Cultural Considerations WG webinar – Artists on the Moon: Lessons from an All-Artist Analog Lunar Surface Mission

The webinar will tell the experience of the four artists who lived a week in The Space Analog for the Moon & Mars at the University of Arizona: the sense of isolation, the difficulties of cohabitation, the simulation of reduced gravity, and the influence that these extreme conditions had on their artistic production.

Speakers:
Christopher Cokinos, poet and author
Elizabeth George, dancer and choreographer
Julie Swarstad Johnson, poet and archivist
Ivy Wahome, textiles artist and costume designer

Introduction:
Remo Rapetti

Comments and questions:
Lisa Pettibone, artist
Cristina Luna Santos, anthropologist

Registration

Christopher Cokinos is the author or coeditor of several books, including The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, Hope Is the Things with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight and Still as Bright. An Illuminating History of the Moon from Antiquity to Tomorrow. He is the winner of awards and fellowships from, among others, New American Press, the Whiting Foundation, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, and the National Science Foundation. His poems, articles, and essays have appeared in such venues as Scientific American, High Country News, Astronomy, Discover.com, and the Los Angeles Times. Having taught literature, writing, and science communication for more than three decades at three universities, he again lives and writes in Utah.

Elizabeth George is an Assistant Professor and Undergraduate Advisor in the School of Dance at the University of Arizona. She is a former dancer of the Dayton Ballet where she was a part of the Cleveland Phoenix Project (a collaborative venture between the Ohio Ballet and Dayton Ballet.) She has performed works by such choreographers as Dermot Burke, James Clouser, Amy Ernst, Luis Fuente, Bella Lewitsky, Stephen Mills, and David Nixon to name a few.

Julie Swarstad Johnson is the author of Pennsylvania Furnace (2019), editor’s choice selection for the Unicorn Press first book series, and co-editor of Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight (University of Arizona Press, 2020). She has served as Poet in Residence at Lowell Observatory and at Gettysburg National Military Park, which led to the chapbook Orchard Light (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). She lives in Tucson and works as an archivist and librarian at the University of Arizona Poetry Center.   

Ivy Wahome is a Kenyan-born costume designer and seamstress with over 10 years of experience designing and producing costumes for theater and dance at the University of Arizona, Broadway in Tucson (nationally touring Broadway shows), and community theaters. Innovative textile artist incorporating Black and African perspectives and history into diverse projects, including functional and decorative materials for a simulated lunar mission, she is co-founder of the Space Suit Lab at the University of Arizona.