What I realized, partly because I didn’t go to art school, but also by engaging in a lot of different audiences and communities, is that people within the arts tend to have an extremely inflated sense of their own importance in the world, and that most people don’t give a shit about “Art.” 

--Josh MacPhee

"News stories don’t satisfy on a human level,” she said. “We know that Guantánamo is still open, but do we really know what that means? The idea is to experience an emotional understanding, so it’s not just an intellectual abstraction."

--Laura Poitras

Art is itself a research practice, a way of investigating the world and ourselves. Art displays us to ourselves, and in a way makes us anew, by disrupting our habitual activities of doing and making.

--Alva Noë

The relationship between the didactic and the arts has suffered immensely, and the gulf continues to grow: the socially engaged artist that wades into the waters of the didactic faces the wrath of an arts community that privileges rigidified codes of ambiguous aesthetics above all else.

--Nato Thompson

That is the miracle of great socially committed art: It addresses our sources of deepest unease, helps us to confront what we cannot organize or explain by making all of it unforgettable. 

--Nicholas Dawidoff on Robert Frank

The Central Valley Project Slideshow: Building California from Chris Austin

Finally, art is--or should be--generous. But when working with place, artists can only give if they are receiving as well. The greatest challenges for artists lured by the local are to balance between making the information accessible and making it visually provocative as well; to fulfill themselves as well as their collaborators; to innovate not just for innovation's sake, not just for style's sake, nor to enhance their reputation or ego, but to bring a new degree of coherence and beauty to the lure of the local.

--Lucy Lippard

A lecture about conservation initiatives on Humboldt Bay

European Beach Grass Eradication, Humboldt Bay, CA

Diagram of an aerobic trickling filter at a wastewater treatment plant

Diagram of an anaerobic digester at a wastewater treatment plant

“I am suggesting that, for too many individuals in modern society, there is a feeling of being dominated, and that feelings of powerlessness are almost inescapable. I am also suggesting that such feelings can to a large degree be overcome through conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them, to interpret the experiences they are having day by day. Only as they learn to make sense of what is happening, can they feel themselves to be autonomous. Only then can they develop the sense of agency required for living a moral life.”

--Maxine Greene

Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
 
--Hannah Arendt