CALL FOR ARTISTS 2024
OPEN FOR SUBMISSIONS June 15 - EXTENDED August 15, 2024
The ecology of freedom
visual activism broadsides
From 2020-2023, ecoartspace presented large billboards annually as a form of visual activism, focused on water issues. After a year of hiatus, for Fall 2024, we will now be presenting an ecological broadside campaign in collaboration with The Crow’s Nest, a new arts incubator focused on climate and environmental justice based in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded by public servant, author, and climate action advocate Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, the space will serve as a hub for artists to collaborate with scientists, activists, community leaders, and each other. Between 20 and 30 visually captivating images and texts will be selected for exhibition (original works), along with printed broadsides.
For this campaign, we will be taking as our point of departure key concepts outlined in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy (1982), written by Murray Bookchin. Inspired by his early environmental advocacy and important understanding of how hierarchy affects human health and the environment, his ideas carry more weight today than ever before. Bookchin wrote, ”....the domination of nature by man stems from the very real domination of human by human,” which is to say, by the emergence of social hierarchies. He advocated for a free nature, meaning a freeing of humanity from the desire to dominate nature; a shift towards a more self-conscious, reharmonization between people and the more-than-human world, a perspective shared by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Bookchin also proposed a political philosophy of Social Ecology to address the environmental catastrophes we face, including transpersonal and economic systems that enmesh us.
A central idea in Bookchin’s work is that the destruction of nature is driven in good measure by the hierarchical structures and institutions through which some people subjugate and exploit other people in the global economy. In other words, the ideology that supports the domination of the many by the few is the same ideology that justifies the limitless exploitation of natural resources and ecosystems. People and Nature are all fuel for the same machine, which will chew them up and spit them out, unless the system is bounded or regulated. Or, in Bookchin’s conception, replaced altogether with a new paradigm based on flat power structures and a form of direct democracy. Basically, the climate emergency cannot be solved unless we also confront the crisis of our political and economic systems.
These ideas resonate powerfully in Baltimore, where climate and environmental injustice and a legacy of racial and economic injustice are closely related. For example, Baltimore communities have long resisted industrial-scale incinerators that spew toxic pollutants into the predominantly Black and Hispanic communities of South Baltimore. Baltimore is also confronting the problem of heat islands—parts of the city that become dangerously hot, especially as the planet warms. Heat islands hit the poorest neighborhoods hardest, as they have the fewest green spaces and the least trees. Finally, Baltimore is suing giant corporations, such as 3M and DuPont, for knowingly letting Baltimore’s water system become polluted with toxic, “forever chemicals.”
ecoartspace is excited to partner with Baltimore’s Crow’s Nest to bring attention to these issues through visual activism and to highlight this incubator effort to support artists addressing environmental issues. Selected broadsides will be printed and available for pick up at The Crow’s Nest, and will be free to download on the ecoartspace website to print and distribute anywhere and everywhere.
Areas of focus for broadsides:
- Equitable access to clean air and water
- Protection of undisturbed soils and regeneration of soils
- Protection of communities against extreme heat and flooding
- Plastics Recycling/Reuse
- Rights of Nature
- Indigenous Knowledge
Most of these issues are urgent problems in Baltimore, though are obviously important everywhere. We welcome artwork with global, regional, or local (Baltimore) focus. We want our ecoartspace members and global visual activists to have access to these broadsides, to download for free and distribute anywhere.
Important to know:
- You do not need to be a member of ecoartspace to apply
- Fee for each image submitted is $10, which will go towards printing broadsides
- We will offer gratis ecoartspace memberships for 2024 for selected artists
- Selected artists will be responsible for mailing original artworks by the end of September, to: The Crow’s Nest, 116 W. Mulberry Street, Baltimore, MD, 20201
- ecoartspace will be responsible for returning original artworks to artists by 12/31/24
- Between 20-30 works will be selected (only one image per artist)
- Leonardo Martinez-Diaz, founder of The Crow’s Nest, and Patricia Watts, founder of ecoartspace, will work together to select the images
- Selected (original) works will be exhibited along with printed broadsides at the Crow's Nest art gallery downtown Baltimore from October 11 to November 5
- Broadsides will also be available for download online
More about Leonardo Martinez-Diaz: Raised in Mexico City and Chicago, Martinez-Diaz began his career as an academic, studying the politics of how money flows through the global financial system, especially during moments of crisis. Drawing on the tradition of environmental activism in his native Mexico, he switched his focus mid-career to collaborate with others in tackling the climate emergency. He has now worked in this field for over fifteen years. Martinez-Diaz helped negotiate and implement the Paris Agreement and craft policy on international climate action as a political appointee in the Obama and Biden administrations. He served in the Departments of State and Treasury, as well as in the U.S. Agency for International Development. He has also worked in the non-profit sector at the World Resources Institute, an environmental NGO. Martinez-Diaz is author or editor of several books, most recently Building a Resilient Tomorrow: How to Prepare for the Coming Climate Disruption (2019), co-written with Alice Hill.
More about The Crow’s Nest: The Crow’s Nest was launched in 2024 as a hub for artistic creation, public discussion, and collaboration on climate action and environmental justice. This arts incubator will draw on Baltimore’s long history of social activism, world-class cultural institutions, and vibrant arts community. It offers artists working on climate and environmental subjects studio space for rent, a gallery for sharing work with the public, and programming to build connections and collaborations with scientists, activists, community leaders, and artists.
More about Patricia Watts: Watts is the founder of ecoartspace and curator/writer of art and ecology since the early 1990s. She has organized annual ecoartspace exhibitions online with printed books including: ecoconsciousness (2020); Embodied Forest (2021); Earthkeepers Handbook (2023); and The New Geologic Epoch (2023). She has also produced ecoartspace pop-up exhibitions including: Fragile Rainbow (2022) in Brooklyn, New York; Some Kind of Nature (2023), and As Above, So Below (2023) in Santa Fe, New Mexico; Transmissions (2024) in Austin, Texas; and Soil Dialogues (2024) in Florence, Italy. Watts will be co-editing a directory of artists engaging soils for the Soils Turn book to launch in spring 2025. Over 1,600 artists and scientists from 28 countries have joined ecoartspace since 2020, which was created as an inclusive, non-competitive, collaborative environment where artists can imagine and make real a healthy, equitable, and resilient future.
More about Murray Bookchin (January 14, 1921 – July 30, 2006): Bookchin was an American social theorist, author, orator, historian, and political philosopher. He was a pioneer in the environmental movement and formulated and developed the theory of social ecology and urban planning within anarchist, libertarian socialist, and ecological thought. He was the author of two dozen books covering topics in politics, philosophy, history, urban affairs, and social ecology. Among the most important were Our Synthetic Environment (1962), Toward An Ecological Society (1980), The Ecology of Freedom (1982), and Urbanization Without Cities (1987). In the late 1990s, he became disenchanted with what he saw as an increasingly apolitical “lifestylism” of the contemporary anarchist movement, stopped referring to himself as an anarchist, and founded his own libertarian socialist ideology called "communalism," which seeks to reconcile and expand Marxist, syndicalist, and anarchist thought.