A&E Faculty

Subhankar Banerjee is an artist, writer, conservationist and public scholar. His place-based and community-engaged interdisciplinary and intersectional efforts aim to advance multispecies justice to mitigate the intensifying biodiversity and the climate crises. He works closely with Indigenous Gwich’in and Iñupiat community members and environmental organizations to defend significant biological nurseries from oil and gas development in Arctic Alaska, including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Coeditor (with T.J. Demos and Emily Eliza Scott) of Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture and Climate Change (Routledge, February 2021), Subhankar was most recently cohost (with U.S. Senator Tom Udall) of the UNM Biodiversity Webinar Series (Fall 2020), cocurator (with Josie Lopez) of Species in Peril Along the Rio Grande (Fall 2019), and convener of the last oil: a multispecies justice symposium (February 2018). His photographs have been exhibited in more than fifty museum exhibitions around the world, including Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment at the Princeton University Art Museum (2018-2019) and the 18th Biennale of Sydney: all our relations (2012); and public and scholarly writing have appeared in many publications, including Global Photography: A Critical History (Routledge, 2020) and Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies: Conversations from Earth to Cosmos (Routledge, 2017). For his conservation efforts, Subhankar received a Greenleaf Artist Award from the United Nations Environment Programme, a Cultural Freedom Award from Lannan Foundation, a National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, a Special Achievement Award from the Sierra Club, and was named an Arctic Hero by the Alaska Wilderness League. Subhankar is the founding director of both the Center for Environmental Arts and Humanities in the Department of Art and the Species in Peril project at UNM.

Szu-Han’s work in performance, sound, and installation explores the interwoven relationship between bodies and sites of memory. Her practice considers modes of exchange through diverse forms of collaboration, such as community organizing, structured improvisation, and collective composition. Recent projects include “MIGRANT SONGS,” a choral performance art piece based on stories and songs of human and nonhuman migration; “BORDER TO BAGHDAD,” an exchange between artists from the US-Mexico border and Baghdad, Iraq; and “Shelter in Place,” a sculptural installation and performance inspired by her family’s history in Taiwan. After receiving a BA in Architecture from UC Berkeley, she launched a six-year collaborative project in art installation, speculative proposals, performance, and agricultural experimentation on a 250-acre site in West Texas. She received an MA in Visual and Critical Studies and an MFA in Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Szu-Han lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is a founding member of the fronteristxs, a collective of artists working to end migrant detention and abolish the prison-industrial complex.

Catherine Page Harris, Associate Professor, teaches Art & Ecology and Landscape Architecture at The University of New Mexico in the College of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture & Planning. She received her BA from Harvard University, 1988, MLA from UC Berkeley, 1997, and MFA from Stanford University, 2005. Her built work resides at Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge Visitor’s Center, Marble House Project, VT, Deep Springs College, CA, and McCovey Field, SF, CA, among other sites. Recent projects include Variance Line, rammed earth and steel sculpture of climate data. Trans-species Repast–sharing meals with animals in North Jutland, Denmark and Vermont, US explores hierarchy, resources, and landscape, showed at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, (2016), UNM Art Museum (2016), the Land Shape Festival (2015) in Hanstholm, DK, Marble House Project, VT (2015) and the Wignall Museum, CA, (2014). Harris works in art/design, and digital/analog expressions.

Jeanette Hart-Mann is a farmer, artist, activist and teacher committed to the transformative potential of traditional ecological knowledge, embodied land-based practices, creative engagement and more-than-human-relationships. Her current research is focused on food and environmental justice, as well as vegetal philosophies and plant communication in conjunction with healing practices. Her methodologies are iterative, emergent and interdisciplinary. She weaves farming, wild crafting, and ecological restoration with video, sculpture, photography, installation, and writing. Hart-Mann is Co-Founder and Co-Director of SeedBroadcast, an artist collective committed to uplifting the culture in agri-Culture through creative public engagement and open-source seed sharing. SeedBroadcast is the recipient of multiple grants from Kindle Project, McCune Foundation, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation – Climate Change Solutions Fund Grant, and Puffin Foundation. She is lead farmer, seed steward, and shepherdess of HawkMoth Farm + Agroecology Center where she is designing and implementing experimental climate-resilient high-desert polycultures through integrative plant, animal, soil, and human habitation while producing food for regional communities. Hart-Mann received her BFA, summa cum laude and University Honors, summa cum laude at The University of New Mexico and her MFA in Visual Arts from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She currently serves as Director of the Land Arts of the American West program and Assistant Professor in Art & Ecology at UNM.

Ryan Henel is the Field Coordinator for the University of New Mexico’s Land Arts of the American West program and a Research Lecturer III for the Art + Ecology Department. He is also a Lead Artist for the Harwood Art Center’s Art and Social Justice Apprenticeship, which employs high-school and college students to design and fabricate works of public art. Ryan has an MFA in Art + Ecology and a BFA in Studio Art from the University of New Mexico. He received the Land Arts Mobile Research Center’s Post-MFA Grant funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation to develop case studies that integrated land art into public infrastructure. Ryan is a practicing artist who develops site-specific public artworks and temporary installations that use perspective, patterns and scale to prompt the viewer to experience a different understanding of their relationship to an environment. His most recent work focuses on public artworks that incorporate principles of biophilic design, green infrastructure and habitat creation.

Bill Gilbert has served on the faculty in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of New Mexico since 1988 where he holds the Lannan Endowed Chair as Director of the Land Arts of the American West program. Gilbert is also the co-founder of the new Art & Ecology emphasis in studio art and has recently been appointed as Associate Dean for Research of the College of Fine Arts. Gilbert has exhibited his place based, mixed media installation and video works internationally since 1981. He received a Lila Wallace Arts International Grant in 1994 to work with the Quichua people of Ecuador and has curated numerous exhibitions and written essays regarding the work of indigenous artists from the US Pueblos, Juan Mata Ortiz Mexico, and Pastaza, Ecuador. In 2009, the University of Texas Press released Land Arts of the American West, co-authored with professor Chris Taylor. Gilbert served on the steering committee for the LAND/ART New Mexico project and has authored the introduction for the culminating book to be published by Radius Books.

Fulbright Scholar, Basia Irland, is an artist, author, and activist who creates international large-scale community-based water projects featured in her books, “Water Library” (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and “Reading the River, The Ecological Activist Art of Basia Irland” (Museum De Domijnen, The Netherlands, 2017). She is Professor Emerita, Department of Art, University of New Mexico, where she co-founded the Art & Ecology Program.

Irland’s website, basiairland.com, contains extensive documentation of her work, including collaborations with scientists, essays about global waterways written for National Geographic, and images from her museum retrospective in the Netherlands. She has created world-wide projects including, Waterborne Disease Scrolls that are based on research done with epidemiologists in Nepal, Egypt, India, and Ethiopia; A Gathering of Waters, which fosters dialogue and connects communities along the entire length of rivers that are accompanied by portable Repositories; and Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, hand-carved ephemeral Ice Books embedded with native seed texts that are floated down streams to aid with riparian restoration. She has constructed rainwater harvesting systems and produced documentaries about water.

In 2015-2016, Irland had a major retrospective exhibition at the Museum De Domijnen, the Netherlands, curated by Roel Arkesteijn. She has lectured globally and was the keynote speaker, along with Amitav Ghosh, for an ecology conference at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 2018. Irland was invited by the United Nations in France to write a chapter about American rivers for a book, “Water Culture,” published by UNESCO, and she is a Knowledge Network Expert for the United Nations’ Harmony with Nature platform. In 2021-2022, she represented the United States in the 15 Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador, curated by Blanca de la Torre. Her projects have been featured in over 70 international publications.