Twelve Earths’ vast size and careful multi-sited exploration calls upon many minds to achieve a psychogeographic examination of this scale and complexity. Stretching traditional project authorship to its limits, Twelve Earths proposes a set of open-textured questions as to how an artwork might come to live in the world while helping catalyze new forms of planetary thinking.

Acting in concert with Michael Jones McKean is an international cadre of thinkers and practitioners from the biosciences, arts, linguistics, philosophy, history, business, technology and philanthropy who have come together to explore the connections and disconnections between the geographical and ecological, human and non-human, and deep historical time and speculative futures.

MICHAEL JONES MCKEAN (b. Micronesia, lives/works US and France) is a recipient of numerous awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Nancy Graves Foundation Award, a Virginia A Groot Foundation Award, and an Artadia Award. McKean has been awarded fellowships and residencies at The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The MacDowell Colony, The International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York City, The Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in New York City. McKean’s work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally. He is a Contributing Editor of Art Papers and is an associate professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in the Sculpture + Extended Media Department where he has taught since 2006.
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FATHOMERS, founded in 2016, is a creative research institute in Los Angeles dedicated to producing sites and encounters that challenge us to live and act differently in the world. As the successor organization to Grand Arts, the influential project space in Kansas City, Mo., that sunset in 2015, Fathomers enlists expansive thinkers across disciplines to redefine the limits of scale, scope and support for artist-led projects. We do this because we value discoveries made absent predetermined outcomes, and we believe in the power of the realized dream as a test site and model for visionary change.
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