T. J. Demos
· ProfessorUniversity of California, Santa Cruz · History of Art and Visual Culture
Active 1993–2025
About
T. J. Demos is a Professor of the History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz and serves as the Director of the Center for Creative Ecologies. His work focuses on the intersections of contemporary art, politics, and ecology, exploring how artistic practices engage with social and environmental issues. As a scholar, Demos contributes to understanding the role of art in addressing urgent global challenges and fostering critical dialogue around ecological and social justice.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Aesthetics
- Social Science
- Political Science
- Art
- Law
- Visual arts
- Physics
Selected publications
2025-01-23
book-chapterThe politics and aesthetics of climate emergency
Manchester University Press eBooks · 2023-12-12
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingWe are living in emergency times, when one person's emergency can mean another's oppression; one's security, another's erasure; one's tragedy, another's economic opportunity. Variously understood, climate change's visual cultures are particularly complex at a time when they include remote sensing of atmospheric carbon and representations of global warming's differentiated sociopolitical impacts on the ground, geospatial scientific data, and artistic mediations and activist interventions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that aesthetic practices (referring to the organisation of appearance) have overwhelmed the boundaries of institutionally recognised modes of creativity, now unfolding on the streets and in the digital public sphere in ways that reconfigure and expand conventional artistic approaches, as in new blurrings of art and activism. In its most ambitious and far-reaching sense, art – and more broadly, aesthetic practice – holds the promise of providing insight and inviting perceptual and philosophical shifts in how we comprehend ourselves, the world, and the relations between them. As such, ecocritical analysis, still very much in development as an interdisciplinary formation, must take an expanded approach in considering competing modellings of creative practice if it is to aid in defining and responding to the conflictual emergencies of climate breakdown. Adopting that working hypothesis, this chapter reflects on disparate creative practices – from those of Extinction Rebellion to Decolonize This Place and Forensic Architecture – and the political rifts they occasion, deploying a politico-ecological visual culture and art history, resonating with the larger project of the environmental humanities and embracing a capacious understanding of social-justice-based climate activism.
“With Applied Creativity, We Can Heal”
2021-01-22
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingA scholar of modern and contemporary Native North American art, I am writing from a place of renewed commitment to Earth care and environmental justice. Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a multimedia artist, creative writer, and citizen of Santa Clara Pueblo, shared her words and experiences with me to generate this conversational essay. Rose holds a BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and a MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied for three years in the Automotive Science Program at Northern New Mexico College, and is currently enrolled in the Low Rez Creative Writing MFA program at IAIA. Behind these institutional markers lies a more fundamental education that has shaped Rose’s creative formulation of a climate-changed futurism: Her upbringing at Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, co-founded by her mother, sculptor and architect Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962), at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1987. This collaboration begins with an intimate narrative by Rose, then opens into a conversation about ancestral Indigenous lifeways, the decolonial politics of permaculture and “climate grief,” the spiritual and ecological resonances of leather, clay, and metal, and the role of post-apocalyptic theory in her work.
ARTMargins · 2021 · 3 citations
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Social Science
Abstract What does it mean to think and act radically, and how does this relate to forms of radicalism connected to earlier moments, for example, in the 20th century? What can be the role of radical art and scholarship under the conditions of late capitalism? More generally, how can art and artists serve the ongoing struggle for social justice and the agendas of emancipatory social change? Finally, what kinds of art criticism and art historical scholarship are necessary to address the great challenges of our uncertain future?
Beneath the Museum, the Specter
2021-01-22
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis chapter discusses the political theory for institutional liberation in the terminal crisis of climate change. Museums are in crisis, facing escalating pressure to drop fossil fuel sponsors, remove robber barons and war criminals from their boards, repatriate stolen objects, and topple racist monuments, dioramas, and displays. Ecology offers a framework to interpret relations between capitalism and nature, allowing us to make sense of climate change as a project of capital. The problem is that while ecology can picture the capitalist world, it also participates in the active repression of the gap. Toscano’s account of the dialectic of extinction and resurrection latent in the labor process presents a key for thinking about what it might mean to conjure the specter that haunts the natural history museum. The museum is constituted through the same dialectics of extinction and resurrection as is the commodity.
Visual Studies · 2021-05-27
article1st authorCorrespondingThere appears to be a certain anxiety expressed in the present questionnaire about the institutional status of visual studies. Visual studies’ academic legitimacy and intellectual integrity seem pr...
CHAPTER FOUR. Gaming the Environment: On the Media Ecology of Public Studio
2020-08-03
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingRoutledge eBooks · 2020 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Physics
This chapter addresses contemporary extraction, its visual cultures, as well as the politics and aesthetics of emergent forms of resistance today. In view of spreading sacrifice zones given over to resource mining, accompanied by exploitative international trade agreements and the finances of debt servitude, what forms do the cultural politics of opposition take, and how are artist-activists materializing the images and sounds of emancipation and decolonization against capitalism's rapacious commodification of anything and everything? With reference to the diverse artworks of Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, which variously consider geographies of conflict in such regions as Greece, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Bangladesh, this analysis considers a range of artistic approaches that adopt experimental documentary approaches to environmental violence. They also identify and cultivate modes of resilience—at once conceptual, social, material, and political—grounded in grassroots mutual-aid practices, where aesthetics connects to and inspires social movement power in resistance to extractive capital. In doing so, these practices both reveal complex causalities and effects of global extractivism and propose forms of movement-building and solidarity with those on the front lines of opposition.
Beyond the World's End: Arts of Living at the Crossing
2020 · 46 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Visual arts
- Aesthetics
- Art
In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises. Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms. Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in work by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout, Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetic and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future
CHAPTER THREE. The Visual Politics of Climate Refugees
2020-08-03
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 5 shared
Eyal Weizman
- 4 shared
Brooke Holmes
University of Pittsburgh
- 4 shared
Mel Y. Chen
- 4 shared
bill brown
University of Chicago
- 4 shared
Jeff Dolven
Princeton University
- 4 shared
Giuliana Bruno
- 3 shared
Julia Bryan-Wilson
- 3 shared
Terry Smith
University of St Andrews
Awards & honors
- College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award
- Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020)
- Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End…
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