Ep. 34 Beverly Naidus: Superwoman Remediating Superfund Sites

Mar 22 2019 • 37 mins

Beverly Naidus is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator. While developing an innovative studio arts curriculum, she has been creating interactive installations, digital projects, artist books and narrative and conceptual drawings for over three decades. Much of her work is audience-participatory, inviting people to tell their own stories in response to the theme being explored. Inspired by the lived experience, topics in her art focus on environmental and social issues, including how we are individually and collectively affected by racism, climate change and multiple forms of systemic oppression.

Her unique courses at UWT emerge from her own projects and include Art in a Time of War, Cultural Identity and Art, Body Image and Art, Eco-art, Labor, Globalization and Art and the Artist as Visionary and Dreamer. She is the author of Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame, numerous essays on socially engaged art and pedagogy and some recent pieces of speculative fiction. She has taught at several NYC museums, Carleton College, Cal State Long Beach, Hampshire College, Goddard College and the Institute for Social Ecology. She has guest lectured and led workshops all over North America and in Europe.

She facilitated and designed the permaculture-inspired, eco-art project, Eden Reframed, on Vashon Island, WA, funded by the Royalty Research Foundation. Her work has been exhibited internationally, in mainstream museums, university galleries, alternative spaces, and city streets. It has been reviewed and discussed by many significant writers, including Lucy R. Lippard, Suzi Gablik, Paul Von Blum and Lisa Bloom.

As part of her new collective, ARTifACTs, she is collaborating on an interactive, multidisciplinary project about the future. “We Almost Didn’t Make It,” imagines the artifacts (and stories that emerge from them) found by our descendants that give them insights into the risks taken by activists (their ancestors) that allowed the descendants to exist. It’s an audience participatory and multi-media work that gives participants the opportunity to imagine the artifacts that their descendants might find.