(Paintings by my student Colin Crawford.)

All cultural production, to a certain extent, is a kind of myth-making. The trick is to do it responsibly, I think.

--Trevor Paglen

"Cultural strategies are as necessary as political strategies."

--Favianna Rodriguez

(Image by Ken Ehrlich)

(image by Aurora Tang)

My new exhibition (Shifting Baselines) at the Santa Fe Art Institute (click here)

Dolls from the Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, NM

@ the CLUI now (click here)

I think that landscape is often an escapist genre. But, even if you start with an environmental idea, it is not what you profess; it is what you express that counts. That’s my problem with most political painting. It is not very convincing. What do your behavior or your actions demonstrate? What do they express? 

--Rackstraw Downes

My lecture at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena on October 19 (click here)

(William Powhida)

(Anthony Discenza)

My project for the first issue of Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design, and Ecology (click here)

The Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio

I have this belief that if you have an idea, and if you have to write it down to remember it, then it can't be a great idea.

--Tino Sehgal

The recently decommissioned Evergreen Pulp Mill on Humboldt Bay

Platform marking the position of a utility cable under Humboldt Bay

Site of the former Simpson Plywood Company, Humboldt Bay

Today a region is generally understood not as a politically or geographically delimited space, but one determined by stories, loyalty, group identity, common experiences and histories (often unrecorded), a state of mind rather than a place on a map.

--Lucy Lippard

Humboldt Bay transmission lines and substations

Boat Tour of Humboldt Bay, Northern California

Humboldt Bay's Oyster Beds

In other urban environments, you tend to feel it when what you are doing is against the grain of the city. But when you are in Los Angeles, everything you do simply lays down a new path that is appropriate for some future, emerging lifestyle. It just feels like there are a thousand different ways of using this landscape, and they're all somehow appropriate.

--Geoff Manaugh

(A couple of Merle Shuster's celebrated aerial photographs of Humboldt Bay from the 1950s.)

Map of Humboldt Bay by Aldaron Laird