Elliptical Vistas

Justice is what love looks like in public. --Cornel West

“I’m a ground person, not a figure person.” --Deborah Stratman

"You've got to take your anger and make it beautiful, like Dr. J going to the hoop or like Duke Ellington." --David Hammons

Map of the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta (1859)

As artists our job is to look where others don’t. --Alfonso Cuarón

Georgia O'Keefe

Charles Sheeler

Romantic reverence for wild nature paradoxically disserved the natural world, idealizing nature to the point of obscuring much of its realit...

The Great Grey Owl Siting at Prairie Creek State Park, Humboldt County, CA (circa 2015)

Perhaps wildness is always a trespasser disrespecting the artificial boundaries of power. --Daegan Miller

1848 illustration of the great Tule marsh of the Sacramento Valley

US Dept. of Agriculture Map of the State of California (1901) courtesy of the Prelinger Library

One of the things I find fascinating about California is that our state of 39 million people with its $2 trillion economy subsists largely ...

I like invoking the native rhythm an image suggests, and then not allowing the viewer to have it. I want people to question the motivation...

The world is a mess. If you concentrate on a little bit of the world and you make a little composition, you’re effectively tidying it up.  ...

The Merced National Wildlife Refuge

The San Luis National Wildlife Refuge

There is a familiar rhetorical trap that occurs around the subject of political art. Artists who's work is too imaginative, rec...

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 pe...

"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...

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...

The relationship between the didactic and the arts has suffered immensely, and the gulf continues to grow: the socially engaged artist that ...

That is the miracle of great socially committed art: It addresses our sources of deepest unease, helps us to confront what we cannot organi...

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 chal...

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 powerlessn...

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

Imitate, make it geometrical, intensify: That is not a bad three-part formula for the driving pulse of the arts as a whole. --E.O. Wilson

Thus the project of imparting visibility to the very classes and peoples, the very spaces and sites, where history has remained nameless a...

One of my favorite things about art/artists in the world today is that beyond any kind of label of "activist", a wide ran...

The McDaniel Slough Restoration Project, Humboldt Bay, CA

Breaching a 100-year old dike on Humboldt Bay to restore a long-lost wetland (September 26, 2013)

Experimenting with your own life is the most fundamental medium we have. --Natalie Jeremijenko

The only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to our...