![]() I think I was one of the few students who didn't have a really great understanding of the Anthropocene before going in, but that was something I quickly learned. And I thought that having a kind of collaborative project that had a very material tangible output, like an exhibition, would be a way of kind of coming together as a class community to produce something and to try to work through those complex concepts, complex feelings together.Īnd when students were coming to class, and maybe I should ask this of you, Anna, when you saw the name of the course, was it readable and familiar to you as a term? Did you have to learn about it and kind of come to an understanding of it that you grew into in the class? When you looked at the course title, did you understand what it was implying? So when I was teaching "Art of the Anthropocene" the first time, I kind of felt like there wasn't a sort of collective space to hold all of those very complicated thoughts and feelings together. Yeah, Elizabeth ready calls it a “charismatic megacategory.” And I really liked that phrasing for it because it shows how large it looms in our minds, how it comes to capture all of our fears, imagination, hope, and also sense of loss. But it's a useful frame of thinking about this time that we're living in and the time that we have created as human beings. So just like Eugenia was saying, it's this moment in our Earth's history where human history has made a significantly noticeable impact and it has been contested by some and accepted by others. Just like to add to that definition, to break it down if we're looking at like "anthro" as "people" and then the "cene" ending like an epic or an era, geologically. ![]() And I don't know, Anna, if you want to jump in with any addition to the Anthropocene. So it talks about anthropogenic things like climate change, pollution, toxicity of various forms. But something that I was thinking a lot about after I taught it for the first time was that when you start to learn about the Anthropocene, which is, I guess I should define this a little bit: it's a period of geologic time, proposed to mark how humans have influenced the geologic record, so literally changed the earth 's strata. Previously, students had been encouraged to do either a research essay or a kind of creative project depending on their own creative practices in response to the themes of the class. So I had taught "Art of the Anthropocene" before, but never with a kind of collective collaborative project. So maybe I'll say a little bit about the class first. And the "Art of the Anthropocene" class that you taught was the kind of instigator for creating the exhibition, correct? So with you as a faculty member, Eugenia, and you as a student, Anna, how you worked together, but also to look at how this project came to be, how the exhibition happened. I wanted to start and talk about how this project came to be and the idea of the podcast is to look at collaborations and to look at cross-constituency kind of collaborations between different aspects of Gallatin. I'm a senior at Gallatin and I am studying a lot of different applications and ways of listening. Hi, I'm Eugenia Kisin, I'm an assistant professor of art and society at Gallatin where I teach classes on contemporary art, museum studies, museum anthropology, and environmental justice, particularly as it pertains to Indigenous contemporary art worlds.Īnd my name is Anna Van Dine. I spoke with them about the thinking behind the show, what it meant to collapse the normal curatorial hierarchies, and what they learned from working together in this way. The curation of Overflow was unusual in that Kisin and her fellow curators, Kirsty Robertson and Keith Miller, collaborated with students from Kisin's "Art of the Anthropocene" course in order to curate and mount the show. For this, our first episode, I spoke with Gallatin faculty member Eugenia Kisin and Gallatin senior Anna Van Dine about Overflow, an exhibition that was shown in The Gallatin Galleries in the summer of 2019. This is Criss Cross: The NYU Gallatin Podcast and I'm your host, KC Trommer.
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