Justseeds with Chicago ACT Collective and Olly Costello
Through the Portal conference
Crafting Climate Justice celebrates years of artists’ work within the climate justice movement. Many grassroots groups have championed creative and community-based solutions to combat climate change; and utilized art to resist environmental destruction including industrial fossil fuel projects, fracking operations, destructive mining practices, and the transportation of toxins. This legacy of creative resistance is highlighted in featured portfolio projects—including We Are the Storm, Wellspring, and Resourced—and exhibited alongside collaborative prints from the local Chicago mobilizations.
Furthering this tradition, Crafting Climate Justice will be activated through a Pop Up Climate Justice Printshop hosted by William Estrada, Aaron Hughes, and Ivan Arenas, and the workshop World We Want Seeds workshop with Olly Costello.
[Image from Justseeds and NRDC activation]
Pop Up Climate Justice Printshop
12:50-2:50 | Friday, Sep. 20, 2024 (William Estrada)
1:30-2:30 | Saturday, Sep. 21, 2024 (Aaron Hughes & Ivan Arenas)
Building on years of collaboration with frontline organizations, Justseeds Artist Cooperative and the Chicago ACT Collective invite you into a temporary risograph print shop to explore and play with graphics from the climate justice movement. During the activation, guests will be invited to collectively create, activate, and take away prints. Through the process we will build relationships, share ideas, imagine alternative futures, and discuss the connections between the conference themes and the communities we work and live in. Additionally, hosts William Estrada, Aaron Hughes, and Ivan Arenas will also share stories and insights on the graphics and prints being utilized and exhibited.
World We Want Seeds with Olly Costello
12:30-1:30 | Sunday, Sep 22, 2024
Through the process of sowing seeds and tending to small plants we are invited to witness a vision transform into reality. This co-creative process with seeds can be a space for us to practice world building. Seeds become portals to possibility when we acknowledge that what we pour our energy and attention into, grows. Seeds teach us about relationship building, reciprocity, adaptability, abundance and so much more.
During the activation, guests will be invited to participate in cleaning and processing seeds, decorating seed envelopes and writing an intention for what value or practice they hope to grow into the world next season when they put their seeds into the soil.
There is so much fertile ground all around us for world building. Let us all sow the seeds and grow the World We Want.
[Image by Olly Costello]
Through the Portal
This two-year, movement-driven symposium has ignited debates, dialogue, and collective envisioning on critical questions of justice, power, solidarity, and change.
Join us as we transcend the traditional boundaries of both academia and activism, hosting our convergence that connects scholar-activists with community-based and movement-focused intellectuals and artists. Speakers will discuss a range of issues, including—abolition, economic democracy, climate justice, feminism, racial justice, and the threat of authoritarianism.
Justseeds Artist Cooperative
Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative is a decentralized network of 41 artists committed to social, environmental and political engagement. With members working from the U.S. Canada and Mexico Justseeds operates both as a unified collaboration of similarly minded printmakers and as a loose collection of creative individuals with unique viewpoints and working methods. We believe in the transformative power of personal expression in concert with collective action. To this end we produce collective portfolios, contribute graphics to grassroots struggles for justice, work collaboratively both in- and outside the co-op, build large sculptural installations in galleries, and wheatpaste on the streets—all while offering each other daily support as allies and friends.
Chicago ACT Collective
The Chicago ACT Collective builds political artistic collaboration and dialogue across communities, expanding our capacity for radical imagination. Our members bring an abundance of art forms to the collective, including screenprinting, audio production, painting and drawing, writing, photography and more, generating work that both reflects and responds to current local needs for a more just world. The Chicago ACT Collective is as much an art collective as it is a community of care and mutual aid.
chicagoactcollective.weebly.com
Olly Costello
Olly is a white queer illustrator PIC abolitionist food growing enthusiast and community seed saver who is committed to participating in the creative collective work of building a liberated and flourishing future for all of us. Through their artistic and community based practices they explore themes of interconnectedness, spiritual ecology, emergence, accountability, community building, Prison Industrial Complex, Abolition, Transformative Justice, and belonging.
William Estrada
William Estrada is an arts educator and multidisciplinary artist. His current research is focused on developing community-based and culturally relevant arts education projects that center power structures of race, economy, and cultural access in contested spaces that provide a space to collectively imagine just futures through intentional and slow collaborations with people in the places they call home.