The Failure of Names, By James Prosek, Orion March/April 08

To see more of James Proseck’s images, click here.

WHEN I WAS FOUR OR FIVE years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table. As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures: Cock of the Rock, Plate-Billed Toucan, Motmot. Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.

When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself—by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition. At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types I could find in books and magazines.

In my mind, an animal was distinct from others if it had been given a scientific name. My view was that the classification of creatures was figured out by authority figures and that I should defer to that authority. In the process of painting different types of trout, though, I learned that even the authorities could not agree on the names they gave to describe the enormous diversity of fishes in the Salmonidae family. Some trout had been named a separate species and subsequently renamed a subspecies, placed in a different genus, or just pushed into a category with allied species. The history of the naming became as interesting to me as the physical diversity of the fishes themselves, which I loved to paint.

I wanted to believe that there were many more distinct creatures rather than fewer, because then I had more trout to paint and to put into what I hoped would eventually become a book of the trout of North America. I used any and all sources I could find in assembling what eventually did become my first book, Trout: An Illustrated History—a book of seventy watercolors. I had not yet explored the idea that naturalists named things because they wanted to create a legacy for themselves, or wished to be published more, or because of an innate human compulsion. I accepted the names without question—at least where there was consensus. Where there wasn’t, I either made an educated decision or included the argument over a species’ status in the text that would accompany each fish.

Since I had seen only a fraction of the trout I painted in my book, there was some amount of mythologizing and imagination involved. I had traveled across country with a friend for a summer when we were just old enough to drive, and we hiked and searched out native trout in many western states. The rest I painted from photos other people had taken and from descriptions in old books. A favorite source was David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann’s 1902 book, American Food and Game Fishes. Jordan, the first president of Stanford University, named a fair number of the native trout west of the Continental Divide, including some trout he described only from dead specimens. The “longfin char” of the Canadian Arctic was based on a tenuous description from a remote lake in Greenland. But Jordan was an authority, so I happily added his fish to my list, and painted it from his descriptions.

As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place. Through genetic analysis, which was fairly new in the early ’90s, it was discovered that rainbow trout (from the Pacific coast) and brown trout (introduced from Europe) were not as closely related as once thought. The genes showed that the rainbow trout was more closely related to Pacific salmon, fishes that die when they spawn, of the genus Oncorhynchus. The brown trout was more closely related to the Atlantic salmon, and remained in the genus Salmo. The native trout of my home state, Connecticut, the brook trout, was actually a whole separate genus, Salvelinus, more closely related to the Arctic char than to the rainbow or brown trout. Technically, it was no longer correct even to call the book I was working on Trout. I found myself wanting to ignore the namers because they were getting in the way of my own personal vision.

I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy—those like Carl Linnaeus—once believed. That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature). These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public. None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected.

In the process of painting and writing my second trout book, Trout of the World, I gathered most of the information firsthand during extensive travels through Europe and Asia. As I saw more of the world and its trout in person, a few things became clearer to me. A species like the brown trout, its native range stretching from Iceland to the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, from the Kola Peninsula in Russia to Morocco, was highly variable. Pretty much every stream I pulled brown trout from, they looked different—not only every population, but every individual. There was no way that names could account for all this diversity. Were names then inadequate in the face of our changing relationship with, and view of, nature?

Ironically, despite the beauty and diversity I had witnessed, the differences between the fish I saw were not as great as I’d wished they’d been—not as great as the differences between the trout in my first book, when I accentuated characteristics that I had deemed important, based on bad photos and vague descriptions and colorful names. I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity (golden trout, Oncorhynchus aguabonita; blueback trout, Salvelinus oquassa), but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.

Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work. For a long time I thought that my profession would be architecture, and that’s what I initially studied in college. The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. After drawing curvilinear lines, first emanating from the points on the body of a seahorse, I realized the lines were helpful as visual aids to point out particular parts of a creature that I wanted to bring attention to. The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath. In this way, the lines became a very personal visual taxonomy, replacing the lingual one.

The lines in these works are also there to acknowledge that nothing is absolute, that even the laws of physics, though tested again and again, may one day buckle in the face of some unknown force. How can we say for sure otherwise? We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to that authority prevent us from looking at things with a fresh perspective? Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it. It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.

Celestial Spheres, Lita Albuquerque's ceremonial art, By William L. Fox, Orion March/April 08

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, the majority of the world’s population lives in urban areas, which means most of us also live under streetlights, divorced from the night sky. Disconnect yourself from the stars and you lose sense of living on a planet, a small body in space. Lose track of your limitations and you no longer know where you live, which makes it increasingly unlikely you will know how precarious the human condition can become on Earth. Lita Albuquerque is seeking to counter this loss by reconnecting us to the sky the old-fashioned way—through ceremonial art.

The Antarctic is the logical place for her to have started.

Tom Griffiths, an Australian historian who visited the Antarctic in 2002–2003, put it this way in his book Slicing the Silence: “In Antarctica you are intensely aware of the celestial Earth.” The continent is not simply “the end of the Earth,” he says, but “a place from which to intellectually encompass the planet and a privileged human window on the universe.” Albuquerque’s large-scale installation Stellar Axis: Antarctica is the first artwork to fully take advantage of that privilege. It is part one of a two-part planetwide project meant to do a simple thing that bears complex results: remind us that the stars continue to shine during daylight and connect heaven to earth, or spirit to matter.

The Antarctic’s Ross Ice Shelf is the largest single piece of ice in the world, a flat expanse the size of Spain and up to a thousand feet thick. Albuquerque found herself standing there amid ninety-nine ultramarine spheres at midnight during the austral solstice of 2006. That would be winter in the north, but summer in the Antarctic. And that would be daylight here, not nighttime. She and her four teammates were working fifteen miles out from McMurdo, the largest base on the continent, where they installed the spheres, representing the ninety-nine stars of greatest magnitude in the Southern Hemisphere.

Albuquerque credits her fascination with the celestial vault to growing up in Carthage. She was boarded there in a Catholic convent and in the evenings would watch the stars rise and set over the twin horizons of the north African desert and the dark waters of the Mediterranean. She graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968 with a degree in art history and a fascination with ancient rock art and ceremonial sites. By 1978 she was strewing rocks and dry pigments across the floor of the Mojave Desert, early versions of her constellation pieces. In 1980 she turned the Washington Monument into the gnomon of a giant sundial in the nation’s capital, and in 1996 she created a star field around the pyramids of Egypt, alluding to their astronomical orientation. The Stellar Axis operation is her most ambitious project to date.

Two specific ideas compelled Albuquerque to create Stellar Axis. First, by mirroring constellations on the ground, her project would remind us that the stars are always with us, no matter how obscured by the position of the Earth. She would reverse the figure-to-ground relationship of stars to sky at solstice. The white ice would become the black sky, the dark blue spheres the light of shining stars.

Her other idea was based on what we call diurnal motion: as the Earth rotates west to east, the stars seem to move in the opposite direction. If you are standing in the Northern Hemisphere, the stars appear to rotate counterclockwise around the Pole Star. If you are standing in the Southern Hemisphere, they appear to rotate in a clockwise direction. If you imagine light from the two apparent motions meeting in the center of the Earth, the geometrical figure created would be a double helix, a spiral with a constant diameter like a strand of DNA. Albuquerque visualized this helix as a metaphor for information passed down over time, whether through the light of stars or through our genes.

She enlisted the help of Simon Balm, an astrophysicist who had worked previously at the South Pole. Simon had the math skills and field experience to transfer the positions of the stars into an accurate configuration on the ice. The artist and astrophysicist were joined by photographer Jean de Pomereu, filmmaker Sophie Pegrum, and cinematographer Lionel Cousin, all of whom would document the event but also help install the spheres representing the stars.

Their preparations took more than two years. In order to pull off such a large project in the Antarctic, it was necessary to obtain the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF), which administers America’s science operations on the ice as well as projects by visiting artists and writers. Albuquerque’s challenge was to piggyback her team and materials onto the existing stream of supplies for the scientists. It’s a cost-effective strategy for the government, relatively friendly to the environment, but a nightmare to implement.

For example, Albuquerque’s spheres had to be manufactured so that they could be packed in halves, both so they would fit in the available cargo and so they could be reassembled solely by her team under the challenging conditions on the ice shelf. Then snow anchors had to be devised so that the spheres would not blow away and violate Antarctic Treaty provisions regarding waste on the continent. In fact, the NSF required her to subject the spheres to 110-mile-per-hour winds in a test tunnel.

On December 7, Albuquerque and her team, along with a gaggle of scientists, arrived at McMurdo aboard a cargo jet. After a week sorting their gear—and completing the survival courses required before being let loose on the ice—they headed out with the first of their six crates of stars. The NSF had assigned them a four-hundred-foot-diameter plot out near the ice runways, a two-hour drive on snow machines over the ice shelf. The site offered a pristine view of Ross Island and the perpetually steaming Mount Erebus, the world’s southernmost active volcano. It was a sublime place to work during the evenings with the sun only a few degrees above the horizon.

After Albuquerque selected what she thought would make the most aesthetic center for her work, Balm bored out a hole for the first pole with a gasoline-powered drill, then set out the forty-eight-inch sphere representing Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, were it visible. The deep blue sphere seemed to barely touch the ice, to almost float above the surface as if unsure whether it belonged to the sky or the ground.

It was December 14, and the solstice was on the twenty-second. All ninety-eight other “stars,” of descending magnitudes and represented by graduated spheres in seven steps down to ten inches, were aligned from Balm’s hole according to his GPS, the array representing the entire dome of the “night” sky from horizon to horizon. It took the team all nine days to install Stellar Axis, a job that in a more benign environment could have been done in two; but they made it just in time for fifty-one people from McMurdo to troop out on midsummer and gather at the center of the piece.

Albuquerque and Balm had stomped out an Archimedean spiral that wound into the array—the same kind of constant radius spiral found in DNA. Everyone walked along the path for ten minutes until meeting at the endpoint, then walked back out while being filmed from a helicopter, their heavy red parkas in contrast with the dusky blue spheres. At the conclusion, they spontaneously fell backward and made snow angels.

“I can’t help but think that Paleolithic people mirrored stars on the ground,” Albuquerque mused during an interview in Santa Monica one afternoon upon returning. “There’s archeological evidence that they did so in many sites around the world.” It would have been part of their quest for the numinous, the tradition in which she places her work. But her more immediate concern is how she will create the second half of the Stellar Axis project. When Balm drew an imaginary line from their site on the Ross Ice Shelf through the center of the planet, he ended up with a spot just off the coast of Greenland. They can get there, or close enough, on a charter ship, but how to deal with spheres in the water is something she and Balm haven’t yet solved. When they do, and when the other half of this artwork is realized, Albuquerque will have completed one of the largest gestures made by an artist on behalf of the marriage between the constellations and Earth.

Interview with Sara Mall Johani, Soul Salmon, By greenmuseum.org

I first heard of Soul Salmon from an event listing sent to greenmuseum.org. It sounded interesting so I visited their site. What follows is the result of an email interview with Sara Mall Johani, founder and director of Soul Salmon a nonprofit organization based in Washington state.

Q: What is Soul Salmon and what is your involvement?

Soul Salmon, the first "art action" of Tahmanawis (the non-profit mother), in a 2 1/2 year effort, "invites Northwest artists, businesses, institutions and tribes to reimagine and interpret wild salmon in order to educate, inspire local salmon culture and generate charity to save native salmon". I was inspired by the directness of the Chicago art cows and invited my friends and co-conspirators to help deepen the urban public's connection to wild salmon. It's difficult to get our wild Pacific salmon to leap the tall buildings - they need a lot of help - and they are dying, weaker by the day. Urban people live in watersheds too, which is a hidden fact in multi-layered city life, hidden due to daily busy busy-ness of all kinds. Bringing the salmon home to the people through art helps connect two elements of the Pacific Northwest that are both essential and must co-exist for either to be healthy - us and them. Wild salmon's health is equivalent to our own health because we share the environment and its condition reflects our condition.

Q: Why did you choose Salmon sculptures to get your message across?

Some people said "Cows are cuddly" and "art pigs are pretty" - but salmon are just ... well, FISH! I wanted to change that perception, as it had changed in me in 1980 when I directly perceived the power and energy beneath the sea that salmon represent - and they bring that energy to the land in their sacrificed bodies! They feed 150 creatures in the watersheds. The Northwest forests relied on salmon to build them; they are made largely of marine carbon. If people only knew how much we owe the salmon in this unique region, they would stand in awe. Just think - no forests! In a geologically young land what else could feed the uplands that were leached by heavy rainfall and washed with cold, torrential rivers? How to achieve this awe? The word ART comes from the Latin artus, meaning "joint". ART CONNECTS. When you meet a salmon in the street, sporting poetry or wildly painted blossoms - it changes your mind, makes you take notice, captures your imagination in a new, surprising way.

Ray Troll, the renowned "Fin Artist", has agreed to recreate an extinct creature, Oncorhynchus rastrosus - or Sabertooth Salmon - using one of one of our Soul Salmon "blanks" offered for sale at the auction on April 13th. At 8-feet in length, they are almost exactly the size of the Pliocene sabertooth (they also grew much bigger), only they had huge fangs - like the sabertooth tiger. This lifelike model might capture the imagination of the Northwest public and to amaze them that such a creature actually existed here, cousin to the modern sockeye. If anything has the power to "blow one away" - it's art. Imagination makes life worth living.

Q: Once you connect people to salmon and their important role in ecosystems what do you hope will happen? Do you want them to eat less salmon, donate money and time to Salmon related nonprofits, protest clearcutting...?

Simple co-existence with the keystone, salmon, is a dream for me and extends to honoring all the creatures it feeds. When I witness restoration groups come alive in the streams, working together to rekindle the life of the streams and rivers - I see HEALTH! When I participate in community salmon celebrations - I see JOY! When I visit salmon classrooms and see the students' enthusiasm - I see a righteous FUTURE. That makes my hope rise against some pretty dour "reality". Salmon is the essence of health - the leaper, the most generous creature - according to Northwest Native myth. My hope is simple - follow the salmon's wisdom to ourselves, our home. Live well! Become one of the Salmon People and know it!

Q: How does Soul Salmon fit into the urban, state, national planning issues that affect our watersheds? Do wild salmon ultimately need a colorful icon to compete for public attention?

Competition for our attention is a full time business. Media, entertainment, work, worries, pleasures - all vie for our limited minds and emotions. What chance has salmon against that? This is just one attempt, one little leap against all the odds. Who knows what can happen? Keep swimming and - jump! Jump again!

Q: What has been your biggest surprise with this project?

My biggest surprise was the utter beauty of the 35 salmon when they were first brought together in the Bellevue Art Museum last November for our celebration First Splash event. The eclectic approaches to the art of the salmon surmounted each individual salmon and they became a poignant marriage of river, art and salmon winding through the museum, mingling with the buzz of the crowd. Of course we know they would be stunning - but to see it was still surprising.

Q: As I understand it, you involve artists to design & decorate the sculptures and create media events and engage the art establishment to promote them. What are your upcoming plans in Seattle?

Seattle communities and environs will enjoy the Celestial Salmon Circus trailer "driveabout" during all of the first week of April. We will drive a flatbed trailer mounted with ten transformed salmon sculptures that are included in the auction in order to introduce them to the public as personally as possible. We will have media involvement - perhaps they will ride with us in the car while we stop in various places and communities to speak to locals. Starting April 6th, the auction salmon are displayed at The Odyssey Maritime Discovery Center at a preview party and the display continues until the auction on April 13th. Sealed bids are accepted after April 1st so it's possible to participate without actually attending the auction. The auction itself will be fun and funny. Besides offering a gourmet meal - there are rumors of Ella Fishgerald and Salmon Davis Junior may be entertaining....

Q: The art in greenmuseum.org reflects a change in the role of art and artists in society: environmental art. Does Soul Salmon reflect a similar shift in the role of non-profits and arts organizations?

I remember a heated discussion on KUOW radio in Seattle about the dire question referring in this instance to the Public Pig Art displayed in Seattle at the time. The question was - "But is it art?" My opinion was that is was not - it was merely decoration, not to say this is a bad thing. I say this because in order to reflect a "shift in the role of artists and art in society", something must be at stake; it should be consequential. Of course the environment as an essential element in art at this historical juncture is almost unavoidable - though this is not a universally held notion. But involving the "environment" doesn't necessarily make it "art" either. I do think Soul Salmon has importance as an art form because it seeks - and sometimes succeeds - to change attitudes in fundamental ways. It refers to real issues and offers art the opportunity to be itself - a connecting, articulating principle. Art at its deepest connects us to the mysterious, the other world. I couldn't say if this represents a shift in the role of non-profits and arts organizations. However, if we juxtapose surprising elements and it wakes up a few persons to possibilities that didn't exist before, we have accomplished something.

Q: Have you thought about Soul Humpbacks or Soul Condors or a Soul Great Barrier Reef? What's next?

Long lasting organizational art "actions" consisting of many complex elements is not part of the future, I dare say, for any of the participants of this amazing project. I dare to predict that! Some of us may like to dream up "overnight" art actions - guerilla art - dramatic and galvanizing at its best. Some of us will surely welcome the much-deserved rest from 200% participation for the good of the community at large. We will savor the renewed privacy of our individual lives - and we will most certainly reflect on a job well done. I hope we will remember fondly the intensity, the steep learning curves and the GENEROSITY of this 2 1/2 year period - after time has smoothed the wrinkled surface of these waters, when it is settled to a clear, deep pool. Profound thanks...

Art, Ecology, and Community

Creative and Green: Art, Ecology, and Community
by Sarah E. Graddy

Chapter 2: Art in Land and Water Remediation

Remediation is the treatment or cleaning of a contaminated site to mitigate or reverse the damages on the environment and humans, and is generally considered the domain of scientists. Others look at polluted places as physical chances for a paradigm shift in how we deal with our environmental mistakes. The landscape architect Herman Prigann, explaining what he means by "ecological aesthetics," writes that "Destroyed landscapes are activity fields available for creative remodeling" (website). He sees in polluted, exploited, and abandoned sites possibilities for remediation not only scientifically, but also aesthetically. He continues:

Without an aesthetic and visionary starting point for the reshaping of the Destroyed areas, there can be no positive identification with the landscape. The aesthetic reshaping of the landscape is always orientated around the Ecological relationships. (website)

If one looks at these "Destroyed" places as places of ecological engagement, the problem changes from how to make these sites ecologically healthy again to how to make them ecologically healthy again, in a way that is compelling to the public. If citizens are not involved in remediation efforts, it is unlikely that they will either be aware of them or help to prevent such exploitation of local resources in the future. Erzen writes that art can provide "symbolic, metaphoric and aesthetically conceived forms" that comprise a unique and educational way to involve the public in issues of ecological damage and reclamation, rather than only providing a practical solution to ecological problems (24). The best remediative response to polluted sites, then, involves not only science but also art.[8]

Several individuals and organizations are tackling environmental issues with this interdisciplinary approach. One is a nonprofit organization in northern Appalachia that is addressing abandoned coal mines that are leaking toxin-laden water into the watershed. Another is an artist who works with public spaces to create a nexus of public involvement and ecological restoration. A third project, in a small community in the Appalachian Mountains, is also artist-driven, and seeks to address the nebulous relationship that the community has with the natural resources it depends on.[9] These projects profoundly affect their communities, often contributing to not just the restoration of the local environment but also residents' sense of community and place, and they inspire similar projects in other communities. In this way -- by restoring the webs of community that connect us all to each other and the land we inhabit and the water we use -- they function not only as projects about and including ecological systems, but in a sense, as key components in ecological systems themselves.

AMD&ART: Vintondale, Pennsylvania

AMD&ART is a nonprofit organization created by artist and historian T. Allan Comp in 1994 to address the environmental hazard posed by abandoned coal mines. Appalachian communities long dependent on coal are still suffering from the departure of coal companies, which left many areas with weak economies, ravaged ecologies, and abandoned, contaminated mines. AMD stands for Acid Mine Drainage, or the water that picks up minerals exposed during mining as it flows through abandoned coal mines and into other water sources. It is acidic, metals-laden water that inundates "streambeds with orange sediment that kills the bottom of the food chain, leaving streams dead" (http://www.amdandart.org/ ). The toxic drainage has been ubiquitous in Appalachian communities for many years, and many economically depressed former mining communities still live with its presence. Comp sees AMD as a symbol of "dying communities, lost biodiversity, lost opportunity" -- a metaphor for a society destroying itself through the waste of its natural resources (website). Communities in Appalachia are deeply conflicted about their past, Comp says, and therefore AMD&ART is characterized by "trying to do something that people could be proud of, and that [would bring] back a pride in a past that's been kind of denied them" together with attempting to change the legacy left by pre-regulatory coal mining (interview).

Comp has a background in history and historic preservation; when he began a job working in a federal heritage area in Western Pennsylvania, he noticed that a common feature among the economically depressed communities there was that "all of the creeks were orange," as well as completely devoid of life (interview). He began to think about the potential impact of addressing the AMD in the area, and a way to involve the arts -- "not just traditional visual artists, but writers, designers, sculptors, historians, anthropologists and many other unfortunately compartmentalized disciplines" (website) -- in solving environmental problems. He likes to describe the impetus behind AMD&ART as the idea that "science is necessary, but not sufficient."

Comp says that scientists realized in the late 1980s that AMD problems could be ameliorated by "passive treatment," which involves the natural filtration and treatment of polluted waters through wetlands. Looking at all of the different treatment systems that used this principle, Comp realized that they were incredibly pragmatic -- he describes this approach as "there are five or six rectangular ponds stuck on a little piece of land, the water goes in bad, it comes out good, problem solved" -- but failed to involve the public or inspire other projects because "nobody even knew they were there"
(interview).

Comp sees this purely scientific solution as a symptom of societal embarrassment of AMD; AMD&ART deliberately challenges "the belief that treatment systems should be hidden away, just because we as a society are ashamed of the mess we have created" (website). The organization instead promotes the idea that the reclaiming of these spaces and resources is a positive, community-building opportunity to engage all facets of society, and "should be a celebration" of the solution instead of a way to hide it -- drawing attention to, and thus spreading, the technology and the support for addressing the problem (website).

When Comp started AMD&ART, he asked geologists, artists, and hydrogeologists he knew to get involved in brainstorming an interdisciplinary way to clean up AMD sites. He says the project formed very quickly around three different possible sites for remediation; of these sites, only the "fairly small discharge" in Vintondale (a town of fewer than 600 people in Southwestern Pennsylvania) ended up being a feasible project for AMD&ART (interview).[10]

The site in Vintondale was chosen for the project because "it had several distinct advantages," Comp says. The Ghost Town Trail, which, at that time (in the mid-1990s) attracted about 60,000-70,000 recreational users per year (this number is now more like 80,000, according to Comp), runs immediately adjacent to Vintondale. In addition, the site, which is surrounded by the town, was unoccupied, owned by the borough (the municipal unit in Pennsylvania), and fairly flat. Comp says he "basically just walked into the borough council meeting and said, 'Would you be willing to let us see what we can do?'" and promised, if they agreed, to find funding elsewhere, to keep council members informed about the progress of the project, and to never promise more than what he knew he could deliver. While the council readily agreed to his proposal, Comp points out that before the first big public meeting about the project, locals in the bar next door just laughed at him for trying to change anything -- especially with art. The attitude in the community when he began, Comp says, was one of cynicism and low expectations, a common feature of Appalachian coal country.

From the beginning, Comp says, he realized that the organization would be more a model for similar projects than a single entity attempting to solve the problems of many places: "Nobody had ever done anything like [AMD&ART] before at all that we could find," he says, so a model could conceivably have an enormous impact. The organization's motto, "Artfully Transforming Environmental Liabilities Into Community Assets," provides a clear philosophical basis upon which other projects could be based. Comp sees AMD&ART as composed of three parts: The design team (a hydrogeologist, a landscape designer, a sculptor, and a historian) the AmeriCorps staff (one or two a year, and frequently including a landscape architect, a historian, or an environmental studies major), and the community.

The project that the organization has been working on for years is the AMD&ART art park in Vintondale. The park is a 35- acre space along the Ghost Town Trail. It includes a series of large ponds ("My hydrogeologist would prefer to call them treatment cells," Comp says) that "take a discharge from a pH of 2.8 and high in iron and aluminum, to a pH of 6.5 or 7, with almost no metal" (interview); on the pH scale, 7 is neutral, and anything below is acidic.

The cleansed water then flows into seven acres of wetlands that attract birds and other wildlife and which the highway department has purchased, enabling AMD&ART to create a trust fund to maintain the system for fifty years. Next to these water features, AMD&ART has created a native tree arboretum, which the organization calls its "Litmus Garden."

The center of the park is a recreation area for Vintondale residents. Based on the community's needs, this area includes baseball and soccer fields, a volleyball court, picnic tables, and open grassy areas. "Part of public design," Comp says, "is [that] you have to give form to community aspiration." If the community doesn't have a stake in the remediation project, it will not succeed in the long run. Vintondale needed a park for recreational activities, and Comp was determined to make that park a part of the AMD cleanup effort.

Because Comp plans to hand the reins of AMD&ART over to Vintondale to run -- leaving only the funding for one AmeriCorps position, but removing himself and the rest of his staff -- it is imperative that the community be invested in the organization's survival. Vintondale residents are very proud of the park, Comp points out, and call it "our park." "We built it with the community and now the community is ready to step in," Comp says, adding that the nonprofit organization AMD&ART is going to become "Vintondale AMD&ART Park, managed by locals."

Comp says that Vintondale residents are, in general, more aware of environmental issues as a result of AMD&ART, and that there is a measurable connection between the completion of a large project like the art park in Vintondale and a community's confidence in its ability to achieve other projects, let alone attempt them.[11] He points to a photograph of men helping build picnic tables for the park as an example: these men were some of the hecklers in the bar three years earlier. He adds that in order to change attitudes, one has to be persistent and consistent -- in AMD&ART's case, someone from the organization attended every monthly borough council meeting, whether or not he/she had anything to share about the project.

Fig. 4. The creation of AMD&ART treatment ponds. © AMD&ART
Finding funding has always been difficult for AMD&ART, Comp says, in large part because the organization addresses problems in Appalachian coal country, where funds are scarce for environmental projects. To diminish this predicament, Comp decided to hire AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers (the U.S. government subsidizes these positions). Comp, who directs AMD&ART, does not receive a salary for his work (which he has always done in addition to a regular full-time job). "If this was really a better idea," Comp says he thought when he founded the organization, "then we don't need to go to traditional sources of funding for Acid Mine Drainage treatment first."

These sources were already funding AMD treatment, and Comp saw no need to compete with the scientists who received those monies. AMD&ART initially received a few thousand dollars from the local government program for the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts; the Heinz Endowment funded a planning workshop for local agencies and Comp and his colleagues. At some point in the mid-nineties, Comp recalls, there was a fiscal crisis, and he wrote a letter to the AMD&ART's board and some of his friends that said that the project might have to go on hiatus indefinitely. Within a few months, Comp found out that the EPA's Sustainable Development Program had awarded his organization a grant, and that it was much larger than what he had applied for the previous summer: $250,000 over three years. After that gift, which constituted "a huge gamble" by the EPA, according to Comp, it became much easier for AMD&ART -- which has no development staff -- to raise money from other government agencies and foundations.

Comp says the idea of involving artists and others from the humanities as well as scientists in projects has begun to garner positive attention in the past few years, and that this may be "the most significant consequence" of the work AMD&ART has done, "because it is being picked up on by others far from coal country as something they need to consider as well." These others, Comp says, include the U.S. Forest Service, people working on abandoned mine lands in the Rocky Mountains, and a little watershed, Crowley Creek, in Oregon.[12]

A current project in the middle of the University of Virginia's Wise campus in southwestern Virginia was inspired by AMD&ART (Comp is the co-manager and co-designer); another project that uses AMD&ART as a model for innovative approaches and partnerships is one at Upper Clark Fork in Montana. Comp thinks of AMD&ART as not simply a project or a nonprofit but "a catalogue of ideas," and encourages others to access it in order to create similar -- not necessarily identical -- projects to heal land and communities. Significantly, through his work with AMD&ART, Comp now works for the U.S. Department of Interior's Office of Surface Mining to work with communities all over Appalachia to clean up watersheds polluted by coal mining. Another measure of AMD&ART's success, Comp says, is that the American Society for Mining and Reclamation has asked him to appear as a plenary speaker for two years. Thus while the nonprofit organization AMD&ART will soon cease to exist in its current form, the idea that spawned AMD&ART continues to spread to communities throughout the United States. The AMD&ART website will then become a permanent archive of the project for anyone to access and use.

Passive treatment employs "native plants and native limestone to neutralize the acid, drop out the metals, and release both clean water and new hope" (website). Comp avers that his approach to AMD remediation differs profoundly from the traditional one:

It's very easy to design a treatment system where all you need to do is fix the water. But if you're going to try to get the 70,000 people riding by on their bicycles to stop and look at it long enough to figure out what it is . . . and realize that maybe getting one of those in their town would be a good idea, too, it's got to be a lot more than just scientifically effective, which is why from the very beginning, this project has always been a collaborative, multi-disciplinary effort between the sciences and the arts. (interview)
Rather than seeing waste treatment as a purely scientific function, Comp writes that it can be a part of our culture, too: "gardens, native plant arboretums and places of learning" (website).

The arts open up "avenues for participation that people would not otherwise seek," Comp says, and in this way complement the unintentionally exclusionary, jargon-heavy sciences. The only way to engage members of the public in environmental issues, he continues, is not only to teach them the scientific principles at work in a particular situation, but also to inspire them to care, and this is where the arts and the humanities come in. The arts without scientists, Comp says, just make for "bad science and goofy art"; on the other hand, collaboration spawns both good science and good art, as well as broad public engagement.

Remediation is not the domain of environmentalists, but entire communities. In Comp's view, we all have a stake in our communities, which include the physical places where we reside, and the "natural" features found there (land, water, organisms). When we invest in them, we gain not only what we can get directly from these features (food, drinking water, a place to have a picnic), but also in what we get from each other: a sense of belonging, a sense of investment in the future, an understanding of who we are and where we come from, and places in which we can come together in productive and positive ways.

By helping communities to become empowered, AMD&ART enables them to view themselves in a new way, to look toward the future instead of the past, and to take charge of the ecological health of their own resources. Local citizens become active advocates instead of passive victims, and in turn aid others in their searches for community health -- which AMD&ART wants to help us see that we are all responsible for.

Patricia Johanson: Three Projects

Patricia Johanson is an artist who creates large-scale, permanent projects that incorporate and celebrate ecological systems. She sees her work as a way to frame ecologies so that humans will be drawn into natural systems and become more aware of the organisms that live there and the forces that influence their worlds. Johanson started her career as a painter and sculptor, but gradually became interested in making sculptures that were sited in nature.

Speaking of her first foray into this kind of sculpture, Johanson says that she quickly "became far more interested in the patterns of nature on the work of art [than in the artwork itself] . . . you couldn't just look at the work of art anymore -- you saw how nature was impinging and encroaching on the art" (interview). This sculpture marked a change in the focus of all of Johanson's work: she remarks that she thereafter began making work concerned exclusively with nature. Johanson lives in New York State; she has a master's degree in Art History and a bachelor's degree in architecture. She cites as her inspirations Monet and nineteenth-century artists who explored the western U.S. and who acted as naturalists, recording the flora and fauna of the unfamiliar places they came across, as well as the celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.

Johanson's first major ecological public art commission [13] was Fair Park Lagoon, located in a city park next to the Dallas Museum of Natural History and the Dallas Museum of Art (which has since moved). Begun in 1981 and completed in 1986, the project is a testament to the creative, holistic, and unconventional perspective that an artist can bring to environmental problems. A few years after seeing an exhibit of Johanson's drawings of hypothetical, plant-based projects in a gallery in New York City, Harry Parker, who was then director of the Dallas Museum of Art, invited Johanson to come up with a plan to restore the lagoon.[14]

Covered in a harmful algae bloom, polluted, and missing key species like aquatic insects and snails, the lagoon ("basically a flood basin," says Johanson) was murky, had a deteriorating shoreline, and lacked a food chain. The body of water was also a hazard to the community that might have enjoyed it -- it created a five-block-long obstacle for people walking through the park. Worse, several children had drowned in it -- two on the morning Johanson came to look at the site at Parker's invitation.

At the time, Johanson writes, "there was neither funding [for] nor community interest" in the project (Art and Survival 14); however, the sesquicentennial of Texas' independence from Mexico was approaching, and Johanson says that Parker saw potential for a lagoon project to be touted as a sesquicentennial project for Dallas, thus practically ensuring funding. According to Johanson, Parker told her, "Do any kind of project you want. This is Dallas -- if they like it, they'll build it." Johanson was given "absolute freedom," she says, to come up with ideas for improving the body of water -- the museum imposed no budgetary or other restrictions on her.

She gave a presentation with drawings and models of her ideas for the lagoon to a group of invited guests at the art museum -- "basically, what [my initial proposal] said was 'I want to use art to bring people into contact with nature and clean up the water,'" she summarizes. Afterward, she was approached by the grants administrator of a local foundation that eventually put up the bulk of the money required for the project. In fact, the project was so popular with the community that organizations offered funding even after it was no longer needed, especially once construction began.

For Fair Park Lagoon, Johanson conducted research on what native animals eat and what local plants would be appropriate to create a proposal that would restore a healthy balance to the lagoon; she asked staff at the Dallas Museum of Natural History to help her create "outdoor educational exhibits" (interview). In addition to proposing the re-introduction of many species of plant and animal, Johanson suggested that the museum remove a non-native species of duck then populating the lagoon, stop.37 fertilizing the grass around the shoreline, and encourage locals to fish for the overabundant sunfish. Johanson writes of the beginning of the project:

I began to develop my own list of concerns, which included creating a functioning ecosystem for a wide variety of plants and animals. I also wanted to control bank erosion, and create paths so that people could cut across the lagoon. I began to do research on what different animals eat, because I knew that the right plants would attract wildlife. The project evolved from many different perspectives at once. I knew that the structures had to not only solve a host of environmental problems, but also had to be acceptable to scientists, engineers and city planners. (Art and Survival 15)

Johanson carefully took all of these perspectives into account in the planning of her artwork, which besides reconstructing the life cycle of the lagoon, involved the creation of "elaborate entangled walkable paths with bridges and arches" that meandered through the lagoon (Spaid 67). Johanson decided to use two native Texas plants as models for the sculptures in the lagoon.

These sculptures, made of terracotta-colored gunite, serve as pathways for visitors and resting places for animals. She designed the Delta Duck Potato-based sculpture's "roots," many of them five-foot-wide paths, to prevent water from eroding the shoreline; the spaces between them "became microhabitats for plants, fish, turtles, and birds" (Art and Survival 15). Thinner roots rise out of the water, inaccessible to humans, and provide perches for birds, while leaves in the middle of the lagoon serve as islands for turtles and other animals. The second sculpture, across the lagoon, is based on a Texas fern, Pteris multifada:

The fern functions as a bridge -- not a direct pathway over the water, but a network of crossovers, islands and stopping-points. Individual leaflets are twisted to create the kinds of spaces I wanted, and the tip of the fern is a causeway surrounded by water lilies and irises.(16)

Johanson wanted people who visit the lagoon to be initially attracted by the sculptures -- she calls her work "big and brassy" -- and then drawn into the life that thrives around it (interview). "Fair Park Lagoon is really a swamp -- a raw, functioning ecology that people are normally afraid of," Johanson writes. "The art project affords people access to this environment, so they find out how wonderful a swamp really is . . . they're discovering a marvelous new world" (16).

Johanson uses art as a way to frame nature, so that people who aren't interested in or cognizant of nature suddenly notice it. She sees this project and the others she has done as inviting the public into relationships with the organisms in a particular ecosystem, which then translates into a general appreciation for the natural world. "There are always people who will do damage," she says, "but I think far less [so] if people get some kind of basic understanding of nature and love for it. And that kind of education naturally takes place in my projects, I believe."

Johanson's methodology for creating large-scale environmental works was perfected during her work on Fair Park Lagoon:

I always come up with designs in the exact same way: I look at the site, and I decide what I want to accomplish on the site, in terms of how people are going to move through it [and] what they're going to see . . . I want a living site -- I want plants and animals living in natural communities. I look at [my work] as
developing a food chain. (interview)

Johanson says that she uses sculpture as a way to move people through the space to give them access to the plants and animals living there. She designs spaces that do not need to be maintained, for two reasons: "Half the time it's not done anyway," she notes, but she also likes her artworks to evolve over time, because they have lives of their own (interview). "The traditional art object is based on the idea of perfection," Johanson writes, but her works grow and change (Art and Survival 10). There may be a point, she says, where her projects begin to disintegrate; at that time, she thinks it is acceptable to intervene, if a community is interested in keeping a particular project, but not before.

Johanson's next major project, Endangered Garden, also resulted from an exhibit of her drawings; this time both the exhibit and the commission were in San Francisco. The circumstances surrounding this project were very different from Fair Park Lagoon, however: the City of San Francisco needed a new transport-storage sewer that would go around Candlestick Cove, but the Public Works Department couldn't come up with a design that the public would approve. The latter had initially proposed "a two-story-high hunk of concrete that blocked the view of San Francisco Bay," Johanson recounts (interview).

Furthermore, the city was about to be sued by the EPA for dumping raw sewage in the bay, so it was in a hurry. Jill Manton, Director of the Public Art Program of the San Francisco Arts Commission, who remembered the exhibit of Johanson's work from a few years before, asked her to get involved. Within a month, Johanson had become co-designer of the facility and produced plans that San Franciscans loved.[15] "I knew right away: bury the sewer, make the roof a bay walk, make it available to the public, so they're getting something for their money," she recalls, adding:

Part of my strategy is always giving back to the public. If the community is happy, the project will be a success. If the community isn't happy, the project won't be a success . . . What happened was, I got huge community buy-in- people started writing letters to the city, saying what a beautiful project this was and how much they wanted [it]. (interview)

Because the public supported her idea so enthusiastically, the city Public Works Department, which was not interested in building her project, had to back down -- and was told by the City Attorney that it had to accept Johanson's proposal. She says that she has always promoted art as an important component in infrastructure projects, and muses that over the years, some of her work might have changed the minds of those who disagreed. In 1987, however, when she designed the project (it was completed three mayors later, in 1996), it was a fairly novel idea to include an artist in the designing of a sewer.[16]

Johanson's design incorporates a huge San Francisco Garter Snake that serves as the unifying element of the park, which is sited on a landfill. Parts of the snake's winding body intersect with the half-mile long bay walk, creating stopping points and the opportunity to appreciate the life found along the trail. The snake's head emerges in a twenty-foot-high earthmound and the neck in another, and some of the snake's scales were designed as huge sculptures.

The sculptures accommodate not only human but also animal traffic. "Cavities, crevices and nesting shelves for bird habitat are incorporated into the structures . . . [and] petroglyph depressions in the Baywalk paving fill with rainwater and become birdbaths" (24). The snake's head mound was seeded with plants that sustain endangered butterflies; the head and neck mounds are sited on a meadow. Both humans and endangered butterflies utilize the windbreak provided by the mounds. Johanson writes that her intention "was to provide cover for small mammals like the endangered salt marsh harvest mouse and larval food plants for endangered and rare butterflies" ("Beyond Choreography" 93).

Like Fair Park Lagoon, Endangered Garden is designed to attract visitors with its sculptural components, but ultimately creates a relationship between the people who visit and the organisms that make the space their home: "Body movement and gardens of unplanned experience turn spectators into participants, ensuring both a creative response and consideration of forces that affect the landscape and their lives," Johanson asserts (98). Her work, in this way, shows that interactions between "nature" and humanity are never passive -- when people are drawn into observation and appreciation of an ecosystem, they become conscientious advocates of its preservation. In Johanson's creations, there is no opportunity to be passive. All those who enter the spaces she creates are implicated in their continued existence and the survival of the organisms that occupy them.

Before Endangered Garden, there was no public access to Candlestick Cove. Now San Franciscans and tourists walk, jog, and bike the pathways on top of the sewer to get access to the intertidal zone, and they use the spaces between to have picnics and fly kites. Most members of the public do not realize that underneath the trails, butterfly meadow, and sculpture, there is a functioning sewer, Johanson says; the city made sure the project had a low profile during its construction to avoid controversy over an artist being co-designer of the project (even though it was built using percent-for-art funds). But Johanson seems to be comfortable with the invisibility of the sewage system: "The idea was simply to take something that was going to be built anyway, and translate it into a public landscape that that people could use and enjoy," she writes (Art and Survival 6). If the city was going to construct the sewer, she figured, it should incorporate art and nature in a way that was meaningful to the people who live in that community.

Even though the community might not remember or be aware of the role the artist had in creating the park, she has still made a difference in their interactions with the environment. Johanson originally saw the project as "a great chance to make people aware of the issue of endangered species," and she seems to have been successful (23).

Johanson says she frequently gets letters about the impact of her work -- people write, among other things, that they became an artist or ecologist because they grew up spending time around her projects. The impact of her work is also more immediate: Endangered Garden is maintained by the San Francisco Youth Conservation Corps (at-risk youth who pick up trash and weed plant beds on the weekend), and when Johanson went to visit the site a few years ago, Corps members applauded her. They told her that they loved the project, and that "it's the best thing in their lives" (interview).

So Endangered Garden not only "fills in ecological gaps with food and habitat, actually making it possible for species that have been wiped out to come back" (Art and Survival 24), but also has opened up a world for humans, allowing them to appreciate native animals and plants up close, while enjoying public space -- all on the roof of a sewer co-designed by an artist in a major U.S. city.

Johanson is currently working on the Ellis Creek Water Recycling Facility and Petaluma Wetlands Park, in Petaluma, California. This project, which at the time of this writing is going out to bid (Johanson expects it to cost about $130 million), involves "between four- and six-hundred acres, at least," she says, which will process sewage for the city. The land already features Petaluma River, Ellis Creek, and a brackish marsh, as well as agricultural fields, which provide food for local mammals and migrating wildlife.

Raw sewage will enter the site through a headworks (the initial intake system) and then flow through "densely vegetated treatment wetlands," Johanson says, which will trap sediments and "remove algae, nutrients and heavy metals" (Johanson, "Fecund Landscapes" 28), thus purifying the sewage. After the water flows through the filtering plants in the treatment wetlands, it will enter the polishing wetlands, which are different kinds of ponds that "have zones of plants alternating with open water zones, which are deeper," and include plants and fish, Johanson says. "Microscopic aquatic animals and insects that live on plants" will consume suspended solids in the water and make up the basis of the food chain (28).

In addition, aquatic plants will pump oxygen from the water, "thus supplying microbial decomposers" and providing "food, shelter and nesting materials to" the animals living there (28). Islands will direct the flow of water, circulating it between the ponds. The islands will be covered in trees and shrubs, grass, or oyster shells to provide refuge and nesting habitat for different species of birds and other animals. After the water cycles through the treatment and polishing wetlands, it will flow back up to the recycled water pond as drinkable water.

There will also be stormwater wetlands that take runoff from the nearby highway and parking lot and purify it before it too enters the marsh and river. The facility will produce twenty-five tons of fertilizer from human waste, which would normally go to a landfill. Besides removing highway and parking lot run-off now polluting the water in the area, the Petaluma project will restore formerly degraded habitats. It will also provide habitat for endangered and threatened species, such as the California Red-Legged and Yellow-Legged Frogs and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse, among many others. Johanson has designed many different land and water habitats to accommodate as many native species as possible.

Besides being essentially (in actuality if not name) a wildlife refuge, Johanson points out that the project incorporates "many levels of community involvement" (interview). The entire facility is designed to be a public facility, with about three and half miles of trails winding through the different ecosystems, allowing for recreation and environmental education. Johanson says that a local high school is creating a plant nursery to breed native plants for the project, and another local group, the Petaluma Wetlands Alliance, is planning to give docent tours. Local schools, grades K-12, will use the space as an environmental learning laboratory.

Johanson started out with the California Dogface Butterfly as her working metaphor for the project, but this morphed into images of morning glories and the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse when the city moved the headworks and administrative facilities to the wetlands park site. For Johanson, the image that describes the project is not important in itself -- instead she sees it as a way for visitors "to grasp these very, very large projects" (interview).

"As you walk around [my projects], you have to experience them not just visually, but also with your feet [and] with your other senses . . . and you have to form a mental image or map of what's going on here," she says. By incorporating a familiar image, this sewage treatment facility, like Johanson's other projects, will engage visitors to be active participants in the ecosystems. Those who come for recreation are likely to be drawn into the different spaces, either by the habitats themselves or by the images of the mouse or morning glories, and will learn about the organisms that live there, as well as what is necessary to purify human waste. Johanson is showing that art, infrastructure, public space, and science can peacefully co-exist, to the benefit of all. Jale Erzen summarizes the important role works like this have in the public realm:

Aesthetic qualities which affect our emotions, which make us feel the pleasure of perceiving beauty, would also make us understand the fragility and the gentleness of this beauty, when we perceive it as being alive. As intelligent and intentional agents we then become responsible about the protection of these qualities.(23)

When we encounter spaces like those that Johanson designs, we almost cannot help but be drawn into responsibility for their survival. Johanson's works reach many, many people every day, and one can only hope that they, too, consequently become environmental stewards and activists.

Beneath Land and Water: Elkhorn City, Kentucky

Beneath Land and Water is an ongoing, artist-initiated project in Elkhorn City, Kentucky, a town of fewer than 1,000 people in the eastern Kentucky Mountains. In Spring 2000, Suzanne Lacy, a Los Angeles-based activist/artist with a background in performance and installation work focusing on issues of social justice, was invited to participate in a workshop called "Artists in Community Gathering," which was sponsored by Appalshop, a Kentucky arts and education center, and the American Festival Project, which is housed in Appalshop.

The event matched teams of artists with small communities in the region in an effort to "facilitate the deeper integration of arts into the lives" of these places by creating a structure for community engagement (http://greenarts.net/art/ky/home/home.html ). From this encounter, Lacy began to work with the Elkhorn City Heritage Council to design a project that would meet the community's needs, and she asked two other artists, Susan Leibovitz Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi, to be involved as well. Steinman, who lives in Oakland, works closely with communities to create ecologically-centered work, and Kobayashi, who is from Japan, makes ecological, site-specific sculpture and other work.

The government of Elkhorn City was looking for a way to economically revitalize the community, which is located in a region devastated by the coal and natural-gas mining industries. It quickly became clear to Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi that residents of the town had an interest in improving Elkhorn City based on its abundant resources, notably Russell River, the woods, and the mountains. Putting it another way, Lacy's website describes the project as focusing "on townspeople's personal experience of their land -- as a site of heritage and as a generator of regional wealth -- and their river -- as an indicator of ecological health and as a moving force that connects them, upstream and down, with the rest of the country"
(http://www.suzannelacy.com/2000selkhorn_overview.htm). Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi wanted to crystallize this experience in public art projects that would reflect it back to residents.

After many community meetings, the project began to take shape; although still evolving, it consists of several facets. One component is a waterfront park that serves as a buffer zone between a bank parking lot and the riverfront. Runoff from streets and parking lots, including pesticides used in residents' yards and other toxins, runs downhill into the river. The park, about 500 feet wide, was designed with plants and gravel to filter some of the runoff before it enters the river.

Project participants planted native plants to serve as habitat and food for butterflies and birds; built benches for visitors, which incorporate text generated by residents with stories about the river; and created signage that highlights features of the park and the river. The park is meant, Steinman says, to focus attention on the river, but also to serve as a model for simple ways to remediate some of the town's resources, to help enable its residents to see them differently.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi also created the Blue Line Trail, which links to a hiking and biking trail that locals created to attract ecotourists and recreational users. The Blue Line Trail is, as its name suggests, a sky-blue line painted throughout the town. It is designed to unify the components of Beneath Land and Water, as well as to support a sense of regional identity. Elkhorn City residents hope to eventually connect the Blue Line Trail to the state's Pine Mountain Trail, which would attract hikers to the area and the town, and would provide, Steinman says, an "overt connection of Elkhorn City to regional and national resources." The artists also painted several town features the same shade of blue.

Lacy and Steinman say that residents wanted a mural, so the artists brought tiles to local schools for children to paint and held several Saturday tile-painting events in the middle of town. These tiles eventually became part of a large ceramic mural, placed on the side of a large building visible from the Blue Line Trail. The artists designed the mural so that people using the trail would see it and be drawn to find out more about the area, thus becoming invested in preserving its natural assets.

Lacy and Steinman used the making of the mural as an educational opportunity for the community by bringing photos of native plants and animals and talking with residents about native and invasive species and how local ecosystems work. Tile painters depicted the river and the town's relationship to it, as well as local history.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi have been joined in their efforts by college students from Lacy's classes at the California College of the Arts and Otis College of Art and Design, who for three years have used their week-long spring breaks to come to Elkhorn City to contribute to the project and gain practical field experience. The first batch of students, in 2001, helped make the park and taught tile-painting workshops for high school students and senior citizens. Steinman says these students gave local students, many of whom looked forward to getting out of Elkhorn City as soon as possible, a new perspective on what is valuable about their community.

Lacy, Steinman, and Kobayashi have struggled to keep Beneath Land and Water afloat from the beginning. Although it started with a grant from Appalshop, that organization almost folded after September 11, 2001, and the artists had to look elsewhere for money (Elkhorn City and its Heritage Council have limited budgets). They have not been paid for any of their work -- although they make a point of paying residents who help -- and use their own frequent flyer miles to travel to Elkhorn City, in addition to often paying out of their own pockets for materials needed for the project. The artists did secure a grant from the Creative Capitol Foundation in 2002, which helped to fund parts of the project.

Steinman sees Beneath Land and Water as a "pragmatic education project" (interview). It would be impossible, she says, "to clean the entire river," but by finding out what the people who live in Elkhorn City have and want and figuring out a way in which art can contribute, an artist can create a project that can inspire locals to "become caretakers of the river." So while the remediation scope of the project is relatively small -- mostly because of budget constraints -- Lacy and Steinman hope that it will spawn or inspire other ecologically-minded projects in Elkhorn City and other communities.

To a certain extent, Beneath Land and Water, like AMD&ART, is about a community cultivating a sense of itself in a period of hardship. With the coal companies' departure and the accompanying environmental devastation and economic stagnation, as well as an aging population, many in Elkhorn City find it difficult to invest in the future. But both Lacy and Steinman emphasize the fact that they and Kobayashi have worked closely with residents and community groups to generate project ideas, all of which build on already-present local efforts and interests (interviews). The artists contributed ecological and aesthetic knowledge and experience as well as a creative outlook that enabled them to approach old problems in new ways.

Steinman says that working in a community as an outsider requires sensitivity and openness; Lacy says that a community is very sensitive to how an artist perceives it. Ultimately, Steinman says, "art is about problem-solving." Similarly, Lacy says that art creates an atmosphere where people's perspectives can shift, enabling them to begin to see their communities in new ways. She adds that art is important to ecological activism and education because it "is an incredibly unifying element." Beneath Land and Water, then, does not change the ecology of Elkhorn City, but creates a way for residents to see themselves -- and thus their relationship to the ecology of the place where they live -- differently. Steinman, like Patricia Johanson, sees art as a visual hook. She says that she uses art "as a public service announcement for what ecology is [and] how it is everywhere around you; [that] art is an integrated part of life and we are an integrated part of nature." Beneath Land and Water is an important step toward spreading this perspective.

Conclusion(s)

American society can benefit from including art, artists, and artistic practices in city infrastructure projects, education, community development and placemaking, and environmental cleanup; ecology is an important concern in all of these. For organizations and individuals working in communities to raise public awareness of ecological issues and change behavior, art can be a useful tool. Because art is inherently visual, it attracts attention and can involve members of the public in ecological issues of which they might not be aware or about which they might not care otherwise.

Artistic practices used in unexpected places and ways can frame ecological systems, drawing individuals in and causing them to notice and care about specific elements of those ecologies. Art projects and education can be used to bring different kinds of people together to talk about ecological issues and to inspire public action on these issues. Artistic practices can make ecological issues accessible and interesting in a way that science cannot. Art projects and projects using artistic strategies can serve as a means by which a community can consider and examine its identity. Most of all, art is often a problem-solving practice, and it can provide new perspectives on current concerns such as pollution, waste management, recycling, resource management, sustainable development, and endangered species.

All of the subjects of the case studies in this document bring these issues, usually marginalized at the fringes of public awareness -- because of collective shame, compartmentalized professional practices, neglect, or ignorance -- into the very core of our society; and art is a key component of this shift in perspective. The success of these projects, organizations, and programs depends on the participation of the public and the public's willingness to change its actions.

These case studies show that partnerships with policy makers, local governments, nonprofits, scientists, schools, and businesses are also of paramount importance. They all look at familiar things -- pollution, trash, public space -- in new ways that seem to contradict the conventional wisdom in those fields. By employing a creative perspective and sharing that with the public, they also empower others to see them, enabling radical change and helping to ensure a better future. Art is clearly an important component of an environmentally healthy society, and it is time that we as a society recognize that it should be a central component of any holistic perspective and progressive action. We must change our relationship to the environment before it disappears, and art is a necessary tool in this process.

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Works Cited

Websites

AMD&ART. http://www.amdandart.org/
Art From Scrap. Community Environmental Council. http://www.communityenvironmentalcouncil.org/artfromscrap/.

Kobayashi, Yutaka. Homepage. http://greenarts.net/

Lacy, Suzanne. Homepage. www.suzannelacy.com/

"Municipal Solid Waste." United States Environmental Protection Agency. http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/facts.htm

Prigann, Herman. Homepage. http://www.terranova.ws

SF Recycling & Disposal Artist-in-Residence Program. Norcal Waste Systems, Inc. http:// www.sunsetscavenger.com/artist_in_residence.htm

3 Rivers 2nd Nature. Carnegie Mellon University College of Fine Arts. http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/

Interviews

Collins, Tim. Phone interview. 13 February 2005.
Comp, T. Allan. Phone interview. 24 February 2005.
Fresina, Paul. Phone interview. 9 February 2005.
Johanson, Patricia. Phone interview. 13 February 2005.
Lacy, Suzanne. Personal interview. 23 February 2005.
Leonard, Mark. Phone interview. 11 February 2005.
Sanchez, Cay. Phone interview. 11 February 2005.
Steinman, Susan Leibovitz. Phone interview. 2 March 2005.

Text Sources

Cerny, Charlene. "American Adhocism: Wasting, Saving, and the Aesthetics of Conspicuous Recycling." Recycled Re-Seen: Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap. Ed. Charlene Cerny and Suzanne Seriff. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1996. 30-45.
Cieri, Marie, and Claire Peeps, eds. Activists Speak Out: Reflections on the Pursuit of Change in America. New York: Palgrave, 2000.

Dissanayake, Ellen. "Very Like Art: Self-Taught Art from an Ethological Perspective." Self-Taught Art: The Culture and Aesthetics of American Vernacular Art. Ed. Charles Russell. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2001. 35-46.

------. What is Art For? Seattle: U of Washington P, 1988.

Erzen, Jale. "Ecology, art, ecological aesthetics." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 22-25.

Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.

Johanson, Patricia. Art and Survival: Creative Solutions to Environmental Problems.

Ed. Caffyn Kelley. Gallerie: Women Artists' Monographs. March 1992. North Vancouver: Gallerie, 1992.

------. "Beyond Choreography: Shifting Experiences in Uncivilized Gardens." Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion.

Ed. Michel Conan. Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture 24. Dumbarton Oaks: Washington, D.C., 2003. 75-102.

------. "Fecund Landscapes: Art and Process in Public Parks." Landscape and Art No. 29 (Summer 2003): 28-29.

Lacy, Suzanne, ed. Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art. Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.

Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press, 1997.

------. "Looking Around: Where We Are, Where We Could Be." Lacy 114-130.

Lipton, Amy, and Patricia Watts. "Ecoart: ecological art." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 90-94..56

Miles, Malcolm. Art, Space and the City: Public Art and Urban Futures. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.

Prakash, Madhu Suri, and Hedy Richardson. "From Human Waste to Gift of Soil." Ecological Education in Action: On Weaving Education, Culture, and the Environment. Ed. Gregory A. Smith and Dilafruz R. Williams. Albany: State U of New York P, 1999. 65-68.

Spaid, Sue. Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies. Cincinnati: The Contemporary Arts Center, 2002.

Strelow, Heike, ed. Ecological Aesthetics: Art in Environmental Design: Theory and Practice. Trans. Michael Robinson. Basel, Switzerland: Birkhauser, 2004.

------. "A dialogue with ongoing processes." Ecological Aesthetics. Strelow 10-15.

Footnotes

8 An early effort of this kind was Revival Field, in which the artist Mel Chin, working with the scientist Dr. Rufus Chaney, successfully addressed the pollution in a St. Paul, Minnesota brownfield with plants that can absorb and process large quantities of heavy metals. This project has already been discussed in detail by numerous authors, including Cieri and Peeps, Finkelpearl, Lippard, Miles, and Spaid.
9 3 Rivers 2 nd Nature (3R2N) is an interdisciplinary project too complex to address adequately in this limited format. Initiated by the artists Reiko Goto and Tim Collins, working through the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University, 3R2N is an outgrowth of the artists' earlier project Nine Mile Run, and "addresses the meaning, form and function of the three rivers and fifty-three streams of Allegheny County in Western Pennsylvania" (http://3r2n.cfa.cmu.edu/ ). This project deserves a longer examination than what I can give it here, but provides an exciting glimpse of the possibilities in this field. 3R2N and Nine Mile Run are also featured in Spaid and in Strelow.
10AMD&ART began remediation at another site, Dark Shade Creek in Central City, Pennsylvania, but that was taken over by the EPA soon after.
11 Comp bases this claim on the 2002 SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry dissertation of Susan Thering, Documenting the Community Capacity Building Benefits of Participatory Community Design and Planning and Developing Indicators of Community Capacity, for which the AMD&ART project in Vintondale was used as a case study.
12 AMD&ART is not the only organization promoting this idea: Seen&Unseen, a project in England managed by the nonprofit Helix Arts, also seeks to help communities address water pollution using both scientists and artists (http://www.seen-unseen.com/ ). Keepers of the Waters is a nonprofit organization that provides an online network created "to inspire and promote projects that combine art, science and community involvement to restore, preserve and remediate water sources" (http://www.keepersofthewaters.org/ ).
13 Johanson has made numerous large-scale artworks that incorporate sculptural and ecological components in the U.S. and in Africa, South America, and Asia. This is not meant to be an exhaustive study of her work, but a brief examination of three U.S.-sited artworks that are designed for the public use and to restore damaged ecosystems.
14 The lagoon is also called Leonhardt Lagoon after Dorothea Leonhardt, in whose name a foundation made a large gift to the project.
15 Johanson cites numerous public meetings where both members of the public and park rangers vocalized their support for her plans.
16 It was still a controversial idea-again, mostly with the other members of the design team-a few years later in Phoenix, when two artists were made a part of the team designing the Twenty-Seventh Avenue Solid Waste Management Facility and Recycling Center, discussed in Chapter 1.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone I interviewed, universally gracious and generous: Tim Collins, T. Allan Comp, Paul Fresina, Patricia Johanson, Suzanne Lacy, Mark Leonard, Cay Sanchez, and Susan Leibovitz Steinman.

A big thank you to Public Art Studies faculty, students, and alumni who offered endless helpful (and life-saving!) tips on reading, writing, and thinking, as well as lots of much-needed support-especially Anne Bray, Dawn Finley, Jeannie Olander, Kendra Stanifer, Sarah Welch, Holly Willis, and Heidi Zeller.

Thanks to Kenny Berger and Jenn "Goiter" League for great editorial input; to Jud Fine-and to Holly Willis and Anne Bray-for serving on my committee; and to my family and friends for support and love.

Finally, thanks to KCRW-Jason Bentley of "Metropolis" and Raul Campos of "Nocturna," above all-for the rad tunes that so often fueled my writing.

A Thesis Presented to the FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES May 2005

Copyright 2005 Sarah E. Graddy (sgraddy@gmail.com)
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Creative and Green: Art, Ecology, and Community

Chapter 1: Art in Waste Management and Recycling Education
by Sarah E. Graddy

This is part of the Toolbox for Communities

This thesis takes a takes a thorough look at several innovative projects in the United States which combine art and ecology in a community context. Creative thinkers, working with organizations or on their own, have created unique programs and artworks that show the potential art has to creatively transform problems into opportunities.

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Writing about the way the invention of the flushing toilet has transformed modern society, Madhu Suri Prakash and Hedy Richardson assert that "instead of a communal responsibility that belongs to a peoples' commons, human waste is now transformed into a state matter," outside of the realm of individual responsibility (67). Prakash and Richardson see the toilet as a metaphor for modern society in general: with one swift movement, a person's unpleasant waste is transported far away from her house and community. We deal with all of our waste this way, and our disposal practices cost a great deal of money, land, and energy, and endanger our environment. According to the website of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in 2001, "U.S. residents, businesses, and institutions produced more than 229 million tons of MSW [Municipal Solid Waste], which is approximately 4.4 pounds of waste per person per day, up from 2.7 pounds per person per day in 1960" (Source).

At this rate, our entire country could soon become a landfill. Companies have capitalized on Americans' increasing consumption, making products with the feature of "planned obsolescence," or a limited lifespan that encourages users to throw them away and thus purchase new products. As Charlene Cerny points out, "The net result of this capitalistic principle, widely accepted by industry and consumers alike, means that so-called durable goods, purposely designed to be cheap to buy -- but difficult or too expensive to repair once broken -- quickly wind up in the landfill, along with all the disposable packaging that leads an even shorter useful life" (37). Even worse, we have been programmed to see our world as disposable, so that even items that can be easily and cheaply repaired become a burden to own, sell, or give away. When we don't want or need things anymore, no matter how useful they are, we simply put them in our trash can or dumpster, or drop them off at the landfill.

We cannot change the way companies manufacture goods overnight, but we can alter our behavior to be more ecologically friendly, saving our resources for another day and preventing places from becoming merely hosts for our trash. Art can creatively call attention to our wasteful, harmful, and unsustainable disposal practices by bringing trash into the public's everyday life, and not allowing it simply to disappear into landfills, out of sight and consciousness. Those who see this potential for art and encourage its practice use similar tactics in different arenas to raise the public's awareness and change individuals' behavior. Reuse stores are a fairly widespread phenomenon in this country; these organizations take donations of landfill-bound leftovers from local businesses, diverting the trash to show community members how to give these items new life. One such nonprofit reuse organization is profiled here. Another solution is to involve citizens in the waste disposal practices of the cities where they live. Two such creative and pioneering efforts are profiled here: one is that of a large city that created a waste management and recycling facility encouraging public observation and participation. The other is an artist-in-residence program at a private waste management company contracted to collect and dispose of the solid waste of another large city. All of these efforts require flexibility, transparency, and the willingness to combine two things that don't immediately come to mind together: trash and art. They also all rely heavily on educating children as a long-term strategy to changing our views and practices of consumption.

SF Recycling & Disposal Artist-in-Residence Program: San Francisco, California

SF Recycling & Disposal, Inc. is a private company that has incorporated art into a pioneering waste-based program designed to raise public awareness of ecological issues. The company started its innovative artist residency program in San Francisco in 1990 after a local artist, Jo Hanson, approached the company with the idea. At the time, SF Recycling & Disposal was expanding its recycling education programs in conjunction with its new curbside recycling program, and felt an artist residency would fit in with these efforts.[2] Through the company's Artist-in-Residence Program, local artists use trash to create art. Currently (the program has changed since its inception) residencies are for a period of three months, and artists may choose to work part-time or full-time and receive a stipend based on the amount of hours they work. The company offers funding for the equivalent of one full-time artist per residency period, so two artists who want to work part-time sometimes receive residencies simultaneously. Only Bay Area artists may apply for residencies in September; the artists for the following year are then selected by an advisory panel made up of approximately ten art professionals, environmentalists, and educators.

SF Recycling & Disposal provides its artists-in-residence with a 1,200-square-foot studio (available 24 hours a day) and access to the materials in its dump. The studio is located at the company's transfer station, which also includes "several recycling facilities and the Public Disposal Area (also known as 'the dump')"
(http://www.sunsetscavenger.com/artist_in_residence.htm).[3] At the end of an artist's residency, SF Recycling & Disposal hosts a public reception to exhibit the artist's work.[4] The company also provides "miscellaneous supplies and equipment," including welding and woodworking tools and a glass kiln. In return, artists-in-residence are expected to work in the studio 40 hours per week (for a full-time residency) or 20 hours per week (for a half-time residency); greet and talk to tour groups during weekday mornings and one Saturday per month; make a few pieces of art for the company's permanent art collection; use materials found in the city's waste stream; talk to the media; and leave all art created during the residency with SF Recycling & Disposal for one year after the end of the residency (website).

The goal of this innovative program is "to use art to inspire people to recycle more and conserve natural resources" (website). The artist-in-residence's role in the company is to raise awareness about what happens to the things San Francisco residents discard. When student and adult groups tour the transfer station, the artist-in-residence speaks to them about "the experience of turning trash into treasures" (website). Art from the program is exhibited in office building entryways and public spaces in San Francisco, and in the sculpture garden next to the transfer station.

According to the Artist-in-Residence Program's director, Paul Fresina, the program is unique to San Francisco (interview).[5] He says he has been contacted by other companies and cities interested in starting similar programs, but has never heard of any actually getting off the ground. Fresina points out that the program was created before the company had a risk manager, and that if it were suggested today, the program would probably not pass muster with the risk manager and the company's lawyers. An artist roaming around a dump on his or her own does seem a steep obstacle to overcome; Fresina says artists-in-residence sign a waiver, but adds that if anything were to happen to an artist, the program would likely be immediately shut down. So while the Artist-in-ResidenceProgram has gotten national press, it isn't likely to inspire others like it.

If a company or city were to start a program emulating that of SF Recycling & Disposal, Fresina cautions against attempting to duplicate it exactly. "San Francisco is so far ahead in terms of . . . environmental consciousness," he points out.

We are way ahead of the rest of the country in terms of recycling percentages. For years, before everyone even started having curbside recycling programs, San Francisco had a 25 percent recycling rate . . . people just took their bottles and cans to the recycling center.

He also points to the local tradition of "dumpster diving," or rescuing useful items from the trash, as symbolic of the cultural sensibility that makes residents more open to the program. "So many unique things converged to start our program," Fresina states. "With a private company, you're more flexible to do innovative things." In addition, San Francisco has an active and diverse arts community. So when people call him to ask about starting programs like his company's, Fresina advises them to start small -- he says it isn't the quality of the studio or even the stipend that draws interested artists; it's the right to scavenge that people are most excited about. For nine months (three residency periods) last year the company withdrew funding for the Artist-in-Residence Program during layoffs, but Fresina says that the program still received 40 applications from interested artists willing to work for free. (The largest number of applications the program has received at one time was 75 in 2002.) This level of interest, he suggests, indicates that people are open to looking at trash as a resource.

Indeed, the reason why art can be so important as a component of environmental education, Fresina avers, is that it is so visual -- it automatically attracts attention, and can thereby reach many people. "The trick is to make people look at the garbage," Fresina says; he sees the art made by artists-in-residence as a way to lure the public into becoming more thoughtful about waste. The artist-in-residence studio used to be located right next to a landfill, but the company recently built a new studio on the other side of its 44-acre property. The end-of-the-residency exhibitions are held in the studio, so some of the impact of the program may have been lost with the studio's move, Fresina acknowledges. Visitors to the exhibitions no longer have to walk past a huge mound of stinky garbage to get to the exhibits; the art has been removed from the context that made it meaningful.

On the other hand, the program has an evolving tradition where at his/her show, each artist creates a give-away pile of trash he/she saved during his/her residency but didn't use, and members of the public who attend the exhibitions are encouraged to take these items home. Fresina admits that the give-away pile probably diverts more waste from the landfill than the artists' works do, but isn't bothered by this phenomenon. Ultimately, the Artist-in-Residence Program is meant to raise awareness about trash, and to encourage a sense in the public of "ownership" of its waste. Clearly, the program is reaching many residents: About 2,000 people (approximately three-quarters of whom were schoolchildren on field trips) took tours of the company's facilities, including the art studio in 2004, according to Fresina. And a two-day exhibition in January 2005 attracted about 850 people, up from 50-75 in 2000. Furthermore, more artists apply for residencies every year (except 2004). The significance of the program is not quantifiable, Fresina says. "We are raising awareness of the preciousness of resources and the need to conserve them." Although it might not be possible to clone this program, its example can provide inspiration for those determined to do something similar in their own communities. Other communities can take note of and imitate the way this Artist-in-Residence Program evolved organically out of its own community, drawing on a local sensibility to spread ecological awareness.

Twenty-Seventh Avenue Solid Waste Management Facility and Recycling Center: Phoenix, Arizona

The first large American city government to incorporate both major artist and public involvement in its waste management practices is that of Phoenix, Arizona.[6] In the early 1990s, the design for the city's new Twenty-Seventh Avenue Solid Waste Management Facility and Recycling Center (hereafter referred to as the 27 th Avenue Center) was created in large part by two artists, Michael Singer and Linnea Glatt. The artists were selected through Phoenix's Percent for Art Program to contribute art to the $18-million-dollar facility. They also submitted ideas for altering the engineers' scheme that the city's administration liked and decided to use; the artists and the engineers collaborated on the resulting building, which was completed in late 1993.

The facility was built not only using green techniques and materials, but also with the public very much in mind: Finkelpearl writes that the artists intended to "bring the visitor into direct contact with the recycling operation, hoping to transform the public's attitudes toward waste and waste management" (197). The artists treated the building as a work of art in itself, not simply a functional transfer station; the engineers who created the original facility design did not think it needed to be beautiful or engaging as architecture (198). Singer and Glatt's design incorporates huge central trusses that rise up out of the building, making it visible for miles. Large windows showcase beautiful vistas, and skylights and translucent panels add even more light. By opening up the space, and making it inviting and easy to use for both the city's Sanitation Department and the general public, Singer and Glatt encouraged public involvement in the waste management process. About 5,000 children on school field trips tour the facility every year, and approximately 1,500 citizens drop off waste there every weekend (Leonard, interview). In addition, the city has made the facility, and art made from items found in the waste stream, a stop on its annual art tour.

This visibility within the community is what the artists wanted; Glatt told Tom Finkelpearl in an interview that "the first thing that we wanted to change in the site plan was the 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude that says you do not put garbage in the view of the visitor" (201). This way the facility becomes an integral part of the community's life and encourages the public to deal with the implications of its waste. The artists' perspective was important to the design of the building because they looked at the specific site and considered how it would actually be used, rather than following the prevailing practices of the industry. Singer relates his and Glatt's approach to Finkelpearl:

Every element of our design contributes to the idea of transformation, reclamation, educating the public towards issues of waste, the need to recycle, the relationship of the building to the landscape around it . . . [I]t was a great opportunity to provide vistas so people could see the city (where the garbage comes from) and its effect, if it is not recycled, on the natural environment, which is also in clear view. (204)

Because of Singer and Glatt's creative and innovative approach to integrating many different components -- community, functionality, environmentally friendly practices, education -- the 27th Avenue Center represents the future of municipal waste management. This project shows the benefits of using an artistic approach to something that ostensibly has little or nothing to do with art. City of Phoenix Public Works Director Mark Leonard feels that including artists on design teams is imperative for waste management projects:

A lot of us in the industry look at things in a certain way . . . [but] artists come in, and they look at it differently. They look at ways that you can design a facility differently, or accomplish environmental or ecological education from a point of view that is broader and has many more components to it than, in my oopinion, any of us professionals would ever achieve. They look at a way that it could be done that could attract [the public] more, be of more interest to people, that will be . . . more beneficial to the operation, and we're living proof of that. (interview)

Art is a way for Phoenix to engage the public in the facility directly. The appearance of the facility (addressing some of the concerns of neighborhood residents), its design (more user-friendly), and public involvement in events there (the art tour, student group tours) all make the 27th Avenue Center a meaningful part of the public realm. The City of Phoenix took a huge risk when it allowed the artists input in the actual plans for the facility. Rather than relegating their role to that traditionally allotted to public artists -- that of decorating a site without affecting its functionality and use -- the city administration looked at their ideas as equally legitimate, useful, and powerful as those of the engineering firm originally hired to design the facility.

The transfer station and recycling center serves as an example for other communities throughout the U.S. and even abroad. According to Singer and Glatt, the city has received so many calls from other cities interested in creating similar facilities that is has set up a consulting service (216). Leonard says the city gives several tours a month to waste management professionals, elected officials, and tourists interested in finding out how they can instigate similar projects in their communities, and that he is "confident that we have had an impact on the design" of other cities' waste management and recycling facilities. Phoenix is also using its own facility as a model: the city is now building a new recycling center and transfer station north of the city based on many of the ideas first put into practice on 27th Avenue. An artist is part of the design team for the new facility, and once again educational programming will be an integral part of the design. Leonard says that the new facility will feature an elevated walkway with windows on either side. Tour groups will be able to walk through the building and see the dual functions taking place: recycling processing on one side, and solid waste processing on the other. The city plans to continue pursuing the mix of public education, art, and function in all of its waste management practices.

The 27th Avenue Center should serve as a model not only for other waste management and recycling centers, but also for what a community can be. As Glatt told Finkelpearl:

The most obvious [difference between our design and the engineers' design] is that it just turns around the whole notion of what these places have always been in a community...the only way that you are going to turn things around [is] to be aware of the abuses and try to point the way in a new and responsible direction. (206)

A creative approach enabled the 27th Avenue Center to help change the way Phoenix residents think about waste and its disposal. Clearly the center has created a new standard for what is possible in the process of serving both a community and the environment on which it sustains itself.

Art From Scrap: Santa Barbara, California

Like the artist-in-residence program in San Francisco, Art From Scrap (AFS) is a program that utilizes trash to make art. AFS, however, was begun in 1990 by Santa Barbara parents who wanted to help find materials for local teachers to use in their classes. The concept behind AFS, as its website proclaims, "is incredibly simple and yet surprisingly unique: take materials that would normally be thrown away, and provide them as art supplies to school children and the public" to encourage recycling and waste reduction (http://www.%20communityenvironmentalcouncil.org/artfromscrap/[7]

Like SF Recycling and Disposal's Artist-in-Residence Program, the founding of AFS coincided with the passing of AB 939, so the parents (all volunteers) were able to approach local businesses for donated materials with a pitch for helping to reduce waste going to landfills, as well as helping schools and "getting the thought of reuse into people's minds," says Cay Sanchez, Program Director (interview). After a few years, the founders formed a nonprofit, and within about two years, a local nonprofit organization, the Community Environmental Council, absorbed AFS into its programming.

AFS encompasses a materials reuse store, environmental education, and an arts program, which together reach 20,000 people annually, about half of whom are students. The store accepts donations from local businesses and individuals of items as diverse as eyeglass lenses and frames, ceramic tiles, circuit boards, fabric, and envelopes. Members of the public can buy these materials, saved from entering the landfill, cheaply in bulk or individually. The store also offers teachers discounts on materials (those in the bulk section are free) when their schools join the AFS School Materials Program (cost is $1 per student).

When school groups come to AFS, they receive a 75-minute lecture, during which "environmental educators talk about Santa Barbara's landfill, where trash goes, and how to create less trash through reducing, reusing, recycling and composting;" specifically, "students learn to identify recyclable materials, observe red worms transforming food scraps to a rich soil, discuss shopping choices that conserve resources, learn about renewable and non-renewable natural resources, and explore how their individual actions can help the environment" (website). After the lecture, students participate in a workshop where they create artwork from the materials reuse store.

These education programs are funded in part by Santa Barbara County (besides mandating waste reduction, AB 939 also required cities and counties to provide education about "reduce, reuse, and recycle," the mantra of the solid waste industry). Every summer AFS holds an exhibition and auction. "About fifty local artists, both professional and non-professional participate" each year, Sanchez says. Artists donate their work to a silent auction; money raised goes to AFS's programs.

AFS creates a powerful nexus in its community: local businesses donate materials (reducing what they send to landfills and their expenses, allowing for tax deductions, and providing a sense of satisfaction that they are contributing to a good cause); artists, parents, teachers, kids, and other members of the public go to the store; school and summer camp groups participate in the educational workshops; and volunteers donate labor (usually students fulfilling community service requirements for high school or a Teen Court program, but also sometimes developmentally disabled adults). Adults are increasingly participating in Saturday workshops that are funded by the local arts commission and led by local artists. AFS has also cultivated many partnerships within the city: Contemporary Arts Forum, a local nonprofit art gallery, sometimes sponsors artists to give workshops at AFS. AFS donates gift baskets and workshop coupons to school fundraisers every year, Sanchez says, and according to the AFS website, the organization also donates materials to groups that work with at-risk youth.

AFS continues to grow organically around its mission: it has recently built a gallery space and plans to hold six shows featuring local artists in 2005. "We just, over the years, keep adding components that make sense," Sanchez declares. She notes that when the program started, it would have been impossible to do many of the things AFS does now. Because there is a solid foundation in terms of partners, audience, and programming, it is possible -- even easy -- to continue to expand around its original mission.

Sanchez says that she gets many calls from people who want to start their own art-centric materials reuse stores, but never learns if they actually do. She directs those making inquiries to a booklet put out by the Local Government Commission in Sacramento in 1996 called California's Material Exchange Facilities, which explains what these organizations are, and "how to get started, how to get materials, how to store stuff, how to exchange stuff, personnel, marketing, all kinds of things" (interview). Sanchez says she warns these callers not to assume that an organization like AFS can survive on revenues from the store alone; AFS earns only about one-quarter or one-fifth of its total budget from store sales. (The organization earns revenue from grants, free events that it is paid to appear at, contracts with the city and county, schools that pay for teachers' access to materials, and program fees for hosting birthday parties and art workshops, in addition to store sales.) AFS thus serves as an attainable model, spreading organizational knowledge and experience, and making it easier for people in other communities to begin similar efforts. Tourists often visit AFS, and Sanchez hopes that they also take what they learn back to their communities with them. She sometimes gets calls from people and businesses in other cities that want to donate materials to AFS, but says she wants other communities to deal with their own waste instead of sending it away.

When asked about the effects that AFS has on individuals once they leave the organization's facilities, Sanchez answers that she thinks that AFS influences members of the public to pursue more sustainable practices. "I also think that people who have a natural tendency that way are re-inspired or re-supported or feel like they have a place to practice what they feel like they should be practicing," she adds. In addition, Sanchez feels strongly that AFS changes behavior through the children it reaches -- these children not only gain environmental awareness at a young age, but also influence their parents to alter their consumption and waste practices. "We're definitely getting people to look at what they're doing," she avers. This includes not only changing the public's perception of what is useful and what is waste, but also affecting how people shop, what resources they use, what they recycle, and what happens to it next, Sanchez says. Besides the long-term results of educating members of the public about waste practices, Sanchez says the organization reduces waste. She points out that even if all of the art made at AFS ends up being thrown away, if the organization didn't exist, children would make art using store-bought materials, adding more bulk to landfills. AFS estimates that it diverts 30,000 pounds of trash from the waste stream every year (website).

Ultimately, Sanchez summarizes the significance of AFS as a program that encourages long-term changes in the ways in which participants think: "For me it's more about creativity, what [participants] are doing. They're not necessarily here to create a product" or become great artists. She sees the fact that AFS cultivates and encourages creativity as important not only for art-making, but also problem-solving. Individuals who are naturally inclined or trained to think creatively tend to be more flexible, open-minded, and able to see more sides of an issue, Sanchez says, and these are valuable qualities for solving environmental (and other) problems. Art should be part of every aspect of our lives, Sanchez says. In this way, AFS is helping to show the public that trash can be art -- but it also shows those who utilize the organization that other problems can also be solved in creative and progressive ways. It is a fairly simple idea, but a powerful and effective one. Hopefully materials reuse stores will continue to spread throughout the U.S., and as these organizations gain more visibility and participants, the collective consumption and waste practices of Americans will begin to stem the tide of still-useful objects that go to landfills, and will create a new generation of conscious, creative, and environmentally proactive citizens.

Footnotes

1 A common association of ecology and art is what is commonly called land art, earthworks, or environmental art. This work, created mostly in the 1960s and '70s by such artists as Robert Morris and Robert Smithson, tends to be large-scale, static sculpture; artists such as Christo and Andy Goldsworthy also make what is sometimes termed environmental art. Readers might note that other artists, such as Helen and Newton Harrison, Krzyzstof Wodiczko, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Buster Simpson, Stephen Sonfist, Jo Hanson, and Dominique Mazeaud, make or have made works that touch upon many of the same themes that I explore in my thesis. This thesis does not include these works for one or more of the following reasons: they tend not to engage with the ecology (the trophic, or solar energy-based life cycles) of a place but instead typically highlight some aspect of the environment, usually largely aesthetic; are traditionally completely dependent on one person's particular vision; do not, in general, encourage or inspire wide-spread ecological awareness and activism; and are often temporary, or exist only hypothetically. Although several artists are included in this document, their work is examined for its larger social and ecological implications, not for its aesthetic qualities. This document does not look at art as a product to be evaluated, but instead as a process intrinsic to the human perspective, and ultimately one that belongs in all aspects of our lives. Some readers might take issue with what I have chosen to include and exclude; here I would like to point out that I offer this document not as a complete survey, but instead a preliminary exploration of what is possible in ecology and community when art is involved, and what we can hope for -- and work toward -- in the future.

2 SF Recycling & Disposal's strong push toward recycling was likely due in large part to the passing of AB 939, also known as The California Integrated Waste Management Act of 1989, which mandated that cities and counties convert at least 50% of their waste stream from landfills to recycling efforts by the year 2000.

3 Websites will initially be referenced in full; thereafter, they will be referenced only as "website" unless it is unclear which website I mean.

4 The work of artists-in-residence varies widely -- as can be expected because of their differing interests and artistic practices -- but can include items like furniture, clothing, flags, vessels, cardboard, games, books, trophies, kitchenware, household appliances, and toys. I have not included any photos of specific artists' work precisely because it is all so different; the Artist-in-Residence website has photos of all of participating artists' work.

5 Throughout this document, when I write "according to so-and-so" or "so-and-so says," I will reference the interview conducted the first time I mention that person. Thereafter, the reference should be clearly inferred from the context; this will avoid repetitive, distracting parenthetical references. When it isn't clear from the context that I am quoting the interview, I have added a reference.

6 A successful recycling educational facility outside the U.S. is The Center for Creative Recycling (Il Centro di Riciclaggio Creativo), known as REMIDA, in Reggio Emilia, Italy. REMIDA , which has extensive public programming, combines many of the components of the Phoenix 27 th Avenue Center with those of both the SF Recycling & Disposal Artist-in- Residence Program and Art in Scrap (and other materials reuse facilities), discussed later in this thesis.

7 Material reuse centers focusing on the arts exist in many cities, especially on the West Coast: MECCA (Materials Exchange Center for Community Arts) in Eugene, Oregon, East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse in Berkeley, California, SCRAP (Scroungers Center for Reusable Art Parts) in San Francisco, California, and SCRAP (School and Community Reuse Action Project) in Portland, Oregon, et al. MECCA's website (http://www.materials-exchange.org/) features links to these and others.

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Creative and Green: Art, Ecology, and Community:

YOU ARE HERE:Chapter 1: Art in Waste Management and Recycling Education
AFTER THAT: Chapter 2: Art in Land and Water Remediation

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