to lie coiled
October 14 — November 10, 2026
This exhibition is open to the public Thursday-Sunday, 12:00 - 5:00 pm or by appointment only. It is open to the campus community via swipe access whenever the Art and Music Libraries are open.
The Art Department invites all to visit to lie coiled, an exhibition of new work by artist lisa banta, the 2025-26 Alice C. Cole '42 fellow.
The exhibition speaks to the histories of the Klamath River, which runs through southern Oregon and northern California. A locus of food and trade for Native Americans along its path for thousands of years, the river's use and management became contested with the arrival of colonizers in the western US, with violent displacements resulting from events like the mid-19th-century California Gold Rush and the construction of privately-owned hydroelectric dams in the 20th century.
The works in to lie coiled conjure protective creatures and manifestations of the land itself that rest quietly and patiently, waiting to be called to action. These forms imagine a reciprocal relationship between human and nonhuman forces, one that acknowledges that agency of the land and our obligation toward it. With Land Back understood as both an imperative and future condition, banta articulates a hybridized in-between that ensures the protection of the land until its return to the care of its original stewards.
lisa banta is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Portland State University. Her work investigates the various ways that historical legacies shape present-day social and ecological injustices. Informed by postcolonial theory and lived experience, her practice bridges critical inquiry and material intuition, engaging questions of justice, care, and decolonization across personal, ancestral, and environmental registers. Through tactile, embodied approaches to material, her works become carriers of memory, grief, and survival, as well as vessels of resistance and repair. She is an enrolled descendent of the Karuk tribe.