The MAK Center for Art and Architecture invites you to join author Eva Díaz in discussion with artists Oscar Tuazon and Connie Samaras to celebrate the release of Diaz’s After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia, and Other Science Fictions. Diaz provides an expansive look at contemporary artists, including Tuazon and Samaras, who confront, challenge, and reimagine R. Buckminster Fuller’s techno-utopianism to envision more just futures.
Architect and designer R. Buckminster Fuller’s (1895–1983) concept of “Spaceship Earth,” one of the most powerful metaphors of the twentieth century, imagines our planet as a monumental vehicle sustained by the interdependence of human technologies and natural ecologies. In this book, Eva Díaz explores that metaphor through the work of contemporary artists from around the world who grapple with Fuller’s project to promote the equitable distribution of global assets through design, and with the technocratic euphoria of his era.
The discussion is included with the price of admission. Click here to reserve your ticket.
Eva DÍaz
Eva Díaz is Professor of Contemporary Art History at Pratt. Her teaching and scholarship are informed by historical and contemporary interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and other cultural producers. Her first book, The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College, was released in 2015 by the University of Chicago Press.
Díaz’s new book After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-utopia and Other Science Fictions, analyzing the influence of R. Buckminster Fuller in contemporary art, was published by Yale University Press in spring 2025. The book is supported by grants from the Warhol Foundation / Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, a Barr-Ferree Grant, and the Pratt Faculty Development Fund. Recent sections of this project, featured in New Left Review, Aperture, e-flux journal, and Texte zur Kunst, take up artists’ challenges to a privatized and highly-surveilled future in outer space, analyzing how the space “race” and colonization can be reformulated as powerful means to readdress economic, gender, and racial inequality, as well as ecological injustices.
She recently edited the book Dorothea Rockburne, published by Dia Art Foundation and Yale University Press in 2024, contributing an essay on topology and techniques of folding in art. Díaz writes for magazines and journals such as The Art Bulletin, Artforum, Art Journal, Art in America, Cabinet, Frieze, Grey Room, Harvard Design Magazine, and October. Prior to coming to Pratt she taught at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, Sarah Lawrence College, and Parsons; she also worked as the curator at Art in General. She is currently at work on a book that explores non-visual experiences in art, such as olfaction, topological procedures, and haptics, by examining the overvaluation of certain experiences in culture (vision and cognition, distance and analysis, for example) and the devaluation of others (smell and sensuality, proximity and the body). In support of this new research, Díaz was awarded a grant from the Huntington Library, and she was in residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles as a Getty Scholar in 2023-2024.
CONNIE SAMARAS
Connie Samaras is a Los Angeles based artist and sometimes writer. Over the past 45 years she has produced a range of projects in which the common denominators are an ongoing engagement with social change, the confluence of vernacular and official histories, specualtive and auto fiction, and the intersection of political, cultural and psychological geographies in the everyday. Relevant to the discussion with Eva and Oscar are her projects photographing built environments in range of places: major U.S. cities, Dubai, the South Pole, Spaceport America (NM), and an all women’s RV retirement community. The focus of these series considers how architecturally neo liberalism holds out the future as a singular probability in contrast to communities that situate the future as an ever changing series of multiple possibilities. Recently over 50 works from these projects as well as others were acquired in a jointly coordinated acquisition by LACMA, the Huntington, and the Getty.
OSCAR TUAZON
Oscar Tuazon is an artist based in Los Angeles and Oil City, Washington. Tuazon studied at The Cooper Union and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York. He is a co-founder of Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), New York in 2000; castillo/corrales, Paris in 2007; and Los Angeles Water School (LAWS), Los Angeles in 2016. He is currently working on the design and construction of Water School as a permanent work of public art in the Great Basin region of Nevada, a long-term Land Back initiative in collaboration with the Goshute Tribe. His work has been included in the São Paulo Bienal, Chicago Architectural Biennial, Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale and Skulptur Münster. Solo exhibitions include Le Consortium, Dijon; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; and Kunst Museum Winterthur, Switzerland. Something in the Water, curated by Tuazon, will run from April - September at the MAXXI Museum in Rome. In 2025, Tuazon completed a major public artwork for the City of Seattle.