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.

Seed Mast: Provisioning
2015
16' x 4' x 3'
wood, grains, rope, print
CUNY James Gallery, NYC
For the exhibition Left Coast: California Political Art, the San Francisco-based arts collective Futurefarmers, Amy Franceschini, Audrey Snyder, and Joe Riley, banded together across continents and oceans to create a new work, entitled Seed Mast: Provisioning. The piece is a traditionally constructed boat mast and spar, filled with grain collected from all over and currently being grown by Futurefarmers at Slow Space in Oslo, Norway. The wooden mast is stepped into a chute covered by a fine patina of flour and water, and a horizontal spar holds a growing collection of seeds as it might a sail. 

At once a library and a silo, this seed mast is the first of many steps in provisioning toward the Flatbread Society Seed Journey — a voyage in which the grains will be transported back to their geographic origins in Jordan. This reverse migration is imagined as a “rescue,” and falls within a larger movement to protect the rights of small farmers. The project also imagines food, and grains in particular, as a symbol of resistance in the wake of intellectual property rights as they relate to biological matter.

As a preparation and anchor of the forthcoming journey, Seed Mast: Provisioning is also accompanied by a broadside print which details the mast's storied cargo along with a new text entitled Seeds of Time, written by anthropologist Michael Taussig for the Flatbread Society Seed Journey. 

Seed Mast was on display for the Left Coast exhibition, April 15, 2015 through May 29 at the CUNY Graduate Center James Gallery.