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The project’s communications team, led by Sofía Sánchez Borboa and Robert Pierce, was essential in building a critical mass of stakeholders around Start a Reaction.

In June 2021, SAIC faculty, curators, and seven specially chosen graduate fellows began to hold regular weekly meetings to discuss how the arts could be leveraged in the fight for a future free of nuclear arms.

In 1963 Moore was invited by the University of Chicago to make a sculpture commemorating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, which had been conducted at the university in 1942. Nuclear Energy was unveiled in 1967. This sculpture is a working model for Nuclear Energy. Moore intended it to suggest ‘a contained power and force’ appropriate to the subject.

The original location of Chicago Pile-1 is now the Henry Moore Nuclear Energy Sculpture Plaza on South Ellis Avenue on the University of Chicago campus. It is one of the most significant sites in the history of nuclear technology and where the majority of Start a Reaction’s artwork was staged.

This project by digital media artist Maysam Al-Ani, specially commissioned for Start a Reaction, utilized an interactive Instagram AR filter to explore topics of metamorphosis and emergence, inspired by the symbols surrounding the narrative of nonproliferation.

The complex relationship of art to memorialization is as alive—and fraught—today as at any time in history. In this photographic study, Hugo Juarez reconsiders both the form and meaning of Henry Moore’s work commemorating the 25th anniversary of the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear reaction and installed in 1967 at the Chicago site of Enrico Fermi’s experiment.

How do we trouble time? was an augmented reality installation experienced on August 7th, 2021 at the site of Chicago Pile-1, where a nuclear chain reaction under Enrico Fermi led to the atomic bomb and the violent proliferation of a nuclear age.

They did not hesitate was a site-specific performance on August 7th, 2021, created and performed by MacArthur Fellow Eiko Otake.

A recent New York Times article explores the artwork of Athena LaTocha (BFA 1992) and highlights her newest projects, a 55-foot long installation at the BRIC House titled In the Wake of…  and a companion piece showing in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) Greater New York exhibit. Working with natural elements such as lead, wood, and earth, LaTocha’s latest projects feature soil from Green-Wood Cemetery and imprints of Manhattan schist bedrock striated by glaciers, and she speaks about her deep dive into what shapes the terrain of New York City.

Talking to Action (Hablar y Actuar)