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As part of covering climate change we've heard from a number of the doers. Here are a few of those innovators and influencers' thoughts and what motivated them to make a change in their communities.

Ana Aranda is the keynote speaker for the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature Spring lecture. Join us on Thursday, March 2 at 2 p.m. in the University Library Leon Williams Room (LL430). Aranda will read from her newest book, “Our Day of the Dead”, and answer audience questions. The event is free and open to everyone. Aranda is a children’s book creator, illustrator, muralist and art instructor. Her work has been featured in galleries and museums in the United States and around the world. Her illustrations can be found in picture books including: “The Chupacabra Ate the Candelabra”; “Our Celebración!”; “Moth & Butterfly: Ta Da!”; and “How to Make a Memory”. “Our Day of the Dead” marks her debut as an author/illustrator. Aranda was born and raised in Mexico City, where she studied design. She completed her undergraduate studies in illustration at l’École de l’Image d’Épinal in France and then obtained her MFA in Illustration in San Francisco at the Academy of Art University. Her biggest inspirations are her childhood memories, the vibrant colors of Mexico, and music. Her work focuses on transforming the everyday into fantastical situations, and often include images from nature and whimsical creatures. For more information, please visit here! Stay Connected on Social Media! Instagram & Twitter

From the organizers: WE Gallery at Dance Place Liberty Station is excited to present Turn! Turn! Turn! featuring Mark Siprut and Larry Caveney. This exhibit explores dance as an expression of life and return to joy following the seasons of change and uncertainty endured during our times of isolation and separation from community during the last three years. Opening event is Friday, April 14 from 6 - 8 p.m. and includes a community dance facilitated by Michele Lyons. In this exhibit of photographic prints and interactive video, Mark Siprut shares his passion for dance and music through his digital imagery incorporating photography and video with collage. Mark’s artistic expression is influenced by his love of dance, body movement and music. He began dancing at age 10 and continued through his teenage years. He danced to the popular music of the 60’s and was especially drawn to Motown music. In college, in the early 70’s, he discovered international folk dancing and fell in love with it. Folk dancing led him to an interest in playing Balkan music. He learned to play the drums; Tupan and Dumbek, and played in Balkan music ensembles in Hawaii, Santa Barbara and San Diego. Folk dancing and music reinforced his interest in world cultures, especially Middle Eastern/Turkish. Additionally he developed an interest in his Sephardic Jewish heritage which was the impetus to travel to and and then teach on a Fulbright grant in Turkey. Prior to his time in Turkey, while in graduate School at UC Santa Barbara, he discovered Lindy Swing dancing and studied with famed swing dancers, Jonathan Bixby and Sylvia Sykes. He developed a great love for this dance style and currently continues to enjoy swing and salsa dancing here in San Diego. Mark Siprut is an Associate Professor in Multimedia in the School of Art and Design at San Diego State University (SDSU). He earned his BA and MA in Art at Humboldt State University and his MFA in Art at University of California, Santa Barbara. In addition to being an educator, Mark is an artist, designer, dancer and musician. In addition to his formal studies in photography and printmaking, his current creative research is in time-base, interactive and electronic media. His work has been exhibited locally and internationally. He currently has a solo exhibition at the Bonita Museum and Cultural Center entitled; “Photographic Portraits of Bonita”. He engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary, and intercultural applications to visual communication. Larry Caveney combines bold strokes and captivating color palettes in this series of dance paintings which form a palpable and kinetic immediacy. The paintings use familiar yet ambiguous figures in order to reveal deeper existential truths. Looking closer at his canvases, the four elements are at play in each frame: air, fire, earth and water. The motion depicted in both his paintings and video works cut through the air, swirls it all about, be it a dancer’s twirl across the ballroom floor or the strut of a superstar sashaying toward the audience. In these frames, the air is disrupted by greatness and the painting captures this disruption. The energy on display burns with the heat of the subject’s intent but also the artist’s as well. The layers of meaning are derived from having captured the explosion of heat, each picture of Caveney’s is defined by the fire of what the subject burns. The solid object of the pictures is a manifestation of the element of earth. Even when the depiction creates illusionistic space, even when the artist captures crystal moments in time and articulates their magic, the object itself is what guarantees its permanence, its earth. The element at the core of Caveney’s practice is the human body, whether depicted in performance video, or the liquid paint he moves around to complete his compositions. Bodies in motion captured in a loop forever dancing. Bodies frozen in mid gesture seem to pulse with the rhythm of the dance, inviting us to the floor, where the we connect with our own embodied gestures. Larry Caveney graduated with an M.F.A from Vermont College, Montpelier, VT and has exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1983. In addition to working as a painter, sculptor, and performance artist, Caveney is a former professor from the Art Institute of San Diego. Caveney has been collected by The Permanent collection in Asheville Museum of Art, Asheville, NC and The Permanent Collection in Casoria Contemporary Museum, Naples Italy Turn! Turn! Turn! is a project of WE Gallery presented in collaboration with San Diego Ballet and Arts District Liberty Station and will be exhibited in the Mandell Weiss Gallery space in the Dorthea Laub Dance Place located at 2650 Truxtun Rd in San Diego. A portion of sale proceeds will benefit The San Diego Ballet Scholarship Fund.

The playful term is trending on social media: Urban workers are embracing (even while joking about) easy-to-fix, healthy Western-style lunches — think sandwiches, veggies ... a lonely baked potato.

OnStage Playhouse opens 2023 with the story of a teenager who flees to her reclusive uncle’s retreat in the Costa Rican jungle to escape the aftermath of a horrific accident. The week they spend together forces them both to confront who they are as well as what it is they are running from.

The "15-minute city" is an urban planning concept that aims to increase quality of life and reduce planet-heating pollution. But it faces obstacles, including conspiracy theories.

Opening reception: 5-8 p.m. on March 12, 2023 RSVP here. From the gallery: Continuing on the theme of “Imagination” at Sparks Gallery, Artist Cheryl Tall uses narrative figurative sculpture and paintings to create a whimsical, yet sentimental commentary on the experience of being human in the modern age. The title of the exhibition, Dramatis Personae, is the Latin term for “cast of characters” in theater, art, and literature. It refers to the colorful troupe of sculptural characters portrayed in Tall’s art. In the style of “magic realism”, her work uses color and texture to create a surrealistic wonderland that touches on our search for meaning, connection and place. Ranging in size from 7 inches to 7 feet, Tall’s works are constructed from a variety of mediums, primarily clay, tile, and paint. By using finger marks in the clay or paint, and layers upon layers of glaze, paint, paper, or found materials, she creates a richly complex surface on the pieces that echo the appearance of primeval artifacts or folk items. The artist’s inspiration from both contemporary and ancient art is evident in her works; myths and dream imagery are a recurring theme. Her subject matter often includes architectural and figurative elements. Many of her paintings depict full scenes of activity, with a cast of several characters and multiple interactions happening at once. The way that individuals – neighbors, lovers, extended families, and community members – interrelate with each other is a visual and thematic focus in her works. These crucial social bonds, which drive everyday life, are emphasized and celebrated. ABOUT THE ARTIST: Cheryl Tall studied art at the University of Central Florida, Orlando, Florida where she received her BFA and at the University of Miami, Miami, Florida she received her MFA in 1995. Her present studio in Southern California, where she creates her large-scale sculpture and paintings and teaches art classes. Tall’s primary medium is clay, coil built into large figurative sculptures and wall pieces. She also works with mixed media, oil and acrylic painting, and printmaking. Tall’s work focuses on the relationships between people and their surroundings, especially their homes or workplaces. Her subject matter often includes architectural and figurative elements. Influences include Surrealism, Expressionism, Pop Art, Lowbrow and Funk Art, Romanesque Medieval art, folk art, mythology and Primitive Art. Influential artists include Robert Arneson, Shepard Farrey, Andy Goldsworthy, Viola Frey, Adrian Arleo, Paul Klee, Giorgio De Chirico, Oskar Kokoschka and Giselbertus.Tall’s works will be on view at Sparks Gallery from March 12 – April 30, 2023 with an opening reception on Sunday, March 12, 2023 from 5-8pm. Use this link to RSVP: https://sparksgallery.com/rsvp?eid=37898 Regular gallery hours: Monday-Friday 12 p.m.-7 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Follow on social media: Facebook | Instagram | Twitter

Having this virus is bad enough at home, where you might spend hours hugging the toilet. Imagine having it out camping. Investigators wanted to find out how backpackers were getting and spreading it.

The Data Pharmacy Speaker: Joshua Neves, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair, Concordia University Respondent: Daisuke Miyao, Professor and Hajime Mori Chair in Japanese Language and Literature, UC San Diego Hosted by Wentao Ma, Ph.D. Student, Literature Department, UC San Diego This event will be held via Zoom Webinar -- registrants will receive the Zoom link prior to the event start time. Abstract This talk explores three insights from my current research and collaborations examining cultures of optimization and the entanglement of big data and big pharma. One key starting point for this work is what Paul Preciado, in Testo Junkie, calls somatechnics to describe processes whereby media technologies are not merely added to or encountered by bodies/subjects – as with McLuhanist “extensions” or ideas about spectatorship, and the like - but are rather “the very means by which corporeality is crafted.” While Preciado’s main concerns are the operations of sexuality and subjection under the new biocapitalism, his recognition that pharmaceutical and digital media industries are crucial to the reproduction of the present has yet to be taken seriously by media theorists. Building on these and related debates, this brief presentation focuses on somatechnics and three aspects of our techno-pharmacological condition – or what this lecture series terms media care – namely: changes in how we understand and perform resilience; the critical role of stimulation in animating modes of media enfleshment; and emergent forms of mood conditioning. These insights do not promise a comprehensive view, but rather signal intensifying relations between data and drugs in practices of self-making, wellness, and work. Biography Joshua Neves is Associate Professor of Film Studies and Director of the Global Emergent Media (GEM) Lab at Concordia University. His research focuses on global and digital media, cultural and political theory, and questions of development and legitimacy. Dr. Neves is co-author (with Aleena Chia, Susanna Paasonen, and Ravi Sundaram) of Technopharmacology (Minnesota University Press / Meson Press, 2022) and author of Underglobalization: Beijing’s Media Urbanism and the Chimera of Legitimacy (Duke University Press, March 2020). He is also co-editor (with Bhaskar Sarkar) of Asian Video Cultures: In the Penumbra of the Global (Duke University Press, 2017), as well as co-editor of recent or forthcoming journal issues examining convenience, paranoia, optimization, and populism. His work is published in Media Theory, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Discourse, Culture Machine, Film Quarterly, Cinema Journal, Sarai, The Routledge Companion to Risk and Media, among others. About the Media Care Talk Series Dozing at the movie theater, listening to the podcast on the subway, counseling via Zoom appointments, searching immigration policy on the internet…In this increasingly crumbling world, media offer maintenance and sustain our vitality while they also harm our well-being through abuse and addiction. This talk series examines the concept of care and showcases the process of knowledge production surrounding artificial care in media practice. We will browse a range of media objects and platforms - from cinema to teletherapy, from smart drugs to sleep apps - and explore the habitual, affective, and material potential of healing and solidarity within film and media theories. This series is co-organized by the Film Studies Program and the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts at UC San Diego with generous support from the following: 21 Century China Center, Department of Communication, Department of Visual Arts, Department of Literature, and the Institute of Arts & Humanities. Questions Email Suraj Israni Center By registering for this event you agree to receive future correspondence from the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, from which you can unsubscribe at any time.