SciArt LASER Talk with Ruth Wallen and Beverly Naidus

LASER Talk: Navigating Grief, Fear, and Denial in a Time of Ecological Unraveling with Ruth Wallen and Beverly Naidus
Ruth Wallen will present Walking with Sequoias: Bearing Witness to Loss and Rebirth

Ruth Wallen www.ruthwallen.net is a multi-media artist and writer whose work is dedicated to encouraging dialogue around ecological and social justice. After working as an environmental scientist, she turned to art to pose questions beyond disciplinary boundaries, address values informing environmental policy, and contribute to the developing field of ecological art. Her interactive installations, nature walks, web sites, artist books, performative lectures, and writing have been widely distributed/published and exhibited. Active in the border region, she has written about race, gender and visual culture, was a member of the multinational artist collective Las Comadres, and a Fulbright Lecturer at the Autonomous University of Baja California, Tijuana. Committed to student-centered learning, she served as chair and core faculty in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College for many years. Her work is deeply informed by Buddhist practice.

Beverly Naidus will present Art as Medicine and Compass

Beverly (Bee) Naidus www.beverlynaidus.net has attempted to subvert the dominant culture since she started to crawl. Despite discouragement from her family to choose art as a profession, creative practices like music, movement, image & altar making, and writing, claimed her. She found solace with plant & animal kin from an early age and identifies strongly as a pollinator and sees herself as part of growing mycelial networks. As a young artist, she achieved unexpected recognition in the NYC art world but was able to flee the competitive pretentiousness of that strange subculture by being offered gigs teaching art for social change at various institutions, both academic and alternative. Her partnership with her late husband inspired new ways of collaborating with community, activist movements, and the sacred. Her work has taken many forms from artist’s books to street art interventions. Her audience-participatory work has often been concerned with healing trauma and creating community through sharing vulnerable stories. She left academia in 2020 and is currently facilitating workshops as an independent including an online program called, “Art Medicine for Catastrophic and Transformative Times.” She is completing her second book, a fractured memoir, that will inspire readers to reimagine the world through healing stories, dancing with grief, and building something within that which needs to collapse to help future generations thrive.
Both Ruth and Beverly will be SFAI artists in residence at and SciArt Santa Fe is grateful to SFAI for supporting this LASER!

This event is free and accessible to all. If you need more information, contact with questions related to access and accommodation.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Santa Fe Art Institute, 1600 St. Michael's Drive #31, Santa Fe, United States