EventsThe New Social Environment#188

This Land: A Conversation with David Opdyke, Lawrence Weschler, and Maya Wiley

Friday, December 4, 2020 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Join David Opdyke, Lawrence Weschler, and Maya Wiley for a conversation on This Land’s mural vignettes, the corrupted system that got us here, and what it will take to make a new future. We’ll conclude with a poetry reading from Allison HedgeCoke.

In this Talk

David Opdyke’s This Land is an epic mural fashioned out of vintage American postcards, which the artist then treated with disconcerting painted interventions—highlighting the climate crisis. A book by the same name affords readers a closer viewing of Opdyke’s devastatingly sardonic take on our impending ecological future. Interspersed among the detailed visual sections of the book are insightful thematic essays by Lawrence Weschler and an afterword that serves as a stirring call to action, by civil rights attorney and current New York City mayoral candidate Maya Wiley.

Join David Opdyke, Lawrence Weschler, and Maya Wiley for a conversation on This Land’s mural vignettes, the corrupted system that got us here, and what it will take to make a new future.

This Land is currently on view at Mana Contemporary. Learn more about the exhibition, and find out how you can visit here. This Land can also be explored at leisure and in high-resolution detail at davidopdyke.com.

David Opdyke

Portrait drawing of David Opdyke by Phong H. Bui

David Opdyke is an artist known for his trenchant political send-ups of American culture. Opdyke’s political awakening in the early 2000s led to a body of work that confronts the horrors of contemporary America. His hyperreal topographical models of suburbs comment on mall culture and suburban sprawl, while his sculptures of ruined monuments mock imperialistic hubris. His work is held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA, and the Washington Convention Center.

https://davidopdyke.com

Lawrence Weschler

Courtesy of Lawrence Weschler

Lawrence Weschler is the author of over twenty books of narrative nonfiction, most recently And How Are You, Dr. Sacks? (FSG, 2019). He is a former staff writer at the New Yorker, served as director of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and artistic director of the Chicago Humanities Festival. His books include Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, Pulitzer Prize finalist; and Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award.

https://lawrenceweschler.com

Maya Wiley

Courtesy of Maya Wiley

Maya Wiley is a professor of public and urban policy at the New School and an NBC News and MSNBC legal analyst. Before the New School, Wiley, a civil rights attorney, was Counsel to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. In October 2020, Wiley announced her own candidacy to succeed de Blasio as mayor of New York.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

https://www.daostrom.com/

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 🌈✨