University Art Museum Presents "Beyond Green"

Monday, 23 October 2006 11:18

Long Beach, CA - Sustainable design has the potential to transform everyday life through an approach that balances environmental, social, and aesthetic concerns.  In Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art, the UAM presents an iCI traveling exhibition that examines some of the ways in which contemporary artists are exploring a socially and environmentally conscientious – in other words, sustainable – way of living and working.  This emerging strategy emphasizes the responsible and equitable use of resources and links environmental and social justice.  By doing so, it moves past a prior generation of more narrowly eco-centered or ‘green’ approaches to architecture and industrial design.  Enacted around the world in large and small ways by architects and designers, as well as a growing numbers of activists, corporations, and policymakers, Beyond Green ventures in to the fertile new zone of sustainability in the arena of contemporary art.  On exhibit November 7 – December 17, 2006.

Beyond Green, curated by Stephanie Smith of the Smart Museum of Art, explores the ways that sustainable design philosophy resonates in the work of an emerging generation of international artists hailing from cities in the United States and Europe, including Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, Copenhagen, London, San Juan, and Vienna.  The exhibition’s thirteen artists and artists’ groups combine a fresh aesthetic sensibility with a constructively critical approach to the production, dissemination, and display of art.  They embed environmental concerns within larger ethical and aesthetic explorations, building paths to new forms of practice that go beyond green.