Rural Culture & Urban Arts: Terroir Wrap

After a three month run the Terroir exhibition in Marin County (Northern California), organized by ecoartspace west has closed. This indoor/outdoor exhibition included 28 Bay Area artists and several site-specific installations both indoor and outdoor. A few of the outdoor temporal works were already removed by the time of the closing reception. There are several posts on the Art at the Cheese Factory blog that capture the programs and artists included. Below are a few highlights and additional information.

Overall, it was a well attended exhibition with a high number of people who had not planned to see an art exhibition when they arrived to visit the Marin French Cheese Company. Of the 42 days the gallery was open to the public, attendance was approximately 70 persons per day. Outdoors there was high traffic flow, with up to 10,000 people over the three-month period. There was also a one-week residency, the very first at this site. And, a total of four events including an opening reception, curator’s tour & tasting, artist talk and closing reception. The owners of the cheese factory were closely involved and really appreciated the number of younger conceptual artists included. Our goal was to show work that visitors could relate to with regard to subject matter and that was a new aesthetic than they might expect to see in a local gallery (no landscape paintings or traditional sculpture). The consensus was that the works were engaging and that visitors were surprised to find conceptual art at their local gathering site.

Some highlights include:

Susan Leibovitz-Steinman
Land(e)scape (2009)
topsoil, rain and pond water all collected on the cheese factory grounds, and acrylic paint

Photo ©2009 Jeannie O'Connor





Philip Krohn with Paul Reffell
The Kindling (2009)
11’ X 8’ diameter
misc firewood (cypress, douglas fir, eucalyptus, monterey pine)










Mark Brest van Kempen
Lineaus Line, 2009
approximately 600 ft (500 tags)











Jessica Resmond
Jorge Bachman
Shipped: Global Terroir (2009)
58” X 130”
4 inkjet prints/sound component









Lewis de Soto
APPELLATION: Napa 4 (10.12.07)
K3 inks on paper
26" x 77.5” X 2"
Courtesy Brian Gross Fine Art, San Francisco


(at the top of the post):

Emily Payne Haven (2009) site-specific installation - clay, wax, linen thread

Report from Seattle Public Art Conference

ecoartspace participated in this year’s Americans for the Arts Public Art Network annual conference in Seattle (June 17-20, 2009), curating a Green Room workshop and also facilitating an afternoon roundtable session on selecting artists for “Green” public art projects. The theme of this year’s conference was Renewable Resources: Arts in Sustainable Communities.

Approximately 80 people attended the morning Green Room session rotating through 5 tables in 3 half hour sessions covering most aspects of greening the arts including Communications, Operations, Programs, Facilities, and Public Art. Ian Garrett, Executive Director of The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts (CSPA) and teacher of Sustainable Theater and Technology at CalArts (Valencia, CA), led the operations or office procedures sessions. Jennifer Orr, who is the green team leader for Bumbershoot: Seattle’s Music & Arts Festival, led the communications sessions. Michael Crowley, member of the Broadway Green Alliance in New York City led the facilities sessions along with one of the very first LEED attorney’s, Janet Kim Lin, with Bullivant Houser Bailey in Seattle. Michael wrote his award winning thesis in Arts Adminstration from Goucher College entitled Somewhere That’s Green: Environmental Stewardship in Performing Arts Organizations. Betsy Bostwick, Public art Manager for Clackamas County Arts Alliance and recent graduate of the Master’s program in Arts Administration from the University of Oregon (Eugene), led the public art sessions. Bostwick wrote her thesis on Going Green with Public Art and published an article for the Community Arts Network on Greening Public Art Policy in 2008. And, Patricia Watts with ecoartspace who led the programs sessions shared one of her most prolific exhibitions, Hybrid Fields, in terms of high community participation and engagement with a broad audience on issues of sustainability. This was a group show of artists addressing food issues both in the gallery and in the public sphere.

In the afternoon roundtable, a group of 20 artists and administrators discussed the artist selection process for LEED buildings and alternative transportation projects, led by artist and project manager Vaughn Bell with SDOT, Rebecca Ansert with the LA County Arts Commission, and again ecoartspace founder and west coast curator, Patricia Watts.

Overall the junior arts administrators (and some veteran administrators like Barbara Goldstein from San Jose who participated in the Green Room) were pleased that becoming sustainable was the thematic. And, being in Seattle we were surrounded by established public artists like Lorna Jordan, Buster Simpson, Dan Corson, and many others from the Pacific Northwest (Portland, OR) who have been creating sustainable artworks for years! However, the general feeling by most public artists was a real concern that if arts administrators are interested in greening everything from the selection process to what materials are being used to create works, that the focus is being taken off of the art. Many artists feel there are already so many limitations to doing public art that if they have to work in this theme or only use recycled materials, that they are not really creating ART. This is obviously debatable.

As of recent, funding has become stalled on many public art projects nationwide and everyone is sitting/waiting for stimulus funding to feed public art projects through transportation and water infrastructure projects. Public art programs that have already established an interest and built relationships with Environmental Services departments are poised to do some interesting projects in the coming years. A few exciting highly anticipated examples are the San Jose Water Pollution Control Plant, Brightwater Wastewater Treatment Facility, and the City of Ventura’s Harbor Wetland's Project. And, in Canada, A Public Art Plan for the Expressive Potential of Utility Infrastructure.

In summary, it appears the time for public art that addresses environmental issues has finally arrived and artists who have been doing ecological art or sustainable art will have a better leg to stand on when applying for these more integrated and functional projects. Let's keep our finger's crossed. And, give special thanks to artists like Buster Simpson who won this year's Public Art Award and who paved the way for all of us.

Dar Williams benefit concert 6/27/09

The first ecoartspace live concert and fundraiser took place this past Saturday. Singer/songwriter Dar Williams gave a solo acoustic guitar concert at the McKenna Theater at the SUNY New Paltz campus - it was a thrilling evening and the audience gave Dar a very welcome reception, they were all big fans. See Dar's blog post on the event HERE.

The concert coincided with a museum exhibition titled Ecotones and Transition Zones at the Dorsky Museum, housed in the same building with the McKenna Theater. Museum curator Brian Wallace describes the exhibition in this way, "New Paltz is an ecotone, a place where overlapping natural and social ecologies—the river and the mountains, the cosmopolitan and the rural—exist in a fragile tension. The artworks and art historical narratives associated with this region suggest the great opportunities (and responsibilities) that area artists, residents, and visitors have to visualize and act upon opportunities to contribute to a better world." The museum stayed open late that evening so that concert goers could stroll through the galleries before the show, it was a successful crossover event.

Included in the exhibition is a work by Simon Draper's Collective, Habitat for Artists (or HFA, which recently had an exhibition at the ecoartspace NYC project room). The Collective includes 15 artists -give or take- as the number changes with each project. There are 3 Habitats currently installed in New Paltz, one on campus, one on Main Street and the third (and most beautiful site IMHO) at Historic Hugenot Street. All of the Habitats have artist residency projects on-going for the duration of the exhibition.

Dar Williams was one of the original HFA members from the first exhibition last summer in Beacon, NY, where she turned her own Habitat into a writing space. She became interested in the bigger picture cause behind the HFA with her interest in recycling, sustainability, and artist's need for space, and decided to give this benefit concert to help ecoartspace and HFA's work continue.

The concert lasted for 2 hours with an opening act by Nick Panasevich who played some cool Randy Newman-esque piano tunes and also a guitar piece. Dar sang for an hour and a half, one great song after the next. Her set list included (The Ocean, The Beauty of the Rain, Spring Street, Midnight Radio, Book of Love, Buzzer, Iowa, The Babysitter's Here, You Are Everyone, Holly Tree), and my personal favorites, Mercy of the Fallen and Hudson, (see complete Hudson lyrics BELOW). Dar is one of those gifted musicians with a beautiful voice, moving lyrics, well crafted songs, great guitar playing AND a huge generous spirit. It was a privilege to work with her.

If we're lucky we feel our lives know when the next scene arrives so often we start in the middle and work our way out we go to some grey sky diner for eggs and toast New York Times or the New York Post then we take a ride through the valley of the shadow of death but even for us New Yorkers, there's a time in every day the river takes our breath away And the Hudson, it holds the life we thought we did it on our own The river roads collect the tolls for the passage of our souls through silence, over woods, through flowers and snow and past the George Washington Bridge, down from the trails of Breakneck Ridge, the river's ancient path is sacred and slow And as it swings through Harlem, it's every shade of blue into the city of the new brand new And the Hudson, it holds the life we thought we did it on our own I thought I had no sense of place or past time was too slow, but then too fast the river takes us home at last Where and when does the memory take hold, mountain range in the Autumn cold and I thought West Point was Camelot in the spring. If you're lucky you'll find something that reflects you, helps you feel your life protects you, cradles you and connects you to everything. This whole life I remember as they begged them to itself never turn me into someone else And the Hudson, it holds the life we thought we did it on our own And the Hudson, holds the life we thought we did it on our own.

Down to Earth at the Schuylkill Center

My current curatorial project Down to Earth: Artists Create Edible Landscapes is underway at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education (SCEE) in Philadelphia, a show with 6 artists or artist teams, each creating a work about sustainable agriculture. The show takes place at a section of SCEE's 3oo-plus acre site called Brolo Farm, complete with an abandoned farm house, barn, and farm fields that have not been actively used for decades. The overall site of the Schuylkill Center is the largest privately-owned open space area within the city limits of Philadelphia - featuring a variety of habitats including woodlands, meadows, five teaching ponds and wetlands. In addition, there are four miles of hiking trails and 7 sculpture/shelters from a current exhibition titled Gimme Shelter, commissioned by SCEE's environmental art program.

The artists in Down to Earth are Joan Bankemper (NYC) who is creating a new version of her Medicinal Herb Garden, titled Willa, a large-scale garden planted in the form of an archaic fertility figure; Knox Cummin (Phila., PA) is building a rain water collection sculpture which contains a "room" garden by Ann Rosenthal and Steffi Domike (Pittsburgh, PA) titled An American Roots Garden, planted with herbs and vegetable indigenous to Native Americans such as squash, corn and beans; Simon Draper and the Habitat For Artists Collective including Todd Sargood and E Odin Cathcart (Hudson Valley, NY) have begun work on Drawn from the Garden, an art studio, potting shed, and 7 raised bed gardens, 2 of which local artists and school groups have been invited to adopt. Stacy Levy (Spring Mills, PA) will create a work titled Kept Out, a deer exclosure built partially in woodlands and partially in fields as an experiment of sorts to see what will grow when the deer are absent. Last but not least is Susan Steinman's (S.F., CA) Urban Defense, a permaculture apple orchard housed within a built structure based on the pentagon form that the seeds make when you look inside a sliced apple.

I spent 5 days at the site last week, helping the artists get started, it was warm and sunny but low humidity, unusual for Philly but great working conditions. I'm pleased to see these projects start to take shape after several months of research on the part of the artists and discussion and planning with myself and the SCEE staff. The maintenance requirements of these living artworks after the planting (watering, weeding and eventual harvesting) are not to be underestimated. Ann and Steffi's American Roots, will benefit from the rainwater being collected above and a hose system running through the beds, but the watering for the other gardens has not been completely resolved other than running a long hose from the farm house to the fields.

Creating "gardens as art" requires lots of advance planning, time in the field with the appropriate tools, ammending the existing soil, tons of compost - and plain old hard labor. Isn't that always the case working outdoors? Real farmers deserve our utmost respect and this show aims to draw connections between art (culture) and working the land (cultivation). In conjunction with this exhibition The Schuylkill Center will soon be selling fresh produce from it's own "Market Garden". They have partnered with Urban Girls Produce (UGP) to begin growing a variety of organic fruits and vegetables, dedicating 1 ½ acres of their site for food production. UGB will plant, tend, and harvest all season to bring fresh produce to the Philadelphia market as well as having a weekly produce stand at Brolo Farm near the artists' sites.

The rewards of presenting Down to Earth will be great as the artist's gardens start growing (opening September 12th) and especially when we enjoy a harvest meal with the public on October 25th.

Sonja Hinrichsen in residence at the Marin French Cheese Company (Art at the Cheese Factory), Northern California June 1-6th

Bay Area artist Sonja Hinrichsen will be in residence at the the cheese factory for the first week of June to create a site-specific installation based on previous work where she sews words on leaves of plants and trees which reflect the place. She will also give a presentation of this site work and other residency projects on Saturday, June 6th at Noon in the gallery.

Hinrichsen has studied with Joan Jonas in Germany and completed her MFA in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute. She has performed over twenty artist residencies internationally including the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming; Art Farm in Nebraska; and Djerassi in Woodside, California. Outside the USA she has done several residencies in Poland, Estonia, Holland, Slovakia and Spain.

Most recently Hinrichsen created snow drawings for a residency at Anderson Ranch in Colorado. For more details about Art at the Cheese Factory and recent programs go to http://www.artatthecheesefactory.blogspot.com

Recent talks and presentations

On Saturday April 25th Chris Neidl of Solar One gave a presentation at ecoartspace NYC on solar energy. His talk focused on NYC and why the outer boroughs (in particular Queens and L.I.C.) pose a good prospect for solar panels (PV), providing many flat rooftops that are not shaded by tall buildings. His comprehensive lecture explained the current energy situation in NY in terms of the history of power plants, the energy grid structure, why NYC is susceptible to power failures and why solar energy could mitigate many of the existing problems. Energy use skyrockets in NYC during peak summer usage (prolonged hours of A/C use) which is not coincidentally the same time period that solar panels would kick in to provide the most benefit. Chris also discussed current energy legislation in NY State, how we as individuals can influence policy decisions (get active), cost benefit analysis/financial incentives for PV use and comparisons to other countries (Germany, Japan, Spain, Italy in that order) and U.S. states most using solar power (CA, AZ, NJ, NY). Not surprisingly in states where conventional power is cheapest - the incentive for using solar power is low, but NY State has the highest electricity costs in the country by a long shot.

On April 16th, along with co-curator and artist Joy Episalla, I gave a gallery tour of the "out of the blue" exhibition at Bergen College to a large group of art department students. The exhibition's focus was on weather, atmosphere and geological conditions, both literally and metaphorically. We discussed the idea of how artists create their own weather conditions and even "storms" in terms of their influence upon one another individually and as a group such as in this exhibition. While walking around the gallery during the tour, I pointed out some uncanny relationships between the art works that were mostly unintentional. I mentioned that without seeing their works at the same time in this show, I would not have realized before the possible influence of Robert Smithson on Felix Gonzales Torres for example, but Smithson's photograph of "Glue Pour" 1970 and Gonzales-Torres bright blue candy wrappers on the floor, Untitled, (Revenge) 1991, begged comparison in terms of ideas related to fluidity, entropy and erosion over time.

On April 6th, I was on a panel at the University of Albany Art Museum in conjunction with Jason Middlebrook's exhibition and installation , Live with Less which explores the relationship between nature and human consumption.

Middlebrook who make paintings, drawings, sculpture, and outdoor public works often uses recyclable materials to draw attention to larger social issues. Live with Less is an expression of Middlebrook’s artistic and environmental goal to see beyond the discarded nature of these materials and to re-imagine them as something beautiful and useful. He literally brings wastefulness and the over consumption of contemporary living to new heights in a massive 35-foot tower made from several tons of recycled cardboard. The cardboard, collected on campus over a two-month period, was stacked and layered from floor to ceiling creating visual stratifications analogous to the layers of a landfill.

The panel discussion titled, Responsive Art: Making Work in the Environment was moderated by Rebecca Wolff, editor at Fence Books and also included Jason Middlebrook and critic/poet Francis Richard who writes for Cabinet and Artforum. Richard also organized an exhibition and accompanying monograph titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates.” I spoke about the fact that as a former sculpture park director and curator I’ve worked with many artists on site specific works outdoors, but one thing that is often not addressed by artists and art institutions is maintenance and long term care. As mundane as this might sound it’s really a very important component of making site specific work that isn't taken into consideration. What happens to the work 2 weeks or 6 months or 6 years later? What are the effects on the art of weather over time and has that been considered?

Since Francis Richard is a scholar on the work of Gordon Matta Clark we spoke quite a bit about his work and how today it would be difficult if not impossible to do his urban based interventions in abandoned buildings in U.S cities. We also spoke at great length about Robert Smithson. I stated that generally speaking Land and Earthworks artists in the 1970’s were not what we today call “site-sensitive” - meaning they worked in remote and vast stretches of open space with land-moving equipment, bulldozers, etc... with little or no regard to the natural environment. Contemporary artists working outdoors today are usually more respectful of the natural world and take into account the attention and sensitivity that is needed when making an artwork on the land.

Lastly – I mentioned that not all artists are well suited to working outdoors, site-specifically (and don’t have to be) - but working with Jason Middlebrook last summer at Art Omi was one of my better experiences. Unlike many artists who came for the day, having created their works off site in the studio and then placed them in the woods - Jason spent time looking, and searched out the right site which nature graciously provided him with. He found a fallen tree suspended in the pond. Jason worked on site for 2 weeks, planed the tree in half, created a painted bench complete with binoculars for viewing aquatic life and a stairway out of the wood for easy access to reach the pond.

On Weds April 29th, I attended a lecture by Neal R. Peirce hosted by The Trust for Public Land. Peirce spoke eloquently about his new book, Century of the City, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. By 2050, the United Nations projects, almost three-quarters of the world's population will call urban areas home. To help manage and plan for this accelerating urbanization, the Rockefeller Foundation convened an exceptional group of urbanists--leading policy makers and government officials, finance experts, and urban researchers for a Global Urban Summit at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center. This book shares their diverse perspectives, creative approaches, and urgent agenda for harnessing the vast opportunities of urbanization for a better world.

Rising Tide Conference REPORT

I was only able to attend one day of the three day conference last weekend in the Bay Area. Entitled Rising Tide, organized by Kim Anno, and jointly hosted by California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and Stanford University, there was a diverse mix of planning, art history, contemporary art, and design/technology.

A few highlights from the early morning session entitled Remaking/Reconceiving: I learned about Form Based Zoning Codes where the public participates in a greater way to decide what goes where in communities/cities. And, I was reminded by Amy Franceschini of the great work by former Super Mayor of Bogata, Enrique Penalosa, who encouraged performance based transformations in sustainability (like using mimes to direct traffic). Here is a short video on his vision for NYC presented last summer:

In the next session, Bonnie Sherk (creator of The Farm), moderated a panel called Material Culture Sustainability. Panel description: What are new materials that artists/designer/architects are experimenting with? What materials have impacts on which industries? Where are the holes in research? What is sustainable business? How is culture sustainable? Stephanie Syjuco presented her Counterfeit Crochet handbags; Lynda Grose presented the work of young designers doing Slow Fashion in her program at Sustainable Fashion Design program at CAA. And, Banny Bannerjee, Director of the Stanford Design program, talked about how human's are always trying to defy nature, stretch its limits, mimic nature, refer to nature, flirt with nature, evoke nature. He had a great saying: Doing Things Right, Doing the Right Things.

After lunch we got a dose of "Green Capitalism" with Amy Berk presenting her work TWCDC (Together We Can Defeat Capitalism). She showed several projects where they used signage to express anti-capitalist views like a road sign that said "Stock Market Crash Ahead" from 2000; "Capitalism Stops at Nothing" at a BART Station; and STOP BUS(H) in the bus lane in Oakland. She also presented her work bed-in-for-peace project, which she conceived in 2001 in Australia (based on Yoko Ono and John Lennon's performance). Basically her position was that true revolution is guided by true feelings of LOVE . . . . . and she proves this by driving around San Francisco in a "FRYBRID" car that runs on moonshine and represents the ethos of Marx (Capitalist production only develops the social process of production by simultaneously underminding the original process of all wealth, the soil and the worker). Next on this panel was Simon Sadler who made some great links with Steward Brand/Whole Earth Catalogue, Buckminster Fuller (design is a scientific study not an aesthetic one), and "soft tech" (the limits to growth, and small is beautiful).

In the following session entitled Futures, Amy Balkin gave a beautiful presentation on her Air Park project. She outlined how she researched carbon credits and set up her work, presenting basically signage about her conceptual dealings around who owns the air. A description of the project: Public Smog is a public park in the atmosphere that fluctuates in location and scale. Built through financial, legal, or political activities, Public Smog is subject to prevailing winds and the long-range transport of aerosols and gases. When built through the economic mechanism of emissions trading, the park opens above the region where offsets are purchased and withheld from use. Public Smog first opened briefly to the public during 2004 above California's South Coast Air Quality Management District, and was open over the European Union through 2008. Balkin is now working on opening the park again in West Africa.

In the final panel of the day Shelia Kennedy showed her portable light project, which is going to receive a big award in May (she couldn't tell us which), maybe the Fuller Challenge? and David Buuck shared about his project on Treasure Island in San Francisco, a tour called "Barge" looking at the paranoid landscapes of post industrial real estate.

There was a great gathering of people and it was a pleasure to finally meet Ian Garrett and see Miranda Wright again, both from Los Angeles with the Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts who drove up for the conference.

For those of you who attended Friday and Sunday's presentations, please comment and fill us in.

SEE COMMENTS BELOW:

Beach Plastic said...

After Sheila Kennedy’s inspiring keynote, conference attendees proceeded to the Cummings Art Building for an opening reception for “Disposable Truths”, an art exhibition by Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang, a collaborative team, who combine their love of nature with their interest in science to produce an on-going series of art works about the oceans and the environment. Since 1999 they have been collecting beach plastic from Kehoe Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore then shaping it into artworks and installations. From that one beach they have collected almost 2 tons of plastic, which has washed ashore from as far away as Asia and as close to home as the San Francisco Bay.

For the Rising Tide Conference, to demonstrate the ubiquity of plastic waste in our oceans, they configured their collection of plastic detritus into a series of prints that represent the aesthetic strategy of counting and categories.

There was also a “living room” arrangement with a chair, table, and lamp covered with beach plastic. On the floor was a square of white beach plastic with a hula-hoop rug with multi-colored plastic.

National Geographic’s new blog featured their Rising Tide exhibition as their lead Earth Day story. http://blogs.ngm.com/blog_central/2009/04/these-sculptures-are-all-washed-up.html#more

April 26, 2009 7:51 PM

Email from Aline Mare: Sunday April 19th, 2009

Sunday's presentations were quite inspiring. Alberto Moreno from the
Seri Tribe of Mexico directs a sustainable indigenous aquaculture
project in partnership with the Comcaac Nation and was an incredibly
articulate advocate for his tribe's inspired attempt to bridge their
relation to the sea that surrounds their environment, working with
mussels, oysters and active attempts to protect the endangered turtles
sea turtles of Mexico.

Robert Dawson, a well known local, whose wonderful photographs take a
hard look at the West's relationship to water was deep and poignant in
his presentation which included world wide visions of humankind's
changing connections to an ecology, shot while traveling through Viet
Nam and India.

Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang presented together and they
described their collaborative process as an alchemical one of making
dross into gold. Making art of trash they have found and categorized
over ten years from Kehoe Beach in Pt Reyes has become a shared
passion, which they shared with a witty humor mixed with political
environmental wisdom

Kim Anno's closing speech rounded up the many disparate elements and
voices of the past several days to a shared voice of passion and
urgency.

All in all it was a deep and meaningful morning- albeit in a dark room
on an unbelievable beautiful day!

Brief update

This is the first time since back in November/December that we have not posted anything for a couple weeks. I think both Amy and I are taking a spring time break . . . .

Wanted to submit a quick post to let our blog followers know that we have updated our projects page on the ecoartspace website. We realize that the more active we are with the blog, that our website becomes less relevant. So, it is now up to speed. This is an ongoing issue and why we really enjoy having the blog (as we rely on someone else to update the website).

O'yes NEWSFLASH: our ecoartspace Facebook group reached 1,000 today!!! And, we have added a fan page as well and are posting links daily, like a Twitter feed. Plus, we are also on Twitter. So, if you want quick byte size morsels of information/links, sign up to follow ecoartspace through our fan page on Facebook or follow us on Twitter!

Amy will be posting soon on a recent panel she participated on in upstate New York with Jason Middlebrook and I plan to write up a summary of the Rising Tides conference I attend last week here in the Bay Area next.

See our new projects page on the ecoartspace website at http://www.ecoartspace.org/projectsinline.html

There really is an overwhelming amount of activity right now in the world of art and ecology. It has been an exciting Earth Day week.

Solar One Gives Presentation at ecoartspace NYC

On Saturday, April 25th at 6:30 join ecoartspace in NYC to hear the "I Heart PV" presentation by Christopher Neidl from Solar One. Christopher will give an overview of why solar photovolatics (PV) are a good fit for NYC and the types of policies that the state and city can pursue in order to grow solar's contribution to our energy mix over time.

Launched by Solar One in 2008, "I Heart PV" is a people powered campaign that mobilizes citizen support for pro-solar policies and educates New Yorkers about the potential and benefits of solar power here in the five boroughs.

The Habitat for Artists project will continue this summer at Solar One's City Sol Festival at Stuyvesant Cove Park at 23rd Street and the East River, stay tuned for more info.

Saturday April 25th at 6:30 pm at ecoartspace, 53 Mercer Street, 3rd Fl. NYC
SEATING IS LIMITED - PLEASE RSVP!
amy@ecoartspace.org

Announcements, news, etc....

We have had a busy past few weeks (and months). Ecologic, Terroir, Habitat for Artists and Out of the Blue, have all opened since January. This week I've had a little bit of down time while working on ecoartspace NYC benefit ideas (stay tuned for more info about this) and wanted to plug some other interesting people, current events, art and ecology related activities.

Artist and eco educator Christopher Kennedy has started a new organization, Artiscycle. This is a project to further an understanding of the role of art in building community, creative problem solving and situated learning. The idea according to Kennedy, "is to connect artists and citizens at the forefront of collaborative and interdisciplinary art practice to collaborative education and project development tools and motivate a new way of thinking about art as a tool for creative problem solving and learning." The Artiscycle project will launch an online database of effective aesthetic and community-based practices meant to identify the strategies and frameworks that engage communities and allow for situated learning opportunities to form. More than this, Artiscycle is a blueprint for a physical learning and project-incubation space that will provide a variety of services for artists, educators and citizens.

ecoartspace advisor Pamela Tucker has joined the team at Brighter Planet. The mission of Brighter Planet is to “help individuals take charge in the fight against global warming and build a clean-energy future" through education, conservation and carbon offsetting programs. Pamela is working on Brighter Schools, a program uniquely designed to help schools and their communities take action against global warming through the purchase of carbon offsets.

Once a school enrolls, all school members -- their friends and family -- join the school "team" and earn fundraising dollars for the school through their purchases of carbon offsets or by signing up for a Brighter Planet VISA card. In short, people buy carbon offsets to their carbon emissions as investments in alternative energy. Brighter Planet has been offering offset "packages," such as offsets for air travel, events, driving, etc. For Brighter Schools, they are going to design unique packages that will appeal and resonate with kids -- such as an offset for the bus travel on field trips, or an offset for driving to away sports games. The school will earn 20% of the total dollar amount of offsets purchased by members of its team. To find out more about Brighter Schools program contact: Pamela@brighterplanet.com

Dorsky Museum Curator, Brian Wallace is planning an exhibition titled Eco-Tones and Transition Zones opening June 13th and has put out a call to mid-Hudson Valley artists, deadline April 17th. The exhibition will feature artwork, information, presentations, activities, and other projects that will connect global issues such as sustainability, ecological awareness, and bioethics to our immediate surroundings.

CALL FOR COLLABORATORS
The Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz hosts an annual exhibition of work by emerging and mid-career artists from the region. This year, some artists will seek local partners involved in sustainable initiatives, ecologically engaged businesses, and green projects that connect communities. If you would like to add your name/contact/projects to a list the museum will share with exhibiting artists, please send this information via mail to sdma@newpaltz.edu by April 17, 2009.

My neighbor and friend Suzie Gilbert has written a memoir titled Flyaway, How a Wild Bird Rehabber Sought Adventure and Found her Wings. Flyaway chronicles the years of Suzie's chaotic household turned into a bird-hospital, recounting the confusion that ensued as her husband and two young children struggled to live in a house where parrots shrieked Motown songs, nestling robins required food every twenty minutes, and recuperating herons took over the spare bathroom. Gradually, however, the birds came to represent the value of compassion and the importance of pursuing even the most unlikely of dreams. Coincidentally (or maybe not), the very same MNN network that interviewed me last month about ecoartspace met with Suzie and interviewed her about the new book. Also, see some images posted by Suzie on Wild About Pets. I sometimes need to remind myself that I moved up to the Hudson Valley for a reason - getting to know amazing people like Suzie Gilbert is one of them.

Washington state based eco artist, writer and educator Beverly Naidus will come to Earth Dance Seed Festival in MA this June to offer a week long course, Eco Art for Everyday Life. Participants will explore different ways of incorporating eco-art practices into their everyday life and their communities. They will discuss some of the ecological issues facing us both on the local and global level, look at the work of contemporary eco-artists, and develop some collaborative site-specific projects. Also, check out Beverly's new book, Arts for Change: Teaching Outside the Frame published by New Village Press.

Author and the annual Bioneers Conference co- organizer and producer, J.P. Harpignies has a new book out: Delusions of Normality: Sanity, Drugs, Sex, Money and Beliefs in America. "What do we mean when we say someone or something is normal?" In his new book, Delusions of Normality, J.P. marshals considerable evidence to persuasively argue that we Americans are collectively far less mentally stable, far more corruptible or financially irrational, in our beliefs than we generally admit, and that a great many of the unspoken assumptions that underlie our media's discourse are seriously at odds with the reality of people's lives and ideas. Read a review of the book by Erik Davis here. J.P. will be giving a talk about the book with Q+A and discussion on: Friday, April 24th, 7:30pm at the New York Open Center, 83 Spring Street, (212 219-2527, ext Admittance: $18 for Open Center members; $20 general. This evening will offer a bracing but refreshing and entertaining look at some dark corners of American life, providing a corrective lens to our rose-colored myopia about how we really behave. Previous books by J.P. include, Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World; Political Ecosystems: Modernity, Complexity, Fluidity and the Eco-Left; Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves (The Bioneers Series) and Double Helix Hubris: Against Designer Genes.

Artist Eve Mosher's Seeding the City project is set to launch late in summer '09 after nearly two years of planning. Eve invites everyone to join her while she's out planting green roofs around New York City. Seeding the City is a neighbor-to-neighbor referral program that gets small green roof modules installed in neighborhoods around the city. ecoartspace included Eve Mosher in the E.P.A exhibition at Exit Art in 2008 with her High Water Line project and she was the featured artist on the Human Nature series panel during the exhibition. We look forward to our continued working relationship with Eve.

Miami based artist Xavier Cortada will participate in an upcoming exhibition, AntARcTica, Collected Works from the Bottom of the World at the Maryland Science Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation's Antarctica's Artists and Writers Program. Cortada has also embarked upon making an endangered animal drawing every day in 2009, from each of Earth's 360°. He is using Facebook and uploading each daily drawing to his profile image. Via this social networking site, he aims to show the ultimate interconnection: What endangers one species affects all, including our own.

More to come soon on the upcoming ecoartspace NYC benefit art sale, but it looks as though all submissions from artists will be digital and in that way will contribute to an online database of images for an ecoartspace archive. Great idea thanks to benefit committee advisor and pal Joy Garnett!