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: Art, Design, & Urban Ecology: The Wildland-Urban InterfaceWinter 2025
UC San Diego

In this upper-division studio course, we explore the theory and methods of an “ecology of practices” across physical design and sculptural strategies in the “Wildland Urban Interface” (WUI), an area or zone where built structures and human development intermingle with landscapes regarded as ‘natural’ (forests, grasslands, the deep ocean). The ecological landscapes and infrastructures we will work with include urban and suburban environments as well as wild, natural, and protected lands. Specifically, through hands-on research and creative projects, we gather around the WUI threshold zone and engage with its social and ecological systems, understanding them as sources of materials available for artistic intervention and design of structures spanning art and design. 

Our approach will emphasize historical, critical, and speculative thinking and study as they inform and are enacted through technical and practical making and doing. We will consider the making of sculpture, research tools, and built environments in the context of mutually supportive and reciprocity-driven relations. We will begin the quarter with brief introductions to the conceptual boundaries of the WUI. Through a series of seminars, guest lectures, and field site visits, we will explore some of the shifting and slippery meanings of the “urban,” the “wild,” and “ecology.” We will incorporate different artistic methods and approaches that have been used to construct urban-ecological interventions and platforms, and consider how we might approach this interface differently, informed by these precedents. Our exploration will be anchored in methods of doing “fieldwork” and “lab work” as artists and designers. Utilizing community-based participatory research methods, prototyping techniques honed during skill-building workshops, and group-oriented assignments, we will tackle critical challenges and contradictions associated with WUI. 





Collaboration and community are central to this class. We will build collaborative relationships with each other and with external course partners, such as UCSD’s Cleland Lab, the EarthLab Community Station, and Condor Media. Through individual and group work in our course “co-laboratories,” we will use critical fabulation with hands-on prototyping and fabrication to experiment with the urban and ecological as conceptual art and design frameworks. The main task for the quarter will be to plan and build a “field station,” or a platform/toolset for study, data-gathering, teaching, dreaming, and staging artistic intervention(s) at a local site. Toward this goal, our class will divide into 3-4 interrelated “co-laboratory” working groups, each dedicated to a specific topic/intervention. Project plan options and primary partners/sites 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