38: Gallery to Garden: Beverly Naidus on Art, Activism, and Reimagining the Future

BIOBeverly Naidus's&nbsp;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.&nbsp;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.&nbsp;Naidus received her BA from Carleton College, and an MFA with a full teaching fellowship from the Nova Scotia College of Art &amp; 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&nbsp;Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame&nbsp;(a book that helped to shift studio arts curriculum in many places). She has written &amp; 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:&nbsp;www.beverlynaidus.net, Instagram: #utopias4all Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/92685388277 or Beverly Naidus https://www.facebook.com/utopias4allNotable MentionsCOCA: Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle:&nbsp;CoCA serves the Pacific Northwest as a catalyst and forum for the advancement, development, and understanding of Contemporary Art.&nbsp;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 &amp; 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&nbsp;Grievers&nbsp;(the first novella in a trilogy on the Black Dawn imprint),&nbsp;Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation,&nbsp;We Will Not Cancel Us and Other Dreams of Transformative Justice,&nbsp;Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good,&nbsp;Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds&nbsp;and the co-editor of&nbsp;Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements&nbsp;and&nbsp;How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office. She is the cohost of the&nbsp;How to Survive the End of the World,&nbsp;Octavia’s Parables&nbsp;and&nbsp;Emergent Strategy&nbsp;podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.Cuban missile crisis: The&nbsp;Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the&nbsp;October Crisis of 1962&nbsp;(Spanish:&nbsp;Crisis de Octubre), the&nbsp;Caribbean Crisis&nbsp;(Russian:&nbsp;Карибский кризис,&nbsp;tr.&nbsp;Karibsky krizis,&nbsp;IPA:&nbsp;[kɐˈrʲipskʲɪj ˈkrʲizʲɪs]), or the&nbsp;Missile Scare, was a 1-month, 4 day (16 October – 20 November 1962) confrontation between the&nbsp;United States&nbsp;and the&nbsp;Soviet Union&nbsp;which escalated into an international crisis when American deployments of missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of similar&nbsp;ballistic missiles&nbsp;in&nbsp;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&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls" rel="noopener noreferrer"...