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.


VIS 101A: Designing Urban EcologiesWinter 2025
UC San Diego

VIS 101A offers a design studio-lab setting to introduce students to actual hands-on visual processes to design urban ecological interventions. Through individual and group work in our “co-laboratory,” situated in the DIB Makerspace, we will use hands-on practices of prototyping and design fabrication to experiment with the urban and ecological as conceptual design frameworks. 

We will begin the quarter with brief introductions to the conceptual boundaries of the “wildland urban interface” (WUI). Through a series of guest lecturers and field-site visits we will explore shifting and slippery meanings of the “urban,” and of “ecology,” and the different design methods and approaches to constructing urban-ecological design platforms. Our exploration will be anchored by methods of doing “field work” and “lab work” as designers. Utilizing design and prototyping techniques honed during skill-building workshops, we will tackle design problems associated with WUI, with the aim of building collaborative relationships not only with each other, but also class partners like UCSD’s Cleland Lab, the EarthLab Community Station, and the Condor Media. 





The main task for the quarter will be to design and build a “field station,” or a platform/toolset for study, data-gathering, teaching, dreaming, and staging intervention(s) at a local site. Toward this goal, our class will divide in 3-4 interrelated “co-laboratory” working groups each dedicated to a specific topic/intervention. Design research trajectory options for each co-laboratory include:

Water + Soil (Co-laboratory 1)

Primary partner/site: EarthLab Community Station

Wildfire Recovery + Resilience (Co-laboratory 2 + 3)

Partners/sites:  Cleland Lab (Karagan Smith and Alexander Gillert), Condor Media (Andrew Pittman)

Wildflowers + Wildlife (Co-laboratory 4)

Partners/sites: Cleland Lab (Julia Bebout), UCSD Urban Forestry (Chris Johnson)

Studio and site visits:


Student work samples:

Liana Kitchel, Caleb Holmes, Anna Norris
Sarah Chung, Sydney Nunnemaker, Jiaxin Tao
Susana Lazaro Hernandez, Alan Gonzalez, Aditya Venkatesh 
Gurleen Kurr, Jacie Littell, Dayton Garrett
Erin Kee, David Ledesma, William Ung
Ajjon Zimmerman, Juliana Amaya, Christine Bui