Please join us for a Round Table on Rural Environmentalism. Current Exhibiting Artist, Subhankar Banerjee will moderate a discussion with: Gwich’in Nation Elder- Sarah James, Duke Professor of Environmental Studies- Jennifer Garcia Peacock and Assistant Professor of Art and Ecology/Director of Land Arts of the American West- Jeannette Hart-Mann. This event is co-organized by the Harwood Museum of Art and UNM Art & Ecology. Sarah James Sarah is an Elder of the Gwich’in Nation. She lives in Arctic Village, Alaska. Sarah was raised in the Gwich’in way of life on the land—hunting, fishing and gathering, with traditional knowledge of air, water, land, life and fire. Gwich’in is her first language. Sarah has traveled widely from Arctic Village to Washington, D.C. and many countries, speaking out for the rights of Indigenous peoples and about the importance of protecting Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, the Sacred Place Where Life Begins—the caribou calving and nursery grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas development. She has received many awards in recognition of her decades of grassroots activism, including the Goldman Environmental Prize and was inducted in the inaugural Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame in 2009. Jennifer Garcia Peacock Jennifer specializes in 20th-century U.S. and Latinx history, environmental history, and visual culture. She is particularly interested in issues related to environmental justice, borderlands and the American West, rural place-making and spatial formation, and community-based learning. Jennifer is a James B. Duke Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Davison College in North Carolina, holds a Ph.D. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a M.A. from Dartmouth College and a B.A. Mount Holyoke College. In her own words: “My research examines the ways that Chicanx cultural producers such as artists and activists have (re)shaped the cultural landscape of California's Central Valley during the second half of the 20th century through visual products such as murals, poster art, pilgrimage, altars, gardens and roadside shrines”. Jeannette Hart-Mann Jeanette Hart-Mann is Director of Land Arts of the American West and Assistant Professor of Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is an alumnus of Land Arts of the American West (2000), earned a BFA, summa cum laude, and University Honors, summa cum laude from the University of New Mexico (2001), and a MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2012). She is co-founder and collective cohort of SeedBroadcast, a creative multi-platform Agri-Culture project employing collaborative engagement, grassroots story making, and free-source seed action. Her artistic practice is centered in a desire to counter oppressive power structures through examining and cultivating transspecies relationships and ecologic processes as acts of resistance to germinate resiliency. Her methodologies are interdisciplinary spanning across video, sculpture, photography, installation, experimental media, print, performance, farming, writing, and activism. This event is free to the public.