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.

We Need More
2013
12 “ x 12” x 12”
steel, aluminum, architectural detail, railroad track cross-section, spraypaint
We Need More appropriates the typeface used by railroad corporation CSX, originally designed by Cooper Union alumn and graphic designer, Herb Lubalin. This piece accompanies a section of railroad track dating to 1853, which was originally a structural support for the Cooper Union Foundation Building. Peter Cooper used railroad tracks and i-beams to frame the building, which was the first ever in NYC to be framed with iron-rolled beams.


The second diptych of We Need More, appropriates the Foundry Gridnik typeface, which Cooper Union uses for its branding and public-facing communications. Alongside, a piece of the ceiling of the Rose Auditorium, located in Cooper Union's New Academic Building. The building is one of the major causes of Cooper Union's financial crisis and the subsequent fight to keep the school free.