Prof.Ound is a Black, disabled, nonbinary artist, organizer, and self-described 'underground ecologist.' Since 2017, Prof.Ound has used their love for African-American folk spirituals, theatre, and speculative art to facilitate workshops about environmental issues that combine scientific scholarship with digital media and ritual performance. Bronx-born and raised, Prof.Ound is devoted to building communities of resistance among marginalized populations disproportionately impacted by environmental injustices.
Perrin Ireland
Perrin Ireland is a visual storyteller at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She uses doodles to report on the science behind environmental issues. She is also a trained graphic facilitator, with experience scribing high level visioning sessions and conferences around the country.
Paloma McGregor
Paloma McGregor is a Caribbean-born, New York-based choreographer and arts leader. As co-founder and Artistic Director of Angela’s Pulse, McGregor has spent more than a decade centering Black voices through collaborative, “community-specific” performance projects. A former newspaper editor, McGregor brings a choreographer’s craft, a journalist’s urgency, and a community organizer’s framework in the service of big visions. The daughter of a fisherman and public school art teacher, McGregor amplifies and remixes the quotidian choreographies of Black folks, reactivating them in often-embattled public spaces. McGregor’s work situates performers and witnesses at the embodied intersection of the ancestral past and an envisioned future; for her, tradition transcends time.
Nancy Nowacek
Nancy Nowacek is an artist and designer. Her work focuses on the habits and practices of daily life as they relate to the natural and built environment, and the systems that produce and are produced in them. Her practice encompasses a wide spectrum of research: climate change, land use, the labor and leisure, and feminism and aging. She has shown work in the United States, Canada, China, the Netherlands, and Venezuela. She is co-founder of artist collective Works on Water and teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology. She is currently Education Artist-in-Residence at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Mary Miss
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design, and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. She has developed the “City as Living Lab”, a framework for making issues of sustainability tangible through collaboration and the arts.
Trained as a sculptor, her work creates situations emphasizing a site’s history, its ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. Mary Miss has been redefining how art is integrated into the public realm since the early 1970s. She is interested in how artists can play a more central role in addressing the complex issues of our times—making environmental and social sustainability into tangible experiences. Collaboration has been central to her work as she has developed projects as diverse as creating a temporary memorial around the perimeter of Ground Zero, marking the predicted flood level of Boulder, Colorado, revealing the history of the Union Square Subway station in New York City and in WaterMarks, her current project creating an atlas of water for the city of Milwaukee.
Mary Miss has been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center. Among others, her work has been included in the exhibitions: Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change curated by Lucy Lippard, co-presented by the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and EcoArts Connections, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 70’s, Brandeis Museum’s Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.
Miss’s influential work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the Urban Land Institute’s Global Award for Excellence and the 2017 Bedrock of New York City Award.
Mary Mattingly
Mary Mattingly is a visual artist. She founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City. Docked at public piers but following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigates New York's public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food. Swale instigated and co-created the "foodway" in Concrete Plant Park, the Bronx in 2017. The "foodway" is the first time New York City Parks is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. It's currently considered a pilot project.
Mary Mattingly’s work has also been exhibited at Storm King, the International Center of Photography, the Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Public Library, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. With the U.S. Department of State and Bronx Museum of the Arts she participated in the smARTpower project, traveling to Manila. Mattingly has been awarded grants and fellowships from the James L. Knight Foundation, Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, Yale University School of Art, the Harpo Foundation, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Art Matters Foundation. Her work has been featured in Aperture Magazine, Art in America, Artforum, Art News, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Financial Times, Le Monde Magazine, Metropolis Magazine, New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, the Brooklyn Rail, and on BBC News, MSNBC, NPR, WNBC, and on Art21. Her work has been included in books such as the Whitechapel/MIT Press Documents of Contemporary Art series titled “Nature” and edited by Jeffrey Kastner, Triple Canopy’s Speculations, the Future Is... published by Artbook, and Henry Sayre’s A World of Art, 8th edition, published by Pearson Education Inc.
Mariel Villeré
Trained as an architectural designer and historian, Mariel Villeré researches, writes, and organizes exhibits and cultural programming at the intersection of architecture, art, landscape, and the city.
She is currently the Program Development Director in the Office of Academic Initiatives and Strategic Innovation at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She was formerly the Manager for Programs, Arts and Grants at Freshkills Park/NYC Parks, where she worked to build the art program for the landfill-to-park site through an inquiry-based artist residency program, Field R/D, and through the on-site Studio+Gallery she founded in January 2018. Her work has been the subject of articles in Hyperallergic, Art in America, ArtSpace, andBOMB Magazine.
Her graduate thesis for the Masters of Science in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture & Art at MIT focused on the first documenta in 1955 in Kassel, Germany and related the exhibit design to the landscape and garden show in the midst of postwar urban reconstruction.
Other writings have been published by Sternberg Press, Thresholds, PLOT, MIT/Keller Gallery, RISD Int|AR, and Urban Omnibus independently and representing Freshkills Park. She occasionally updates her blog and boardsof visual inspirations and associations.
Marie Lorenz
Mare Liberum
Mare Liberum is a freeform publishing, boatbuilding and waterfront art collective based in the Gowanus area of Brooklyn, New York. Finding its roots in centuries-old stories of urban water squatters and haphazard water craft builders, Mare Liberum is a collaborative exploration of what it takes to make viable aquatic craft as an alternative to life on land — and as a way to make visible the overlooked and the neglected, in particular the often toxic waterways of our cities. The collective draws from sources as diverse as ocean-crossing raft assemblages, improvised refugee boats built in Senegal and Cuba, and modern stitch-and-ply construction methods which make complex, classic boat designs approachable by novice builders. Mare Liberum’s boats, broadsheets and workshops have been exhibited by MASS MoCA, The Neuberger Museum, Maker Faire, Psy-Geo-Conflux Festival, Parsons/The New School, Boston Center for the Arts, the Boston Children’s Museum, EFA Project Space, Alexandraplatz, the Antique Boat Museum, and have been written about in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Bad at Sports, The Village Voice, and Vice Magazine, among others.
KC Trommer
KC Trommer is the author of We Call Them Beautiful (Diode Editions, 2019) as well as the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl press, 2014). She is the founder of the online audio project QUEENSBOUND. With Spencer Reece, she co-curates the weekly Red Door Series at St. Mark’s Church. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her son.
Kate Liebman
Kate Liebman is an artist who lives and works in New York. By working serially, she tests whether seeing leads to understanding. Her work attends to the passage of time -- time as recorded in history, art history and memory. She investigates the overlap and interplay between the personal and collective, between the self and the screen, and how the tension between remembering and forgetting impacts these subjects. She graduated from Columbia University with her MFA in 2019, and Yale College with her BA in 2013. She has received residencies and grants from the Lower East Side Printshop, the Vermont Studio Center, the Institute for Investigative Living at AZ West in Joshua Tree, and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Her work has been exhibited at LatchKey Gallery, the Wallach Gallery at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, 15 Orient, the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, MX, Ortega y Gasset, FringeArts Philadelphia, Montez Press Radio, and the Jewish Museum of New York. In addition to being part of the Soho House Collections, her work has been reviewed on WKCR, Hyperallergic, and Two Coats of Paint. She has taught at Columbia University, Sussex County Community College, and the Manhattan Graphics Center.
Kamau Ware
Kamau Ware is a multidimensional creative blending complementary yet disparate disciplines as an Artist / Historian. Ware retells and expands history with scholarship and visual storytelling to fuse creativity and learning into one experience. He is best known for his flagship storytelling project, Black Gotham Experience (BGX), which is an immersive multimedia project founded in 2010 that reimagines the African Diaspora as one unified epic through a series of experiences including walks, talks, media, and events. Kamau Ware is the author of a forthcoming graphic novel series based on the five core historic walks of the Black Gotham Experience.
John Atkinson
John Atkinson is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, as well as a writer on energy and environmental issues. As part of Aa (“Big A little a”), a group of percussion-heavy experimentalists and mainstays of the Brooklyn 2000s DIY music scene, he released several albums and toured the US, Europe, and Australia. His solo work transmutes and disfigures field recordings to create hyperreal soundscapes, evoking the ways in which "nature" and processes of environmental change have become inextricable from the manmade in the era of climate change.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is a 1.5 generation Jamaican-American interdisciplinary artist living and working in Queens, NY. Her work often explores performance and installation art drawing from the nostalgia of her homeland, Caribbean folklore, fantasy, feminism, globalism, spirituality, environmentalism, and migration.
She holds a BFA with honors from New World School of the Arts, University of Florida and an MFA from Hunter College, CUNY. Lyn-Kee-Chow’s exhibitions of note include “Jamaican Pulse: Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora”, Royal West Academy of England, Bristol, UK (2016), a special project commission at “Jamaica Biennial”, The National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, JA (2017), “Live Action 12” in Gothenburg, Sweden (2017), Guangzhou Live 5: International Performance Art Festival, China (2014).
Lyn-Kee-Chow’s work has garnered a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award in Interdisciplinary Art (2012), Rema Hort Mann Artist in Community Engagement Award (2017), Franklin Furnace Fund (2017-18), Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice (2018), and Queens Art Fund (2019). She is also a faculty member at School of Visual Arts, NY.
https://www.jodielynkeechow.com/
Floating Studio for Dark Ecologies
Emily Blumenfeld
Emily Blumenfeld is a public art consultant, curator and art historian with expertise in strategic planning, artist selection, exhibition production, media relations, and working with artists to ensure the maximum impact of their work. Emily curated the 2018 Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge project Inspiring Community Healing After Gun Violence: The Power of Art in the cities of Coral Springs and Parkland, FL with the Coral Springs Museum of Art, develops public art plans and manages large-scale integrated design projects in NYC.
Elizabeth Webb
Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs. She has screened and exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria, Norway and Germany and was a recipient of the inaugural Allan Sekula Social Documentary Award in 2014. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from California Institute of the Arts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She was Fall 2019 Visiting Faculty in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2015 she has been the Creative Producer for Arts in a Changing America and in 2020 worked on the launch of the Cultural New Deal for Cultural and Racial Justice. She is currently co-editing an anthology with Roberta Uno and Daniela Alvarez entitled FUTURE/PRESENT: Culture in a Changing America solicited by Duke University Press.
Electric Djinn
Electric Djinn is an American-born New York City-based electronic music producer, performer, and inter-disciplinary artist.
Electric Djinn is an American-born New York City-based electronic music producer, performer, and inter-disciplinary artist.
She works on site specific multi-media installations, performance and live music. These include the use of sound design, electronic music, projected video, dance, and extended reality technology.
Her sound/music incorporates the production of electronic, virtual music instrumentation with the infusion of healing frequencies and modalities such as singing bowls and chanting, binaural beats, and isochronic tones. She holds certificates as a sound healing practitioner and includes this knowledge in her music/sound compositions.
Presently she is working on an ongoing series of inter-disciplinary works entitled “Liminal Bodies | Parts 1-4”
Electric Djinn also collaborates with visual/performance artists, dancers, and film and video makers.
She has collaborated with and is a founding member of “Extended Reality Ensemble” This group explores Extended Reality and Mixed reality performances, dealing with technology in art.
Other past notable collaborations are with Maria Hupfield, performing live music/sound at the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturdays for “The Kind Of Dream You’ve Never Seen,”. "The One Who Keeps On Giving" at Galerie U’QUÀM in Montreal. “Electric Prop and Hum" at Gibney Dance Space in New York City. She has received a Bessie Award as a contributing artist and is a recent recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant.
Her sound/music incorporates the production of electronic, virtual music instrumentation with the infusion of healing frequencies and modalities such as singing bowls and chanting, binaural beats, and isochronic tones. She holds certificates as a sound healing practitioner and includes this knowledge in her music/sound compositions.
Presently she is working on an ongoing series of inter-disciplinary works entitled “Liminal Bodies | Parts 1-4”
Electric Djinn also collaborates with visual/performance artists, dancers, and film and video makers. She has collaborated with and is a founding member of “Extended Reality Ensemble” This group explores Extended Reality and Mixed reality performances, dealing with technology in art.
Other past notable collaborations are with Maria Hupfield, performing live music/sound at the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturdays for “The Kind of Dream You’ve Never Seen,”. "The One Who Keeps on Giving" at Galerie U’QUÀM in Montreal. “Electric Prop and Hum" at Gibney Dance Space in New York City. She has received a Bessie Award as a contributing artist and is a recent recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Denae Howard
Featured
Amy Wetsch
Amy is a NYC based multidisciplinary artist and educator originating from Louisville, Kentucky. Her artistic practice spans from creating installations, paintings, drawings, mixed media sculptures, to publicly engaged works. Amy’s work examines the intersections of various sciences and investigates ideas of the internal and external struggles of the human body. Her work focuses on lifting chronically ill voices while shedding light on the mistrust in our modern-day medical systems. Another large facet of her practice focuses on collaborating with people in diverse scientific fields such as planetary scientists from Johns Hopkins University and NASA. She believes there is a healing power emitted when communities come together to reflect on the wonder and awe of the world around us and the power of the human imagination.
Amy received her BFA from Western Kentucky University (WKU) and her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in the Mount Royal School of Multidisciplinary Art. Amy has exhibited her work in various galleries and museums nationally, including The Kentucky Museum, The National Academy of Sciences, The Museum of Contemporary Art Nashville, and in galleries throughout New York City. Amy has attended artist residencies such as the Trestle Art Space Residency and the Post Contemporary Residency. She was selected as a 2018 HEMI/MICA Extreme Arts Fellow, a 2018 National Academy of Sciences fellow, and selected for a 2019 European Space Agency conference in Madrid, Spain. Amy is also a lead artist on the newly selected NASA mission, Dragonfly.