Over the past two years ecoartspace has focused on creating an archive of ephemera and video interviews of ecological artists' work. We have also been invited to contribute several essays for publication with increasing interest.
Our most recent essay, Public Art Ecology: From Restoration to Intervention, co-written by Amy Lipton and Patricia Watts, is for a new book entitled The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency edited by Twylene Moyer and Glenn Harper and published by International Sculpture Center Press (distributed by University of Washington Press). In this essay we reviewed long-term projects by artists Mierle Ukeles, Patricia Johanson, Mark Brest van Kempen and Jackie Brooker; and also highlighted recent temporal works by Eve Mosher, EcoArtTech, Amy Franceschni+Future Farmer and Tattoo Tan.
Patricia Watts has published an essay which is a start to a book she would like to write on ecological performance art. Entitled Performative Public Art Ecology you can read it online in the Women Environmental Artists Directory magazine, Issue #4 entitled No Time For Complacency edited by Susan Leibovitz Steinman, co-founder of WEAD. In this essay Watts examines important performance based ecoart with early examples beginning in 1970 and follow its evolution up to 2008. The works featured illustrate an evolution from the gestural, poetic, or conceptual, towards more practical actions that provide tools for sustainable living.
Another recently uploaded piece online is an interview with Watts for the #5 Winter Issue of Mammut magazine entitled Some Kind of Nature, published out of Los Angeles and edited by Matthias Merkel Hess and Roman Jaster. In the interview Hess and Watts discuss The Ebb and Flow of Ecology and Art. The magazine is available as a high or low res download and can be viewed as an online flip book (very sustainable), each for FREE. And, to start 2012 off on a good funding foot, ecoartspace was awarded a grant from the Arnow Family Fund in New York to do new interviews for our video archive and to edit footage from interviews we did in 2010-11. Interviews with Mierle Ukeles, Buster Simpson, Susan Liebovitz Steinman, Betsy Damon and Bonnie Sherk are now in the works. These are two hour interviews that will be available for research purposes and will also be edited into approximately 5 minute videos for exhibition purposes. Previous edited interviews with Patricia Johanson and Jackie Brookner can be viewed on the ecoartspace YouTube site HERE.
We are going to be using our blog as the main ecoartspace website for now until we build a new site this year, and are also looking to create a digital catalogue of our first 12 years (1999-2011), pending funding.
