Artist Talk: Lee Boot’s Abstracts & Artifacts in Second Life

In winter of 2023, artist Lee Boot exhibited his Abstracts & Artifacts exhibition at The Peale building. It was so compelling that we decided to recreate the exhibition “permanently” in the virtual world! Join Lee for the official launch of Abstracts & Artifacts in The Peale’s virtual museum in Second Life. Drop in to Peale island to “visit” our museum and use your custom avatar to “walk” around the stunning virtual exhibition, just as it appeared in the building. For this event, Lee will join us and offer an insider’s interpretation of his various multimedia works, spanning nearly twenty years of artistic achievement. Interested participants are encouraged to create their Second Life account in advance.

How to join this event:

1. Install the Second Life viewer to participate in the tour in Second Life.
2. Set up your free account from the Virtual Ability website and get logged in! (Picking an avatar is the fun part!)
3. Learn some essential skills for moving around and interacting with the environment on the New Resident Orientation Course.
4. After opening Second Life, go directly to Peale island by pasting this link in the url bar: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/The%20Peale%20Museum/127/96/22

Twenty-five years ago, media artist Lee Boot stepped away from a promising artworld career to join scientists and others doing research to find ways to meet some of our most significant public challenges. For more than twenty-five years he has brought artist’s thinking into rooms where it is seldom seen. Literally and figuratively, he has colored outside the lines, spilled paint on his colleagues, flipped the script and reframed conventional thinking to reimagine how we meet the challenges of our time and better ground our efforts in the cultures, experiences, and lives of the people they are intended to serve.

Boot’s work stands for the idea that artists’ value is not only found in the work they produce, but in the way they think. What he calls Artistic Methods include many practices that artists engage in, and most often rely upon human intuition as a guide to create transformative experiences that expand our collective imagination and help evolve and enrich our cultures. Boot believes these are the capacities we need in this world now to meet our most pressing challenges because whether the issue is climate change, democracy, social justice, or something else, the greatest obstacles to resolving it are a crisis of imagination, and the absence of cultural sophistication within the technocracy.

Works that will be on view are selected largely from projects Boot has led as a researcher, and more recently, Director of, the Imaging Research Center at UMBC.