Wednesday, October 25 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Online at Zoom: uwmadison.zoom.us/my/artcolloquium
Jen Rae is an artist who has worked for years in collaboration with governmental organizations on scenario planning for disaster management. As a result, when pandemic lockdowns arrived, Rae had already been engaged in the imaginative work of creating humane responses to crisis. She and colleagues were ready to create the community infrastructure to transfer fresh foods from producers and vendors to consumers in need in her own neighborhood in Melbourne, Australia. Rae’s lecture will showcase both of these types of labor (disaster planning and community hunger action) and her workshop will take first steps to analyzing how this work is done locally here in Wisconsin.
Dr Jen Rae is an award-winning artist-researcher of Canadian Métis descent living and creating on Djaara Country in Central Victoria. Her expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. It is centered around cultural responses to climate change/emergency (a.k.a. ‘everything change’ as coined by Margaret Atwood), specifically the role of artists. Her work is engaged in discourses around food justice, disaster resilience and speculative futures predominantly articulated through transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies and community alliances.
Rae creates and contributes to experimental multi-platform collaborative projects, where artists, emergency service providers and communities work together to rehearse climate-related emergencies and explore the impact of creativity in disaster preparedness. She is a co-founder of the CENTRE FOR REWORLDING (C∞R), a diverse collective of Indigenous, people of colour, settler, LGBTIQA2S+ thinkers and doers working at the intersections of art, climate futures and disaster resilience.
Rae is also Director of Fair Share Fare and was a Co-founder of Fawkner Commons – creative and research-informed projects that center food justice, land remediation and social cohesion in the climate emergency context. Rae is a board member of the Australian Creative Recovery Network and the International Environmental Communication Association. She has lectured at the post-graduate level in socially-engaged art and performance at the University of Melbourne and Deakin University. jenraeis.com