AVIVA RAHMANI: FROM ECOFEMINISM TO CLIMATE JUSTICE

109th CAA Annual Conference (complete program)
February 10–13, 2021; recorded sessions available through March 15

Prerecorded session available Feb. 9 - Mar. 15; live Q&A: Wed. February 10, 2-2:30 PM EST
Conference registration required

Chair: Robert R. Shane, Ph.D., College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY
Presenters:
Rebecca Lowery, MOCA, Los Angeles
Tender Investigations: The Early Work of Aviva Rahmani
Monika Fabijanska, independent art historian and curator, New York
Models of Healing after Rape and Ecocide: The Art of Aviva Rahmani
Chave Maeve Krivchenia, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Rock Formations: Aviva Rahmani's “Blue Rocks” (2002)
Gale Elston, Law Offices of Gale P. Elston, PC, New York
Aviva Rahmani’s use of the Visual Artists’ Rights Act and Eminent Domain Law as a Medium in Her Artwork “Blued Trees Symphony”
Aviva Rahmani, discussant

Ecoartist, feminist, and composer Aviva Rahmani has been engaged with transdisciplinary art practices and social/ecojustice for over 50 years. Leading her performance group American Ritual Theater (1968-1971), Rahmani was one of the first artists to treat the topic of rape and went on to play a formative role in Ablutions (1972) with Suzanne Lacy, Sandra Orgel, and Judy Chicago. Since 1989 she has pioneered ecoart projects, such as Ghost Nets (1989-2000) and her continentally-scaled Blued Trees Symphony and Opera (2015-present), which not only address climate change, but make major changes to ecosystems through small-scale but strategic interventions she calls “trigger points”—the focus of her interdisciplinary PhD research. This conference session is similarly an intervention that seeks to make a major change by introducing Rahmani’s body of work to art historians, evaluate her legacy thus far, and engage with her current projects that address the most pressing issues of our time.

This session aligns with both the Committee on Women in the Arts 50/50 Initiative and the CAA's 2021 theme of climate crisis.

Image: Aviva Rahmani, Bed of Nets, 1992. Courtesy of the artist