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.

Free On Next to Nothing
2013
8.5” x 11” x 3” (24 count)
letterpress prints, galvanized steel brackets 
A series of how-to guide proposals based on the form and content of the Crew Change Guide (CCG). The CCG is an underground publication that contains information on riding freight trains in North America—a concentrically distributed zine which cannot be purchased or found online. Free on Next to Nothing imagines the CCG as a provisional model for skirting authority in financial and political systems as well as accessing resources such as healthcare and higher education from an outsider and trickster position.