Wave Hill's Summer Exhibition to Focus on Artist As Environmental

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Wave Hill’s Summer Exhibition to Focus on Artist as Environmental Instigator Opening July 1, Glyndor Gallery Showcases Projects Across New York City

Bronx, NY, June 11, 2018—Artists are the voice of the community. Often they are the first to voice social concerns and the most effective at garnering grass-roots support for important issues. Not surprisingly, as communities’ concerns about persistent environmental issues have escalated, artists have been uniquely positioned to actively respond, collaborating with engineers, designers, landscape architects, ecologists, historians and other professionals to bridge the gap between science, art and activism. Today, in New York City alone, artists and artist collectives have initiated dozens of complex environmental projects. Wave Hill stands at the center of this paradigm shift—and the work it has generated—providing the impetus for Wave Hill’s summer exhibition. Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator opens July 1. For Wave Hill Senior Curator Jennifer McGregor, for the message of artist as instigator to be effective, it needs to connect with multiple audiences and resonate with locale and topic. Thus the garden’s curatorial team has devoted the gallery space to creating a kind of laboratory setting for showcasing more than a dozen artist-initiated projects generated across the city, addressing issues ranging from water quality and food justice to soil carbon content and resiliency. It is driven, in part, by Wave Hill’s desire to foster environmental stewardship, especially in ways that are explicitly educational. Stewardship, for example, lies at the heart of the garden’s decades-long paid internships for teens to learn about and practice urban ecology. With opportunities for visitor reactions and suggestions, Ecological Consciousness will include photo and video documentation, interactive activities, a directory of workshops and events happening offsite and a guide to visit the locations. The projects, by gallery space, are introduced below.

North Gallery

THE POINT’s South Bronx Resiliency Arts Fellowship is taking place this spring through workshops with Hunt’s Point residents and workers to raise awareness about aspects of resiliency. Wave Hill presents projects by residency artists Blanka Amezkua, Brandon Ballengée, Lynn Cazabon and Alicia Grullon. City as Living Laboratory makes complex issues of sustainability tangible through artist-initiated projects. Founded by the artist Mary Miss, the organization studied the Marble Hill and Van Cortlandt Park section of Broadway and invited artists to develop a number of projects for Daylighting Tibbetts Brook. The inaugural projects include a moveable, wetlands demonstration by SLO Architecture and a series of body painting events by Bob Braine, planned to launch in the Van Cortlandt Park tennis courts in the fall.

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Lillian Ball has developed a series of WATERWASH projects that provide wetland habitat restoration and absorb storm water overflow. The proposal for WATERWASH on the Bronx River was included in Remediate/Revision at Wave Hill in 2010. WATERWASH was completed in 2015 and will be presented through a video and photographs. Eve Mosher and Clarinda Mac Low are part of Works on Water, a group of artists and curators dedicated to working with water to bring awareness to the public of the issues and conditions that impact their environment through art. Their installation, created for the show, maps NYC’s waterways and identifies various projects and strategies artists are using to engage water as a subject and a place. Works on Water is also hosting short-term residencies for artists on Governors Island this summer.

Center Gallery Jean Shin proposes a massive levee of blue denim sandbags for Louis Valentino Park on the Red Hook shoreline in Brooklyn. This is a direct response to the devastating impact of Hurricane Sandy in the neighborhood where the artist works. Created from cast-off jeans, the project invites residents to engage in emergency readiness while developing long-term solutions. Her proposal is presented with sandbags created from denim collected from the Wave Hill community. Shin was a 2018 Winter Workspace artist.

Since 2016, Swale: a Floating Food Forest, created by Mary Mattingly, has visited waterfront parks in the Bronx, Brooklyn and on Governors Island. It is a fully planted barge with solar and irrigation systems that provide visitors with free, healthy fruits and vegetables. In May and June, the barge is located at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. During the summer, the plants will be transferred to Governors Island and the Concrete Plant Park on the Bronx River.

Artist Juanli Carrión initiated the Outer Seed Shadow Project (OSS) in 2014 as a series of geopolitical gardens that demonstrate the union between plant and human interaction by using different plant species. Made in collaboration with Jacki Fischer, the project’s first permanent garden, located at the Marble Hill Houses, came to fruition in 2017. This summer, two new projects are underway with artists selected through an open call. Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong is working on an extension to the Marble Hill Houses site and Asha Hanna is working with Dyckman Houses residents on designing and implementing a new garden.

South Gallery Two New York Hall of Science Designer-in-Residence projects will be included: Jan Mun will exhibit dioramas that she is creating with the museum’s Explainers, as part of her research for a new mycoremediation project on Newtown Creek. Brooke Singer’s Carbon Sponge project includes three test plots where an interdisciplinary team is studying how various conditions affect the amount of carbon stored or released in soils, with a focus on urban and exurban conditions.

Greg Lindquist is working with Newtown Creek Water Keeper Willis Elkins on water sampling, part of an extensive water quality program that collects data and offers ways for local residents to help improve conditions. He will exhibit a video and map documenting sampling sites.

OnBehalfof.Life is a web platform initiated by the Environmental Performance Agency (EPA), an artist collective founded in 2017 in response to the proposed defunding of the U.S. Environmental Protection MORE// -3- Agency. It encourages people to submit comments on environmental justice issues to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of another species, with a focus on amplifying the voices of wild urban plants (a.k.a. weeds). This iteration of the project focuses on multispecies habitats of the Bronx.

Tattfoo Tan’s NERTM (New Earth Resiliency Training Module) teaches an ethos of self-reliance and living closer to the earth, especially within an urban environment. A banner with instructions on making a herbarium will be presented along with four, complete herbariums.

The Stewardship Mapping and Assessment Project (STEW-MAP) is a national USDA Forest Service research program designed identify which environmental stewardship groups are working across urban landscapes. In New York, it is administered by the NYC Urban Field Station. As one of the many “stewardship groups,” Wave Hill set up an interactive station in the gallery to capture visitors’ comments.

Public Programs All programs offered at Wave Hill in conjunction with Ecological Consciousness are free with admission to the grounds.

SUN, July 1, 2‒4:30PM, Summer Exhibitions Opening Reception. These include solo exhibitions by Beth Galton and Cynthia Hartling in Wave Hill House, and installations by Priyanka Dasgupta & Chad Marshall and Katie Westmoreland in Glyndor Gallery’s Sunroom and Sunporch.

THU, July 19, 6–7:30PM, Countering Risk through Resiliency: An Open Conversation This conversation is co-hosted with THE POINT, whose South Bronx Resiliency Arts Fellowship has engaged four artists represented in Ecological Consciousness.

THU, August 2, 6–7:30PM, OnBehalfof.Life: Bronx Edition Environmental Performance Agency (EPA) Agents will be on hand to facilitate conversations about environmental issues affecting multispecies habitats in the Bronx River Watershed and how these issues are influenced by environmental protection policy. Visitors will have the opportunity to participate in the OnBehalfof.Life project by submitting a public comment to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of another species, helping to articulate a vision for environmental justice on behalf of all life.

SUN, August 5, 1:30–4PM Neighbors Engaging the Environment Explore two thought-provoking exhibitions at neighboring institutions in one afternoon. The Derfner Judaica Museum + The Art Collection’s Associate Curator Emily O’Leary will give informal tours of Erosion: Works by Leonard Ursachi, whose work addresses themes of environmental and social crises caused by manmade events. The exhibition reflects on how the destruction of natural resources is intimately interconnected with the effacement of human history and culture. Wave Hill Senior Curator Jennifer McGregor will give informal tours of Wave Hill’s Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator. Wave Hill provides shuttle service between the Hebrew Home and Wave Hill. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Ecological Consciousness: Artist as Instigator is organized by Wave Hill’s curatorial team, Jennifer McGregor and Eileen Jeng Lynch.

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Support for the Visual Arts Program is provided by the Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Inc.; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; New York Community Trust Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; The Pollock- Krasner Foundation; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; and by the Cathy and Stephen Weinroth Commissioning Fund for the Arts. Wave Hill Incorporated is an independent; non-profit cultural institution governed by a volunteer Board of Directors. The buildings and grounds of Wave Hill are owned by the City of New York. With the assistance of the Bronx Borough President and Bronx representatives in the City Council and State Legislature; Wave Hill’s operations are supported with public funds through the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; the Zoos; Botanical Gardens and Aquariums Grant Program administered by the New York State Office of Parks; Recreation and Historic Preservation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation; and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

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A 28-acre public garden and cultural center overlooking the Hudson River and Palisades, Wave Hill’s mission is to celebrate the artistry and legacy of its gardens and landscapes, to preserve its magnificent views, and to explore human connections to the natural world through programs in horticulture, education and the arts.

HOURS Open year-round, Tuesday–Sunday and many major holidays. 9AM–5:30PM, Mar 15–Oct 31; 9AM–4:30PM, Nov 1–Mar 14.

ADMISSION TO $8 adults, $4 students and senior 65+, $2 children 6–18. THE GROUNDS Free Tuesdays and Saturdays until noon. Free to members, children under 6.

DIRECTIONS Getting here is easy! Located only 30 minutes from midtown Manhattan, Wave Hill’s free shuttle van transports you to and from our front gate and Metro-North’s Riverdale station, the W. 242 Street stop on the #1 subway line, and to and from our free offsite parking lot. Limited onsite parking is available for $8 per vehicle. Complete directions and shuttle van schedule at wavehill.org.

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