Renowned artist Rebecca Rutstein to visit UGA in November and March as Delta Chair
The Willson Center will welcome Rebecca Rutstein, an artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, installation, and public art and explores abstraction inspired by science, data and maps, to the University of Georgia as the third Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding.
Rutstein will visit UGA twice during the current academic year: in November as part of the national conference of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru), and again in March, 2019. During each of her visits, Rutstein will give public presentations with the widely known oceanographer Samantha Joye, Athletic Association Professor in Arts and Sciences in the department of marine sciences at UGA. The first presentation, a public plenary event on the second day of the a2ru conference, will take place at 9 a.m. on November 2 in the Georgia Center for Continuing Education’s Mahler Hall.
Beginning November 1, Rutstein will display a 64-foot-long interactive sculptural installation made with laser cut steel and LED lights, and a large-scale, four-part painting installation at the Georgia Museum of Art, as well as a mural-sized banner in the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The works were commissioned as part of her tenure as Delta Visiting Chair.
The forms in the sculpture and paintings were inspired by the hydrocarbon structures and bioluminescence present in Mexico’s Guaymas Basin in the Sea of Cortez, where Rutstein will join Joye between her two visits to UGA on an expedition that includes a deep sea dive aboard Alvin, a U.S. Navy submersible vessel designed for extreme deep sea exploration. Rutstein will establish an art studio on the support vessel Atlantis, where she will create new works inspired by data being collected below. In October, prior to her expedition with Joye, Rutstein will make her first descent in Alvin to the ocean floor off of the Pacific coast of Costa Rica with a team of scientists from Temple University.
In the process of creating works inspired by geology, microbiology and marine science, Rutstein has collaborated with scientists aboard research vessels sailing from the Galápagos Islands to California, Vietnam to Guam, and in the waters surrounding Tahiti. She has exhibited widely in museums, institutions and galleries, and has received numerous awards including the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts. She has held more than 25 solo exhibitions at venues across the United States.
Joye’s research examines the complex feedbacks that drive elemental cycling in coastal and open ocean environments, and the effects of climate change and anthropogenic disturbances on critical environmental processes to gain a better understanding of how future changes will affect ecosystem functioning. Her work in deep sea extreme environments explores how microbial processes interact with geological and physical processes.
The Delta Visiting Chair, established by the Willson Center through the support of The Delta Air Lines Foundation, hosts outstanding global scholars, leading creative thinkers, artists and intellectuals who teach and perform research at UGA. Its first honoree was Alice Walker in 2015, followed by Colm Tóibín in 2017.
The chair is founded upon the legacy of the Delta Prize for Global Understanding, which from 1997-2011 was presented to individuals – including Nelson Mandela, Mikhail Gorbachev, Ted Turner, Desmond Tutu, and Jimmy and Rosalyn Carter – whose initiatives promoted world peace by advancing understanding and cooperation among cultures and nations.
Each holder of the Delta Visiting Chair engages the Georgia community through lectures, seminars, discussions and programs; they present global problems in local context by addressing pressing contemporary questions about the economy, society, and the environment – with a focus on how the arts and humanities can intervene in major contemporary issues.