Art + Activism: Linda Weintraub
Art + Activism: Linda Weintraub
Drop Dead Gorgeous: Beauty and the Aesthetics of Activism
Location: Broad Art Center, EDA, Room 1250
Ecological concepts of continuity and interdependence are renegade forces. They not only transform existing patterns of material consumption and production, they destabilize social values and disrupt aesthetic conventions. Even the notion of beauty is overhauled by the ecological mandate to embrace all aspects of the life cycle – decay as well as growth. Artists who demonstrate radical beauty are renegade aestheticists. They demonstrate that the greening of society depends as much upon revising human values as reforming human behaviors.
Linda Weintraub is an artist, curator, educator, and the author of Avant-Guardians: Texlets in Ecology and Art (2006 - ongoing) and founder of Artnow Publications. She wrote In The Making: Creative Options for Contemporary Artists (2003) and Art on the Edge and Over: Searching for Art’s Meaning in Contemporary Society (1995). Weintraub served as Henry R. Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College from 2000-2003. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Rutgers University. She lectures frequently on contemporary art and its intersection with ecology.