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.




The Politics of Destruction
2013
performance with Free Cooper Union
e-flux, NYC 
On November 24th, 2013 at e-flux, Free Cooper Union held a performative reading of the 41-page Board of Trustee meeting transcript leaked by the Village Voice in July 2013 and first performed by Free Cooper in May 2013 during the student occupation of the Cooper Union President's Office. For the Performance, students play the roles of trustees and Jamshed Bharucha’s lines are played by a computerized text-to-speech tool.

Weak coffee and mini-hot-dog hors d’oeuvres were served, and the performance was reviewed by Hyperallergic.