Lecture: Using Beauty and Textiles to Look at Hard Environmental Realities

How do we respond to a situation as troubling as climate change? What will inspire us to change our behavior? Artist Linda Gass makes artwork using beauty to encourage people to look at the hard environmental issues we face. Working in textile, glass and installation art, Linda’s artwork addresses the relationship between humans and the water and land that sustain them. Her work explores how landscapes change over time focusing on those places where destruction and renewal, wounding and healing, absence and presence overlap. Linda’s presentation will take you on a photographic journey to the places that inspire her artwork, from the wilderness areas of California to the significant evidence of climate change in the American West. She will share images of her artwork made in response to her experience of the landscape and her research, as well as a behind-the-scenes view into how her artwork is made from initial concept to finished artwork. You will leave with a new appreciation and awareness for the impacts of climate change and how art can play an important role in educating the public.

Bay Area artist Linda Gass is best known for her intricately stitched paintings about climate change, water and land use. She learned to love textiles as a child when her grandmother taught her to sew and embroider. Winner of the prestigious 2012 Fleishhacker Eureka Fellowship Award, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the Museum of Craft and Design, Oakland Museum, the Bellevue Art Museum and the US Embassy in Moscow and has been published in books and magazines, including National Geographic’s All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, 500 Art Quilts, and American Craft. When she’s not making art or championing environmental causes, you can find her backpacking, camping and hiking in the wilderness areas of the West where she finds much of the inspiration for her work.