2013 Edelman Lecture: Rebecca Solnit

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in collaboration with Oregon Humanities, welcomes celebrated author, activist, and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit to deliver the 2013 Alfred Edelman Lecture.

Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in collaboration with Oregon Humanities, welcomes celebrated author, activist, and cultural historian Rebecca Solnit to deliver the 2013 Alfred Edelman Lecture.

Solnit’s lecture, entitled “On Getting Lost and What you Find There: Uses of the Unknown for Artists and Explorers,” draws from ideas in several of her recent books: A Paradise Built in Hell which addressed the way individuals to rally for good in the face of disasters, and Field Guide to Getting Lost, on wandering, being lost, and the generative qualities of the unknown. Rebecca Solnit is a remarkably versatile, politically engaged, and erudite writer who has taken on subjects ranging from 19th-century photography to Nevada nuclear test sites, from Yosemite to a social history of walking, in a career spanning twenty years. She is a nature writer with an outraged consciousness of what humans are doing to nature, but along with alarm and dismay comes undiluted hope that we can be better.

The annual Edelman Lecture is one of PNCA’s four Cornerstone Lectures, which also include the College’s Convocation Address at the start of the academic year, the Homecoming Lecture during Alumni weekend, and the Graduation Address given at Commencement in May.

About Rebecca Solnit
San Francisco writer Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about art, landscape, public and collective life, ecology, politics, hope, meandering, reverie, and memory. They include November 2010’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a book of 22 maps and nearly 30 collaborators; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, and many others, including Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). She has worked with climate change, Native American land rights, antinuclear, human rights, antiwar and other issues as an activist and journalist. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and frequent contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com and has made her living as an independent writer since 1988.

About the Edelman Lecture
When the late Portland architect and photographer, Alfred Edelman, taught three-dimensional design at PNCA, he challenged his students to consider the principles of engineering, kinetics, physics and other subjects seemingly dissimilar to art. In doing so he brought the outside world into his classroom. Founded by Carol Edelman, the Alfred Edelman Lecture was created to enhance the student’s understanding of the visual world by presenting timeless and/or unique ways to examine and manipulate three-dimensional space and to be a catalyst for lively discussions in the classroom at PNCA.

Artwork Info

Medium audio recording
Dimensions 1:11:12
Subject Matter edelman lecture, rebecca solnit, cornerstone lecture,
Language English

Artist Info

Name Pacific Northwest College of Art

Rights: All Rights Reserved

Appears In 1 Album

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Edelman Lecture: Rebecca Solnit