March 2025
I haven’t refreshed the content of this website since pre-Covid. First, I accidentally let the domain lapse; then my web designer, Faerthen Felix, moved and no longer had access to the necessary tools—and then the Nevada Museum of Art embarked on a building expansion which would increase the size of the Center for Art + Environment, which I direct , by almost a magnitude. That facility will be renamed the Institute for Art + Environment to acknowledge our growth and open this early summer.
In the meantime, Faerthen began to work with Eric Leuthardt, the Creative Director at 7th Circle Designs (https://www.7thCircleDesigns.com) to recover the original website pages—and here we are. My profound gratitude to both for rescuing the website, and just in time for a flood of news. Apologies for such a lengthy missive.
The Marshall Islands
Photographer Mark Klett and I were invited to join the Kõmij Mour Ijin / Our Life is Here expedition to the Marshall Islands, a trip bringing together a diverse group of international and young Marshallese artists to learn about and make work regarding the conjoined existential threats of climate change and the nuclear legacy in the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI). By “existential” I mean events that threaten the survival of individuals, the islands, and the entire culture. The art-and-science expedition was conceived of by photographer Michael Light, then abetted by David Buckland, the founder of Cape Farewell in the U.K, the oldest and largest art-and-climate change program in the world. David, in turn, suggested inviting Marshall Islander climate activist, artist, and poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, who would help loop in local artists.
Mark and I joined the thirty members of the expedition in August 2023 and spent twelve days sailing 450 miles aboard a dive/research vessel. The expedition’s website is here: https://ourlifeishere.org/. Mark and I then returned to the RMI capitol, Majuro, the following March for more research and to attend the Nuclear Remembrance Day commemorating the 75th anniversary of the “Castle Bravo” detonation of a hydrogen bomb. The test, one of the 67 aboveground and underwater test the United States conducted in the northern Marshall Islands, was unexpectedly powerful and the winds at the higher altitudes reached by the cloud were unpredictable. As a result, any of us who were alive in 1956 carry traces of the plutonium isotopes the device created.
I’ve written three accounts of the work we all produced out of these journeys. First is an essay in the catalogue for the 2025-2026 exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art, Over the Time Horizon, curated by Apsara DiQuinzio. That will appear in Spring 2026 from Radius Books in Santa Fe. Second is a collaboration by Klett and I, Sailing Through the Anthropocene, which was conceived up as a sequel to the book we created together about the Wendover Air Field and the bomber of Hiroshima, the Enola Gay (again, Spring 2026, Radius Books).
And last, and the most complete account of the work in the Marshalls, are the essays included in a new book seeking a publisher, The Greater Nuclear West, which includes all of my writing about matters nuclear since 1989. The book covers and compares nuclear sites in both Nevada, including the Nevada National Security Site (formerly the Nevada Test Site) and Yucca Mountain, with the sites in the Marshall Islands and other Pacific locations. Given the current worldwide efforts to ramp up nuclear weapon stockpiles, this is a timely work.
Other Books
The University of Nevada Press is slated to published my first full-sized collection of poetry in twenty years, Terrae Nullius, in spring 2026. Terra nullius, of which terrae nullius is the plural, is Latin for “nothing land,” or “zero land,” but more commonly taken in international law to mean “nobody’s land,” a terrain that is not yet a territory. The papal bull of Pope Urban II from 1095 adopted the term to allow European sovereign nations to occupy and claim land inhabited by non-Christians.The term acquired an especially unsavory reputation when it was used by the British to justify their occupation of Australia, which had been settled by Aboriginal Australians some 50,000 years previously. I am expressly countering that usage by titling a collection of poems about places that, although they are in every case inhabited—albeit in some cases only temporarily by scientists or hunters—nonetheless stand at the edge of our understanding. These places are among those that are as near as we can get today on earth to places that are inhabited mostly by our imagination. The collection of minimalist poems includes sites such as the Antarctic, the Atacama Desert, the outback of Australia, and Devon Island in the far northern Canadian Arctic. As for why most of the places have names that begin with the letter A, your guess is as good as mine.
Lastly, in fall of 2027 the Press will release another book of essays, Visual Flight Rules: Aereality and the Arid American West. The book is comprised of ten essays about aerial projects by nine artists and related colleagues. They photograph the earth from above, sometimes image the sky from below, and take flight in a variety of vehicles. They use digital and analog cameras, but also sometimes draw photographs, and launch art into the sky. Altogether, they redefine an old French term, aréalité, which I have defined through three books as our increasingly common aerial imagination.
