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.


Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward a Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970

2020-present
UCSD Visual Arts


My dissertation explores the interaction between artists and oceanographers in late-20th and early 21st-century environmental art. Mobilizing evidence from research spanning the studio, laboratory, and archives, I argue for a critical oceanic turn led by interdisciplinary networks situated in Southern California. I examine the institutional contours of modernist and conceptual art’s integration with environmentalism, tightening proximities between Southern California’s oceanographers and an environmental art avant-garde, and artists’ apprehension of technological solutionism and conservationist frameworks in the context of marine ecological crises. 

Photocollage detail from The Second Lagoon: Sea Grant (1974). Helen Mayer Harrison (center) and Newton Harrison (right) gazing into a large aquaculture tank they created for their Sea Grant-funded study of Scylla Serrata crabs. John D. Isaacs (left) is depicted overseeing the artists at work in the studio/laboratory.
Allan Sekula, Fish Story, Third revised English edition (London: MACK, 2018).

I track these developments through ecocritical case studies of Helen and Newton Harrison’s aquacultural experimentation in The Second Lagoon: Sea Grant (1974) and Allan Sekula’s engagement with capitalism’s oceanic crises in Fish Story (1995) and The Forgotten Space (2010). These two historical cases ground a participatory account of seaweed research conducted by contemporary artists and scientists in relation to intersecting histories of how we model and understand colonization, maritime capitalism, and globalization. By integrating visual-historical and ecocritical research methods and embedding their inquiry in art practice and marine science, the project offers an informed revision of standard historical narratives of environmental defense and repair through the lens of ocean science and art.