JOERILEY.WORK




joriley@ucsd.edu
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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.


(S)tools for the Mothership
2022
wood, newspaper, fabric webbing, plants
 In 2022 Audrey Snyder and I had an opportunity to travel to Tangier, Morocco for an artist residency called The Mothership which is run by the artist Yto Barrada. The residency is surrounded, and grounded, by a garden of tinctorial plants. The flowers grown in the garden are used by Yto and the many visitors to this place to dye textiles, make pigments, and more. While at the Mothership we helped lead some of these workshops making pigments and dyes from the Mothership’s plants.

The first image in the image gallery above shows three stools. Shortly after we arrived in Tangier, Yto directed our attention to the small wooden stool in the center there. She said that The Mothership could use some more of these stools, which are common throughout the city and country. Street vendors perch atop these stools; people shine shoes from these stools; they are in kitchens, sidewalks, and gardens. Although they appear all over, these stools are also hard to come by. Like any favorite/perfect chair, they can be deeply personal and attached to the place.

Audrey and I collected discarded materials, useful debris, flotsam, jetsam, and various hand tools scattered around the grounds of The Mothership. We tried to learn from the stool that Yto shared with us, and to fold its brilliance and usefulness back into the forms and functions of the dye garden. We adapted the design of the stool into a dye-garden tool by turning them into herbarium presses—simple instruments which are widely used in scientific botany for the purpose of drying and preserving plant specimens.

Lake pigment dye workshop at the Mothership, July 2022: