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Lisa Moline

  • Professor, Design & Visual Communication
  • Co-Area Head, Design & Visual Communication

Education

  • MFA, Printmaking, UW-Madison
  • Certificate, Special Advanced Studies in Printmaking, Central School of Art & Design, London, England
  • BA, Studio Art, Smith College, Northampton, MA

Biography

Lisa Moline is an artist and designer living and working in Milwaukee. She and her partner Lane Hall have been working collaboratively on art and creative activism projects for over 35 years. Her creative research falls into two major bodies of work: Eco Poetics and Artful Activism.

Eco Poetics projects present an associative reinterpretation of natural sciences, exploring the boundaries between the natural and the technological. Moline and Hall’s major projects include installations for the California Academy of Sciences, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Science Gallery at Trinity College, Dublin, the Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, the Block Museum at Northwestern University, and the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. Their Eco Poetics videos have been shown in the UN Pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo in China, and in Berlin, Germany, at the Kolbe Museum and the Neuen Gesellschaft for Bildende Kunst.

In 2011, Moline and Hall co-founded the Overpass Light Brigade (OLB). In collaboration with Joe Brusky, they grew the project to be an international performative activist tactic, with multiple Light Brigades across the US and the globe. News publications such as The Guardian, The New York Times, Time, CNN, BBC, NBC, The New Yorker, The Progressive, Mother Jones, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Public Radio International, The  Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as scores of local, regional, and alternative media outlets have published photo documentation of OLB’s actions. OLB’s actions have also appeared in the films Citizen Koch, Forward, Standing Rock: Take Me from the River, Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland, and Language Back, as well as the Be Visible publicity campaign for Planned Parenthood.

Lisa Moline was born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her BA degree in Studio Art from Smith College, Certificate for Special Advanced Studies in Printmaking from the Central School of Art and Design (now Central St. Martins College of Art) in London, and MFA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She began teaching at UWM in 1996 and joined the faculty in 2001. Her teaching focused on web and interaction design, typography and book arts.

Links

Recent & Selected Works

Photo of many people holding signs made of lights with individual letters spelling "abolition"
“Abolition,” Overpass Light Brigade on stage with Boots Riley and The Coup, Chicago IL
Photo of many people holding signs made of lights with individual letters spelling "keep ICE out" with semi-transparent, superimposed white butterfly on a red background
“Keep Ice Out,” Overpass Light Brigade at Wisconsin State Capitol, Madison WI
Two photos of Blue Oyster mushrooms growing out of a segment of a birch tree on a wooden platform
“Slow Growing: Blue Oyster and Paper Birch,” collaboration between Lisa Moline, Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Lane Hall
Photo of a green and a grey cube with white mushrooms growing out of each on a wood platform.
“Slow Growing: Two Cubes,” collaboration between Lisa Moline, Yevgeniya Kaganovich and Lane Hall
Four photos of two thin, flowing black webbing strands printed against a white wall
“Gut,” print installation, Lisa Moline and Lane Hall, Milwaukee Art Museum
Two animal hides resembling a black and white giraffe hung on the wall, three people run in the foreground
“Hide,” print installation, Lisa Moline and Lane Hall, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh PA

OLB Film, Documentary by Dusan Harminc/Stumptown Media; 6-minute documentary about the Overpass Light Brigade
We Are Water, Short film with Overpass Light Brigade, in collaboration with Dusan Harminc/Stumptown Media

Creative Works Published/Cited by Others

  • Jobin-Leeds, Greg and AgitArte. When We Fight We Win, The New Press, New York, NY, 2016 (pp 40-41)
  • Beautiful Trouble, a Toolbox for Revolution (website), Toolbox>Tactics>Light Brigade https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/light-brigade
  • Kuppers, Petra. Community Performance: An Introduction, 2nd edition, Routledge, Abingdon, UK and New York, NY, 2019 (pp 15, 132)
  • Young, Phoebe SK. Camping Grounds: Public Nature in American Life from the Civil War to the Occupy Movement, Oxford University Press, 2021 (p 296)
  • Stern, Nathaniel. Ecological Aesthetics, “Activist Ecologies: singular pluralities, in letters and light,” Dartmouth College Press, Hanover, NH, 2018 (pp 128-141, plates 19, 20, 21)
  • Faure-Walker, James. Painting the Digital River, Prentice-Hall (now Pearson), New Jersey, 2006 (pp 261-263)
  • Whale, George. Digital Printmaking, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK, 2001 (p. 14)
  • Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science and Technology, MIT Press, 2002 (p 114)
  • Spalter, Anne. The Computer in the Visual Arts, Addison Wesley (Pearson), Boston, MA, 1998, (pp. 104-107, 194-195)
  • AIGA. 365: AIGA Year in Design, Promotional Design and Advertising, American Institute of Graphic Arts, Brooklyn, NY 2004 (p. 87)