she/they
Arts Division
Professor
Faculty
Elena Baskin Building E
E-112
DARC building
Wednesdays 2 - 4 pm and by appointment. Please email me if you would like to meet during office hours.
Art Department
A. Laurie Palmer’s work is concerned with material explorations of matter’s active nature as it asserts itself on different scales and in different speeds, and with collaborating on strategic actions in the contexts of social and environmental justice. She sees art in its surprising, sensory, relational, and critically constructive capacities as a liberatory force that can contribute to collective and systemic transformation. Her work takes form as sculpture, installation, writing, and collaborative public projects. Palmer taught sculpture and contemporary theory at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for 18 years before coming to UCSC in 2015. She lectures widely on her work, and publishes writing as, and about, art in multiple formats and forums. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, including at Haus der Kunst, Munich; Grimaldi Forum, Monaco; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Artists Space, NY; Aperto XLV Venice Biennale; Magasin, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Grenoble; Seniorenzentrum, Dornach, Austria; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago; MASS MoCA, North Adams, and in various public spaces.
Teaching Interests:
Sculpture, Writing, Forms and Ideas, mixed media and project-based art; Materiality of Color; Materiality of Time; Environmental and Racial Justice; Environmental Art and Social Practice Graduate Program
Education and Training:
B.A. Williams College; M.F.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Recent:
Soulstorm: Caucus & Memorial, Watershed Art & Ecology, Chicago, 2024
STOA, Pölling (Germany), 2021
Just Futures, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, 2020
The Big Sleep, Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2018
Sensing Connection to the Time Left, Iceberg Projects, Chicago, 2018
Schichten, Leipzig, 2016
The Lichen Museum, Sector 2337, Chicago, 2015
Selected Collaborative Projects:
LANDING, A temporary, collective, and migratory art and event program in Santa Cruz, 2022-24,
https://landingevents.org/
“The River Composes Us in Concert Together: A Multi-species Tribunal in Defense of What’s Common,” 2020, with SC DSA Ecosocialists, https://abolitionecology.org/multispecies-tribunal/
Chicago Torture Justice Memorials, 2011 – 2015, https://chicagotorture.org/about/
DuSable Park Proposal Project, 1999 – 2004,
https://www.amazon.com/Acres-Lake-DuSable-Proposal-Project/dp/0945323034
Haha (collab art group), 1988 – 2008, http://hahahaha.org/
Books:
The Lichen Museum, 2023, University of Minnesota Press
In the Aura of a Hole: Exploring Sites of Material Extraction, 2014, Black Dog Press
With Love from Haha, 2008, Whitewalls Press/University of Chicago
3 Acres on the Lake: DuSable Park Proposal Project, 2004, Whitewalls Press/University of Chicago