Risa Puleo, an Early Modern art historian and curator of contemporary art, will discuss thinking alongside animals in her research and exhibitions to unravel the logics of colonial property relationships and Western epistemologies. Her 2018 exhibition, Monarchs: Brown and Native Artists in the Path of the Butterfly, took the migratory path of the Monarch as a metaphor for sovereignty connecting the 2016 Standing Rock Reservation to the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Puleo’s current research centers on the Iberian Churra, a sheep breed introduced by the Spanish to 16th-century Mexico, where it aided dispossession. Puleo’s research follows the sheep into the 19th-century Southwest, where it was integrated into Diné kinship networks, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the 20th, where artworks made from its wool were displayed as “primitive” art. In conversation with Lang Arts faculty Amalle Dublon, Puleo will discuss the concepts and strategies at work in some of her recent exhibitions and research.

Risa Puleo is an art historian and independent curator, and one of the curators of the 2023 Counterpublics Triennial in St. Louis. Puleo’s exhibition Walls Turned Sideways: Artists Confront the American Justice System opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston and traveled to Tufts University Art Gallery in January 2020. Puleo holds Master’s degrees from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Hunter College, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Art History at Northwestern University. Her writing has appeared in Art in America, Art Papers, Art 21, Asia Art Pacific, Hyperallergic.com, Modern Painters and other art publications.

Organized by Amalle Dublon (co-sponsored by the Tishman Environment and Design Center).

This event is part of PRACTICING THE ENVIRONMENT, a virtual, public-facing event series with artists, curators, activists, and scholars across the world who explore and engage in various aspects of environmental concern. This series reconsiders the supposed distinction between humans and nature; it is a distinction that has impacted notions of cultivation and place, as well as our relationships with plants and with each other. Focusing on visual arts and performance-based projects that engage notions of environment, these events consider the ecological implications of the materials that we work with, as well as the environmental frameworks and atmospheres that we work within. Hosted by faculty from the Department of the Arts at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. All events are free and open to the public, but prior registration is required.

Zoom link will be sent in advance of the event.