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Lecture

Jen Delos Reyes: There Are Other Ways

Less is Enough and Other Approaches to Radical Reduction
Tuesday
Tuesday, April 19, 2022 - 5:00pm

Virtual

Join Jen for a talk that centers on transitioning from her large-scale organizing work with Open Engagement, to making a practice at the scale of her life at Garbage Hill Farm, an urban farm in a post-industrial corridor in Chicago's McKinley Park that is committed to organic regenerative farming practices, closed loop production, and the elimination of single use plastics in distribution. Garbage Hill Farm is located at SIDE by SIDE, a future residency for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) arts and culture leaders and artists to rest and rejuvenate. The farm’s CSAA (Community Supported Art/Agriculture program) and product sales is what helps provide the funding to support the artist residency. The farm is home to chickens, birds, rescue chihuahuas Mei-Mei and MoMo, and twin goats, Bucky and G.O.A.T. The talk will incorporate activities that will ask attendees to shift their arts practices toward personal meaning, value, and sustainability.

Jen Delos Reyes is a 'farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts,’ educator, writer, and radical community arts organizer. She is defiantly optimistic, a friend to all birds, and proponent that our institutions can become tender and vulnerable. Her practice is as much about working with institutions as it is about creating and supporting sustainable artist-led culture. In 2015 Delos Reyes became the Associate Director of the School of Art & Art History of the University of Illinois, Chicago’s only public research university, where she teaches in the departments of Art and Museum and Exhibition Studies. She was the Director and founder of Open Engagement, an international annual conference on socially engaged art that was active between 2007-2018 and hosted ten conferences in two countries at locations including the Queens Museum in New York.

This Zoom event is free, open to the public, and will not be recorded. Jen’s talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by MHC Associate Professor Lisa Iglesias. Registration is required.

Co-sponsored by the Art Studio Department, the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, and the Miller Worley Center for the Environment.