SEAN FADER + MAUREEN TOWEY
QUEER AMERICAN MEMORIALS
Years in the making, Queer American Memorials (QAM) places interactive site markers at locations where queer people were murdered between 1999 and 2009—the decade Congress spent debating whether LGBTQ+ people should be protected under federal hate crimes law. Covered in the Whitehot Magazine article "Joy, Community, & Memory," the project takes its physical form—a brick—from the Stonewall riots, and its site-based approach from Germany's Stumbling Stones. Installed at sites of LGBTQ+ hate crimes across the country, each brick holds a scannable AR memorial, accessible by phone.
Led by interdisciplinary social practice artists Sean Fader and Maureen Towey in partnership with MASS Design Group's Public Memory and Memorials Lab, the nationwide project unearths erased queer histories and reclaims spaces lost to hate, evolving out of Fader's Insufficient Memory, an interactive digital memorial mapping LGBTQ+ lives lost.
On view at ICA San José from September 2026 through February 2027, Insufficient Memory will be accompanied by a QAM brick honoring Alina Marie Barragan, a Latinx trans youth killed in San Jose in 2000, with community storytelling gathered through 2027 ahead of the brick's placement. QAM will also partner with the Matthew Shepard Foundation this winter on an interactive installation at Washington National Cathedral, timed to Shepard's 50th birthday and the nation's 250th anniversary—a reminder of the ongoing need to visualize queer history.
KÕMIJ MOUR IJIN / OUR LIFE IS HERE MULTI-YEAR ART + CLIMATE COLLABORATION COMES TO UC BERKELEY + DAVID BROWER CENTER
Being unveiled in Fall 2026, Kõmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here—a curatorial, programming, and educational initiative curated by Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll, based on the expedition to the Marshall Islands organized by artists Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Michael Light, and David Buckland of Cape Farewell—will bring together art, climate science, and cultural dialogue to confront climate colonialism, imagine alternative futures, and recognize our shared responsibility for planetary care. The initiative centers Marshallese voices and perspectives, reflecting on the entanglements of climate, history, and our collective future.
Running from September 2026 through Spring 2027, installations and film screenings at UC Berkeley will engage students, faculty, and the broader public in a multi-sited exploration of how art can deepen our understanding of climate change—not just as an environmental crisis, but as a complex cultural and geopolitical challenge. UC Berkeley faculty and scholars will anchor the programming, drawing interdisciplinary connections between art, history, and climate, supported by course and public programming grants that invite students and faculty to contribute their own scholarship and art-making to the project.
September 2027 through February 2028 brings a comprehensive body of original artwork to the galleries at the David Brower Center—a home for the environmental movement which unites art, activism, and climate—following exhibitions at the Royal Maritime Museum London and the Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art + Environment.