrote a fifth book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, with Scott Kurashige and published by the University of California Press. She is regarded as a key figure in the Asian American Movement. See Also: The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was the author of several award-winning novels including PARABLE OF THE SOWER (1993), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and PARABLE OF THE TALENTS (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future.

Octavia's Parables: Beginning with The Parable of the Sower, our hosts Toshi Reagon and adrienne maree brown are examining each of Octavia E Butler’s published works, chapter by chapter. Our podcast summarizes the storyline, places it in a strategic context for those intending to change the world, and provides questions to help bring Butler's ideas to life.

ZAD de Notre-Dame-des-Landes (also known as ZAD NDDL) is the most well-known 'Zone to Defend' in France. Located in the Loire-Atlantique department near to Nantes, it is a very large, mostly agricultural terrain of 1,650 hectares (4,080 acres) which became nationally famous in the early 2010s and has resisted several concerted attempts by the French state to evict it.[1]

For decades there was local resistance to plans to build a new airport in the rural commune of Notre-Dame-des-Landes. In the 2000s much of the land was squatted as farmers were evicted. The new occupants set up autonomous self-sufficient structures such as a communal bakery and animal husbandry. Attempts to evict the squatters saw largescale counter-mobilisations in 2012 and 2018. French president Emmanuel Macron announced in January 2018 that the plans for the airport would be shelved and the already existing airport at Nantes would be redeveloped instead. Many of the remaining projects at the ZAD then engaged in a process of legalisation.

Jay Jordan and Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Infamous for fermenting mass disobedience on bicycles during Copenhagen's UN climate Summit, touring the UK recruiting a rebel clown army, building an illegal lighthouse on the site of an airport control tower, launching a rebel raft regatta to shut down a coal fired power station and refusing to be censored by London's Tate Modern museum, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination has been walking on the tightrope between art and activism since 2004.

“We bring together cultural workers and activists to co-design and carry out creative forms of direct-action which attempt to be as joyful as they are politically effective. We train people in entangling resistance and creativity and building resilient horizontal forms of organising. We call our work experiments, because we believe courage and creativity are fed when one claims the right to fail and we believe the role of art in this era of the Capitalocene is not to show the world to people but to transform it together.”

Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most pressing issues. On Democracy Now!, you’ll hear a diversity of voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes provocative perspective on global events.

Emergent Strategy Podcast: Is the official podcast of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute - each episode we dive deeply into the life, practice and experimentation of a person or group who we see as living embodiments of emergent strategy. Emergent Strategy is about how we get in right relationship with change - what are the simple interactions that can shift and shape complex systems and patterns? Hosts are Sage Crump, Mia Herndon and adrienne maree brown.

Deep Adaptation: This Facebook page is part of the larger Deep Adaptation Forum (https://www.deepadaptation.info/), an international virtual community which includes multiple other platforms and offerings. This is where we share information on our inner and outer deep adaptation to unfoldinsocietal breakdown due to climate change. We share on:

- The emotional, psychological and spiritual aspects of facing societal collapse;

- Practical ways to support wellbeing ahead of/during collapse, at household, community, national, or international scale. We welcome collective action in a spirit of compassion.

- We don’t share news on the state of the environment or climate here, nor on examples of social breakdown; in time, our feeds will be full of such news. We’re here to support deep adaptation to the situation, not to chronicle it.

The Following are mentioned in our description of Change the Story / Change the World's second...