This exhibit is presented in collaboration with University Museum of Contemporary Art.
“Earthly extraction” may bring to mind images of irreparable terrestrial violence—strip mining, soil depletion, deforestation— as well as related corporate and transnational competition, the coercion of a globalized labor force, and depletion of indigenous resources. Within scholarly and artistic endeavors of conservation, collection, curation, and interpretation, do we likewise practice a form of extraction? How might humanists, scientists, artists, librarians, and today’s student climate activists collaborate to introduce a series of mythologies about extraction that might reshape our goal of collective continuance? How might new mythologies inaugurate a politics of change?