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Educator Speaker Series: One Person Can Make a Difference with Pam Longobardi and Sean Teuton

Class/Workshop
Zoom Meeting
FREE
This event has passed
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art will be closed Monday, May 13, to prepare for the visit of Antiques Roadshow. We will return to normal hours of operation Wednesday, May 15.
Pam Longobardi, Ghosts of Consumption (for Piet M.), 2013, found ocean plastic from Hawaii, Alaska, Greece, Costa Rica, Italy, and the Gulf of Mexico, 75 x 110 x 5 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2021.43. © Pam Longobardi. Photography by Edward C. Robison III.

If you’ve ever thought that art can make a difference, this talk’s for you.

Join artist Pam Longobardi and Professor Sean Teuton as we explore how art, literature, and Native Ecology can help us face some of the biggest crises  confronting the world today. We’ll look at how creativity and activism connect and support each other, how art and Indigenous beliefs can guide real change, and how to take that insight into our classrooms, workplaces, and everyday lives to make a difference—one person at a time.

Free, tickets required. Register online or by calling Guest Services at 479.657.2335 to reserve your spot today.

Educators, register here to receive 1.5 hours of PD credit with the purchase of your ticket.

Once registered, you’ll receive an email with information about the event and the Zoom link for your convenience at a later date.

About the Speaker Series

In this interactive, three-part speaker series, we invite leading artists and educators to weigh in on culture and this American moment. By examining art and the impact it has on us, our guest speakers look at where we’ve been, where we’re going, and what we can do to shape that future for the better. As an added bonus, educators and activists alike will walk away from these discussions with concrete ideas and strategies to use in their work and classrooms. 1.5 hours of educator professional credit available with educator ticket registration.

About the Speakers

Pam Longobardi

Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connected her from an early age to the water. She moved to Atlanta in 1970 and saw her neighborhood pond drained to build the high school she attended. Since then, she lived for varying time periods in Wyoming, Montana, California, and Tennessee, and worked as a firefighter and tree planter, a scientific illustrator and an aerial mapmaker, a collaborative printer and a color mixer. Her artwork involves painting, photography and installation to address the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. She has exhibited across the US and in Greece, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Costa Rica and Poland. She currently lives and works in Atlanta as Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Art at Georgia State University and drifts with the ongoing Drifters Project, following the world ocean currents.

With the Drifters Project, she collects, documents and transforms oceanic plastic into installations, public art and photography. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption -the vast amounts of plastic objects’ impact on the world’s most remote places and its’ creatures – framed within a conversation about globalism and conservation. Longobardi participated in the 2013 GYRE expedition to remote coastal areas of Alaska and created project-specific large-scale works for exhibition at the Anchorage Museum February 2014 that traveled nationwide to five US museums. Longobardi was featured in a National Geographic film on the GYRE expedition and her Drifters Project was featured in National Geographic magazine. Longobardi created a site-specific installation for a special project of the Venice cultural association Ministero di Beni Culturali (MiBAC) and the Ministry of Culture of Rome for the 55th Venice Biennale on the Island of San Francesco del Deserto in the Venetian Lagoon, a work made from plastic water bottles, crystals and a mirrored satellite dish that signaled an apology to St. Francis across the lagoon to the island of Burano.

She exhibited photography in Seescape at George Adams Gallery in New York, and won the prestigious Hudgens Prize (2013), one of the largest single prizes given to an artist in North America.  She has an ongoing collaboration supported by the Ionion Center for Art and Culture in Metaxata, Kefalonia, Greece. In 2019, Longobardi was awarded the title of Regents’ Professor at GSU, and is Oceanic Society’s Artist-In-Nature.

Sean Teuton

Sean Teuton is Professor of English, Director of Indigenous Studies, and Fulbright College Master Researcher at the University of Arkansas.  He is the author of Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Duke 2008), Native American Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford 2018), and numerous articles on literature and pedagogy. Teuton is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Sponsored by

Northern Trust