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2011 Lecture : William L. Fox

From TTU College of Architecture

WILLIAM L. FOX, poet, author, and director of the Center for Art & Environment, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno will present

The Art of the Anthropocene: From Landscape Painting to Land Art.

The talk will examine landscape painting and land art since 1790 in light of 2000 Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s proposal that we have moved into the next geologic era, the Anthropocene, where humans are the most influential element on Earth. Fox is known for visiting extreme environments to research his books. In 2001, he spent a season at the McMurdo Station and South Pole in the Antarctic as part of the National Science Foundation’s Visiting Artists and Writers program. During the summers of 2002 and 2003, he made three trips to Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic to join scientists testing future exploration protocols of Mars as part of NASA’s Haughton-Mars Project. He has since visited sites in the United States, Chile, Nepal and other places around the world.

William L. Fox is a writer whose work is a sustained inquiry into how human cognition transforms land into landscape. His numerous nonfiction books rely upon fieldwork with artists and scientists in extreme environments to provide the narratives through which he conducts his investigations. He also serves as the Director of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

Fox was born in San Diego and attended Claremont McKenna College. He has edited several literary magazines and presses, among them the West Coast Poetry Review, and worked as a consulting editor for university presses, as well as being the former director of the poetry program at the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In the visual arts, Fox has exhibited text works in more than two dozen group and solo exhibitions in seven countries

Fox has published poems, articles, reviews, and essays in more than seventy magazines, has had fifteen collections of poetry published in three countries, and has written eleven nonfiction books about the relationships among art, cognition, and landscape. He has also authored essay for numerous exhibition catalogs and artists' monographs.

In 2001-02 he spent two-and-a-half months in the Antarctic with the National Science Foundation in the Antarctic Visiting Artists and Writers Program. He has also worked as a team member of the NASA Haughton-Mars Project, which tests methods of exploring Mars on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic. He was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Institute, the Australian National University and the National Museum of Australia. He has also twice been a Lannan Foundation writer-in-residence.

Fox has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Fox will lecture in room LH202 of the Rawls College of Business Building at 7 p.m. April 7.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Parking is available after 5:30 p.m. in Lot R5 and the Flint Avenue Parking Facility.

This lecture is supported by Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech in the College of Architecture in connection with the College of Architecture's 2010-2011 lecture series, Material Ecologies in conjunction with School of Art and the joint series Landscape as Knowledge.

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