Joe Riley

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Joe Riley (b. 1990) is an artist, historian, and Ph.D. candidate at UC San Diego Visual Arts in a joint environmental research program with Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation. His dissertation, Fixing the Sea: Case Studies Toward A Critical Environmental History of Ocean Art and Science since 1970, foregrounds and critically examines histories and practices of interaction between artists, oceanographers, and marine life situated within California’s university-military-research complex.

Presently a Predoctoral Fellow with the Getty Research Institute, Joe’s scholarship has also received recent support from UCSD’s Rita L. Atkinson Fellowship, UC Humanities Research Institute, Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, and UCSD Nature, Space & Politics. In 2021-22, Joe was a Fellow of the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego, researching the hydro-ethics of race and gender and the problem of documentation in oceanography. Previously, he was an Ocean Fellow with TBA21-Academy’s Ocean Space in Venice, Italy, and a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Joe is a participating artist, co-author, and co-curator of UCSD’s Getty Pacific Standard Time “Art & Science” Embodied Pacific initiative. This project supported thirty artists working with oceanographers and historians in Southern California and the Pacific Islands, inviting immersive engagement in oceanography, Indigenous design, and critical craft through exhibitions, workshops, programs at six interrelated venues, and a forthcoming volume with Bloomsbury for which Joe is a co-editor and contributor. As a participating artist and writer, Joe collaborated with marine ecologists to create Passengers of Change: Ballast Bench, a research platform designed and built to generate new data about Undaria pinnatifida (wakame), a resilient, ocean-crossing seaweed counted among the world’s 100 “most invasive” organisms. In addition to its exhibition with Embodied Pacific, Joe has presented Ballast Bench at 4S Honolulu, the Getty, University of Oregon Blue Humanities Symposium, USC Visual Studies Research Institute, and elsewhere.

As an artist, Joe designs and builds large-scale sculptural installations that reverse-engineer vessels and instruments, such as cars and boats, and infrastructures such as railroads and maritime shipping networks. His collaborative projects with Audrey Snyder and the collective Futurefarmers have been exhibited at venues including Clockshop, Socrates Sculpture Park, Artes Mundi 7, and Sharjah Biennale 13. His forthcoming work, R/V: Research Vessel, focuses on the non-spectacular forms of labor, leisure, and the everyday practices and instruments of doing scientific research at sea, bringing into relief the normality (even banality) of oceanographic field work as a way to critically engage with science during times of uncertainty and upheaval.

Joe is a rank-and-file organizer with the UC graduate student workers union UAW 4811. He holds a BFA from The Cooper Union and has taught at UC San Diego, CalState San Marcos, The Cooper Union School of Art, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Bruce High Quality Foundation University.