University Ecologies Event: Against Animal Objectification, 9/24
University Ecologies invites you to a special event featuring Giovanni Aloi (SAIC) and Emily Gephart (SMFA).
Emily Gephart's research spans many forms of visual culture: she has published and presented on how new scientific approaches to the unconscious mind informed the work of American artists and critics in the early 20th century; on poetic satire and pictorial criticism of modernism in the 1916 Spectra hoax; on transatlantic encounters with the oceanic commons in art; on coordinated human and animal aesthetics in millinery fashion; and on the fabrication and perception of fly fishing lures, among other examples of 19th century 'ecologies of mind.
Giovanni Aloi's research focuses on the Anthropocene and new conceptions of nature in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder, 2023), Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking (2023), Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (2025), Lawn (2025), and I'm Not an Artist: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content (2025). He has contributed to PBS TV and BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series 'Art after Nature'.
