JOERILEY.WORK





joriley@ucsd.edu
@pleasedontfront
linktr.ee/joeriley
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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.

881 Radio
2010-13
FM radio, performance

881 Radio was a long term project aimed at using the form of pirate radio broadcasting as a platform for performance art and local community building. From 2010 - 2013 this clandestine, weekly FM radio broadcast offered a free form space for performance to students at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, local residents and community members. The content, location, and timing of the station’s broadcasts shifted constantly in an effort to highlight the project’s focus on the uncertain translation of visual to audio communication as well as the message-in-a-bottle quality of radio broadcasting.