Location: Stanford University, Mendenhall Library, inside Building 120 (McClatchy Hall) (map)
GUH Project Director Susan Moffat will give a talk on her documentary and curatorial work at the Albany Bulb, where she is working to establish an art and performance park at an old construction debris landfill known for encampments of homeless people. Andrew Herscher, Creative Cities fellow 2016-17, will serve as respondent.
Please RSVP — Lunch is provided:
http://www.justplacemaking.com/november-3.html
Just Placemaking: Arts and Community Development Towards an Equitable City is a free public lecture series co-hosted by the Stanford Human Cities Initiative and the Creative Cities Working Group. The series explores the intersection of social justice and the role of artists, curators, gallery owners, and cultural workers in supporting community efforts towards an equitable and just city.
Susan's research focuses on issues including perceptions of nature and culture in public space, parks, homelessness, water and landscape, and methods of spatial narratives. As a curator, she has mounted exhibitions on cartography and on the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Her oral history and mapping project, Atlas of the Albany Bulb, collects place-based stories from users of wild space at the urban edge, including unhoused people and artists, and was part of the SOMArts Cultural Center exhibition Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture Project. She also served as a consultant on the Detour audio tour of the Albany Bulb. Susan has organized symposia including: Mapping and Its Discontents; Art, Politics, and the City in Mexico and China; and, in collaboration with the Arts Research Center, Reimagining the Urban and Public Art/Housing Publics: Conversations on Art and Social Justice.
Susan has worked in the fields of affordable housing, environmental planning, land conservation and regional planning advocacy, and journalism. Her writing on Asian cities, ethnicity and place, and environmental issues has been published in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Fortune, Planning, and the edited collection The Misread City: New Literary Los Angeles. She recently was a guest co-editor of the Fall 2016 special edition of BOOM: California on urban humanities. She has an A.B. in History and Literature from Harvard College, a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a Master of City Planning with a concentration in Urban Design from UC Berkeley.