Date/Time
Date(s) - September 10, 2021
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Ecosex Walking Tour of the Cache la Poudre River at Whitewater Park, led by artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle
Multi-media and performance artists Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle will lead a site-specific, public Ecosex Walking Tour along the Cache la Poudre River on Friday, September 10, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. The performance tour is directed by Joy Brooke Fairfield and held conjunction with the current exhibition Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place, curated by CSU Professor of Painting Erika Osborne.
“Performed by Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle, and their team of punk rock boot camp counselors. Directed by Joy Brooke Fairfield.
Join in an outdoor ecosensual exploration of the city of the Poudre River. Come experience 25 ways to make love to the Earth. We’ll raise awareness of environmental issues, learn Ecosex 101 basics and demonstrate inspiring ecosexercises, and we’ll climax at our E spots. You might discover that you are ecosexual too!”
Attendance and Accessibility:
This Ecosex Walking Tour is free and open to the public. Portable assisted-listening devices are available for participants.
Location:
Meet outside the CSU Energy Institute’s Powerhouse Building at 430 N. College Ave.
About the artists:
Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle are multi-media performance artists who create work about sex, love, and queer ecologies. Stephens is an Art Professor at UC Santa Cruz, where she teaches and directs the E.A.R.T.H. Lab, and Sprinkle is a former sex worker and current sex educator with a Ph.D. in Human Sexuality. The pair have been creating together since 2002, and since 2008, have developed the ‘ecosexual’ movement through art, theory, practice, activism, and especially their Wedding to the Earth and the Ecosex Manifesto.
Currently, the artists focus on projects like Water Makes Us Wet—environmental films with an “ecosexual gaze.” In their own words, “By shifting the metaphor from ‘Earth as mother’ to ‘Earth as lover’ we aim to entice people to develop a more mutual, pleasurable, sustainable, and less destructive relationship with the environment.”
Stephens and Sprinkle also create in theater, performance art, and produce symposiums and workshops. They have been honored as official documenta 14 artists and awarded a 2019 Eureka Fellowship. Most recently, the pair were awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship. Stephens and Sprinkle’s new book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position—the Earth as Lover, is available through the University of Minnesota Press.
This program and the larger exhibition, Reclamation: Recovering Our Relationship with Place, are presented in collaboration with the Energy Institute at Colorado State University and the CSU Department of Art and Art History. Reclamation is also part of the worldwide art project EXTRACTION: Art on the Edge of the Abyss.
Support has been generously provided City of Fort Collins Fort Fund, by the FUNd Endowment at CSU, and with additional support from Colorado Creative Industries. CCI and its activities are made possible through an annual appropriation from the Colorado General Assembly and federal funds from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This project was also made possible, in part, through a grant from the Lilla B. Morgan Memorial Endowment, which works to enhance the cultural development and atmosphere for the arts at Colorado State University. This fund benefits from the generous support of all those who love the arts.
