What Good Is Eco-Art Without Community? w/ Keg De Souza and Alicia Grullon

Building on Grullon’s 2023 Hyperallergic article “What Good Is Eco-Art Without Community?" This night of presentations brings together two artists, Keg De Souza and Alicia Grullon, to share their work and observations about the field. Join us to welcome them to Philadelphia and continue the discussion from past Eco-Social events.

Images: Keg de Souza "Not a Drop to Drink" (2021) Arts House, Naarm (Melbourne) Photo credit: Bryony Jackson; Grullon’s 2023 Hyperallergic article “What Good Is Eco-Art Without Community?"

Alicia Grullón is a Bronx-based artist and organizer. Grullon’s social practice work extends to exploring how people relate to land in order to rally a transformation of our living by using performance and self-portraiture as a critique on the politics of presence, an argument for the inclusion of underinvested communities in political and social spheres. She was a Moore College of Art and Design Walentas Fellow for 2020-2022, and teaches at Queens College. Alicia Grullón has exhibited work at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University; Bronx Museum of the Arts; and BRIC Arts Media House, all in New York, among others. Grullón's legislative art project PERCENT FOR GREEN looks at climate change from the perspective of environmental injustices in the Bronx and has created a functioning green bill with Bronx residents. This project contributed to her acting as one of the co-lead organizers in the Bronx for the People's Climate March. Grullón’s works have been shown in numerous group exhibitions including The 8th Floor, Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC House for Arts and Media, School of Visual Arts, El Museo del Barrio, Columbia University, Socrates Sculpture Park, Performa 11, Old Stone House and Art in Odd Places

Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives on unceded Gadigal land in Sydney. Architecturally trained, she creates social and spatial environments, making reference to her lived experiences of squatting and organising with projects that use plant and food politics, temporary architecture, publishing and radical pedagogy. De Souza also draws from personal experiences of colonialism to inform her layered projects that centre voices that are often marginalised, for learning about Place. Themes of displacement – through lenses such as colonialism and gentrification – filter through her work, sharing (often lesser-known) stories of plants, people and Place. Keg is a trained bookbinder and is represented by Booklyn Artist Alliance, NY for her artist’s books and zines which she has been publishing for over 20 years; has a Certificate in Botanical Illustration from The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; holds a PhD, through the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab, MADA, Monash University titled: Relationality in Place: Radical Pedagogy and Decolonial Space; was the 2022 Parramatta Artists Studios Creative Fellow and received the 2024 Dahl Fellowship from Eucalypt Australia. Keg is a part of the Food Art Research Network, an international network of established artists and researchers that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food and was a founding member of SquatSpace an artist collective exploring the poetics and politics of space.

About the Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series:

Eco-Social (aka Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing & Screening Series) is an event series and learning community that will convene seasonally in Philadelphia since 2023 where ecologically-themed artwork is presented and excursions taken. See https://ecosocialseries.wordpress.com/

Host or Publisher Ray is a Place