EventsThe New Social Environment#1122

Artists Commit

Featuring Deville Cohen, Jessica Gath, Andrew Kachel, Jenny Kendler, Laura Lupton, Robin F. Williams, and Julie Reiss

Thursday, October 31, 2024 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Artists Deville Cohen, Jessica Gath, Andrew Kachel, Jenny Kendler, Laura Lupton, and Robin F. Williams join Rail contributor Julie Reiss for a conversation.

In this Talk

Deville Cohen

Deville Cohen is a non-disciplinary artist based in New York City. He studied sculpture at the KHB Berlin from 2002-2007 and received his MFA in film/video from Bard College NY in 2010. In 2020, Deville Founded Hand To Mouth, a collaborative performance project. Hand to Mouth received a MAP Fund grant for a new performance in 2025. Deville is also a founding member of Artists Commit, an NYC-based artist-run initiative invested in advocating for a climate-conscious, equitable, and resilient future. As a platform, the group has provided tools and resources to support artists catalyzing climate action, in particular through the impact of the work we make and how it travels through the art world.

Jessica Gath

Jessica Gath is a possibilitarian who makes artwork in paint, garments, zines, food, correspondence, community, activism, songs, dirt, and whatever else gets the job done. Cycles of life and our connections to Earth and one another are integral to her practice. Jessica received funding from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Scholler Foundation, and the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture’s PA Preferred program to create an art almanac for eating seasonally and locally in our foodshed. She is an elected member of her Election Board and a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led effort to raise climate-consciousness and knowledge-share solutions in the art world.

https://www.jessicagath.org/

Andrew Kachel

Andrew Kachel is a New York-based art worker, curator, and Director & Felix Gonzalez-Torres Liaison at Andrea Rosen Gallery. As a co-founder of Galleries Commit and a core organizer of Artists Commit, he is part of a coalition of artists and art workers organizing laterally toward more resilient and climate-conscious ways of working. He holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

http://andrewkachel.com/

Jenny Kendler

Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, naturalist and environmental activist based in Chicago and various forests. Over the last two decades, her research-driven projects—centered on climate change and biodiversity loss—have been shown at London’s Hayward Gallery, New York’s Governors Island, Storm King Art Center, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the MCA Chicago and public locations as diverse as urban riverwalks, remote deserts and tropical forests. From 2014 to 2024 she was artist-in-residence with environmental nonprofit NRDC. She sits on Boards for 350.org and the artist residency ACRE and is a founding member of Artists Commit, an artist-led effort to raise climate-consciousness in the art world.

Laura Lupton

Laura Lupton is the founder and principal of LHL Consulting, an incubator for ideas that center art, climate, and our collective future. Working at the intersection of art and climate, Laura is the co-founder of several collaborative ventures including Galleries Commit, Artists Commit, Barder, and the Visual Arts PACT, and is on the founding committee for the Gallery Climate Coalition New York chapter. In addition to recent climate action projects with clients like the ADAA, MOCA, and Hauser & Wirth, she is currently working with Getty to lead the PST ART Climate Impact Program.

Robin F. Williams

Known for their large-scale paintings of stylized, sentient, yet ambiguously generated female figures, Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) meticulously deploys oil, airbrush, poured paint, marbling, and staining to construct deeply textured and complex compositions that transcend an identifiable medium. With a masterful technical understanding and an innate sense of curiosity, Williams fuses imagery from social media channels with references to early modernism, pop culture, advertising, and cinema, to challenge the systemic conventions around representations of women.

Julie Reiss

Portrait drawing of Dr. Julie Reiss by Phong Bui

Julie Reiss is an independent art historian and critic with a focus on contemporary art that addresses the climate crisis and the role artists play in social change. She is the editor of Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene. She is also the author of From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art. Julie teaches courses on Art and Sustainability at Columbia University where she is also a Visiting Critic to the MFA department. She is Consulting Editor to the Harpo Foundation, working on an anthology of essays about its founder, artist and arts advocate Ed Levine.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨