Brandon Ballengée - Biodiversity, muscular hope, and the persistence of life
Brandon Ballengée has a unique quality of attention, one that is not constrained by traditional distinctions between art & science and working & living. He wants to share that capacity to witness to liberate everyone's imagination of what this world can be, a world we are of rather than just in. This ecological consciousness informs his work as a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator.
Ballengée creates transdisciplinary artworks inspired from his ecological field and laboratory research. His work swaps out shock and didactic show and tell for visual drama, textured moral thinking, and muscular hope.
In 2014 he received his Ph.D. in Transdisciplinary Art and Biology, a singular kind of degree that we will talk about, from Plymouth University in the UK. Much of his adult life has been spent in New York City and Louisiana and his artwork has been exhibited throughout the US and internationally in more than 20 countries.
From 2016-2018, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University, studying the impact on the ecology of the Gulf of Mexico after the 2010 oil spill. His project, Crude Life Portable Museum: A Citizen Art and Science Investigation of Gulf of Mexico Biodiversity after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, is profoundly affecting and has been extended to examine the species “missing” from the Gulf since the oil spill.
In 2020, he was named to the Grist's 50 Emerging Environmental Leaders. In 2021, he was awarded the illustrious Guggenheim Fellowship.
His life, as in his art and scientific research, is a model of crossing and dissolving boundaries.
After years in New York, he and his family decided to make Arnaudville, Louisiana their home. Brandon, his wife Aurore, and children, Victor and Lilith, began Atelier de la Nature, a South Louisiana area eco-educational campus and nature reserve that inspires people to steward the nature in their own backyards and learn how, collectively, we can protect these natural gifts for future generations.
Brandon is a voice we desperately need amidst our ecological crises and a model of the attitudes and philosophy that might ignite the change. His life is a beacon for increased understanding of localized environmental problems with an overall awareness that each of us as individuals has an impact and can make a difference in our global environment.
It is a distinct pleasure to have Brandon on Origins, to begin to talk about how he has navigated to unexplored places physically and cognitively and become comfortable there, and to share the breadcrumb trail of brilliant work that marks that trajectory.