Matt Kenyon at the Gregory Allicar Museum of Art

Reclamation features the work of celebrated artists Matt Kenyon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mary Mattingly, John Sabraw, “Ecosexuals” Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, and Cedra Wood.

Artists are visionaries, capable of reimagining the industrialized world and its practical systems. Featured as part of the global art project Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss and held in collaboration with the Colorado State University Energy Institute, Gregory Allicar Museum of Art (GAMA) proudly presents the exhibition Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place, which asks what might happen if artists, instead of or working alongside mining companies, engineers, and scientists, are given the opportunity to envision resource removal and post-extraction sites. 

Reclamation is curated by Erika Osborne, Associate Professor of Painting, and features the work of celebrated artists Matt Kenyon, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mary Mattingly, John Sabraw, Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, and Cedra Wood. The artists were chosen for their radical ecological perspectives, using humor, poetry, beauty, and science to present futures in which human action enables the land to reassert its rights and extraction no longer decimates ecosystems. 

 “We are honored to be exhibiting such important work from these amazing artists,” says Osborne. “We hope that this exhibition, along with those happening as part of the larger Extraction project, will bring to light the myriad issues surrounding our unending thirst for energy—by not only highlighting the problems, but by demonstrating possible paths forward, towards a post-fossil fuel future.”

Extraction: Art on the Edge of the Abyss is “a multimedia, multi-venue, cross-border art intervention” that investigates the industrial extractive industry. The project interrogates resource extraction’s negative societal and environmental consequences, from the injury done to people (particularly in Indigenous and marginalized communities) to the harm caused in natural landscapes. The project is also “de-centered, non-hierarchical, and self-organizing,” which has allowed GAMA to develop Reclamation independently.