EVENT DETAILS

The Fabricated American Desert: Modern and Anti-Modern

The southwestern desert has long stood for American individualism, modernist and anti-modernist sentiments, and social and political experiments. As such it has attracted artistic and architectural movements that give visual and embodied form to these ideas. This conference brings together scholars from diverse disciplines to explore the relationship between desert extremes and the built environment.

Location: 
The Huntington Library, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA
Rathenberg Hall, Steven S. Kablik Education and Visitor Center

FRIDAY, APRIL 15
8:30 Registration & Coffee

9:30 Welcome: Steve Hindle (The Huntington)
Remarks: Lyle Massey (University of California, Irvine)

9:45 Session 1
Militarization and the Desert Imaginary
Moderator: William Deverell (University of Southern California and The Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West)

Joseph Masco (University of Chicago)
“Desolate Dreams: The Making of Nuclear Modernity”

Stefanie Sobelle (Gettysburg College)
“That Vast Something”

11:45 Lunch

1:00 Session 2
Desiccated Landscapes
Moderator: Lyle Massey

Emily Eliza Scott (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
“Spectres of Aridity: Desertification in California and Beyond”

Karen Pinkus (Cornell University)
“The Anthropocene Desert between Geology and Geography”

3:00 Break

3:15 Session 3
Indigenous Structures
Moderator: Heath Massey Schenker (University of California, Davis)

Jess Horton (University of Delaware)
“Will Wilson’s Post-Apocalyptic Hogan: Episodes of Desertification and Decolonization at Dinétah”

Albert Narath (University of California, Santa Cruz)
“Desert Technologies: Imagining Indigenous Design through the Energy Crisis”

SATURDAY, APRIL 16
9:00 Registration & Coffee

9:30 Session 4
Midcentury Inversions
Moderator: Michael Osman (University of California, Los Angeles)

Ed Dimendberg (University of California, Irvine)
“Explosive Modernism: The Southwest Architecture of Hiram Hudson Benedict”

Sylvia Lavin (University of California, Los Angeles)
“Architecture not in Evidence”

11:30 Lunch

12:30 Session 5
Desert Avant-Garde
Moderator: Alena Williams (University of California, San Diego)

Joshua Shannon (University of Maryland and The Potomac Center for the Study of Modernity)
“The Matter of the Mid-Century Desert”

James Nisbet (University of California, Irvine)
“Virtual Earthworks”

2:30 Break

2:45 Session 6
Outsider Spaces
Moderator: Bridget Cooks (University of California, Irvine)

Yael Lipschutz (Independent curator)
“A NeoHooDoo Western: Noah Purifoy, Spirit Flash, Art, and the Desert”

Charlie Hailey (University of Florida)
“Concrete on Sand: Casting Freedom between Necessity and Control in Slab City’s Desert Camp”

4:45 Closing Remarks: James Nisbet