JOERILEY.WORK




joriley@ucsd.edu
@pleasedontfront
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Photo: Natalie Conn

  Joe Riley is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. 

  Joe’s research has recently been supported by the Getty Scholars Program, a UCSD Rita L. Atkinson Fellowship, and the UC Humanities Research Institute. His dissertation, Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward A Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970, foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within California’s university-military-research complex.

  From 2020–2025 Joe has been a participating artist and co-curator for the Pacific Standard Time exhibition Embodied Pacific, featuring projects by thirty artists working with researchers in laboratories, field sites, and archives in Southern California and the Pacific Islands. 

  Previously, he was an Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Joe holds a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art and has taught at UC San Diego, Cal State San Marcos, Stevens Institute of Technology, and The Cooper Union.

Seed Mast: Arrange
2017
wood, grain, performance
Hunter East Harlem Gallery, NYC
collaboration w/ Futurefarmers 
The exhibition Futurefarmers: Arrange highlighted specific projects from the past 23 years of Futurefarmers work and attempts to place the group into the canon of important socially engaged artists and designers. Arrange featured key thematic threads within the collective’s practice and the viewer is thrust into the world of Futurefarmers where, like a small ecosystem, their projects intertwine art, science, design and the environment. The exhibition title harks to an inherent resistance to the typical retrospective exhibition model and also the collective’s interest in arrangement, organization, and non-hierarchical cataloguing structures. The viewer, guided through the exhibition by professional actors—Messengers—sees art objects act as props to the stories, interpretations, and phantoms of Futurefarmers’ past projects through a scripted, performative experience. The exhibition can be understood as an experience that grasps the temporal and interstitial moments of dialogue, conversation, performance, and collaboration - processes that are deeply rooted in the work of Futurefarmers. 

For the exhibition, Seed Mast was re-arranged in the form of flotsam and jetsam in the wake of Seed Journey. Messengers rehearse the telling and re-telling of the journey around the wood and grain assembly. 

At the closing of Futurefarmers: Arrange, Futurefarmers together with Messengers and audience, rehearsed a traditional sea shanty and spiritual: Roll the Old Chariot Along. Participants rehearsed with song and whistling.