Chris Jordan is an artist and cultural activist whose work explores contemporary mass culture, connecting the viewer viscerally to the enormity and power of humanity’s collective behaviors. His works have been exhibited and published worldwide. Running the Numbers looks at contemporary western culture through statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: two million plastic bottles (five minutes of bottle consumption in the US), 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of our can consumption) and so on. Finding meaning in these mass phenomena can sometimes be difficult because the phenomena themselves are often invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. Jordan condenses these phenomena in his work, causing uncomfortable feelings that, for Jordan “can become part of what connects us, serving as fuel for courageous individual and collective action as citizens of a new kind of global community.” In conjunction with a UM campus-wide exhibition of Jordan’s work.

With support from the UM Erb Institute for Global Sustainable Enterprise, Graham Sustainability Institute, College of Engineering, School of Natural Resources and Environment, Institute for Humanities, Life Sciences Institute, Arts Engine, Program in the Environment, and Chelsea River Gallery.