If someone was to ask me what my medium is, as this place is really my medium
as a young artist, I was trying to figure out what my vocabulary would be and I really didn't
want it to be about making big objects. I wanted to figure out a different way to
make things and have them communicate. In the sculpture class in particular. I was able to
kind of formulate ideas or responses to things in a way that I didn't have access to in writing
or in in any other thing that I had tried doing. The stripping things down to a kind
of skeletal framework with some strange early pieces made with string and rope and canvas.
As I was making those, I ended up putting them outdoors and it was a way to engage the landscape,
which was really interesting to me. For me, it was really about something being more intimate.
I was really interested in the way you could begin to read the world around you in a different way.
I started to meet a lot of young women who wanted to be artists, and we became
very active in insisting that our work be taken seriously, that our work be looked at,
and it's very difficult to be taken seriously at that time. It was no longer wanting to accept the
status quo and really insisting that our voices be heard. It's not about a certain style that
came out of the seventies. I think it's about this sense of a collective vision to imagine a future
that is richer, that's more generous, that's more caring. And I think it's the thing that has stayed
with me so strongly over these years is that we can create our own circumstances. So here I am
making these temporary projects that would be up for a, you know, a few months and then taken down
again and have a chance to do this complex out on Long Island. "Perimeters, Pavilions, Decoys,"
it ended up being the project that most fully defines who I am to many people.
I had imagined this idea of this underground structure that was like walking under the
skin of the earth that you had just come across the visceral quality of
being able to go under the ground and into this darkened passage where there's a wall
with openings into yet another dark space with a very mysterious project.
I think New Yorkers think they're so separate from nature that its nature is out there someplace
and a place like the South Cove allows that reconnection with nature in a very intense where
it was a new way of having access to the waterfront. You really hear the water, You
smell the water. If the tide is high, you'll get your feet wet, it'll splash through the walkway.
Doing the South Cove solidified my idea that artists could have an impact,
a very positive impact on the public realm, so we could give people experiences that wouldn't
be available to them otherwise. That physical engagement was really an important part of
the work and something that continues today with the work that we're doing.
As I look back on the path that I've had, it seems very strange to me in a way. I've
really transitioned into a different position as an artist. I'm still engaged in coming up
with the conceptual framing of these projects. So we came up with this idea of cities living
laboratory sustainability made tangible through the arts. Recently, we had a planning session
to bring about 40 people together to talk about paths forward, trying to imagine not just my view
of what would need to happen, but realizing that issues were so big, so broad that we needed to
have this collective approach because the data's already happening and the Citizens Living Lab is
just so grateful. So thank you. Just really appreciate it. Artists have this ability to
help people imagine something. Artists can give an experience that can create an engagement.
So this is the Watermark Project in Milwaukee. I really wanted people to begin to look carefully
at the water that runs off the streets and the impact that it has on the river. The idea was how
we could set up a kind of call and response with the citizens. So we proposed lighting the stack,
being able to use it as a beacon that signals whether there might be a chance
of a sewage overflow and if there's a chance of a sewage overflow. The stack lighting turns
red and that warns people not to use bathtubs, dishwashers, heavy uses of water. And in that way,
everybody starts to be part of the green infrastructure of the city.
When we had workshops with the community, we found out one of the biggest issues is with
flooding in the Bronx, that severe flooding hit so quickly. Dozens of cars were trapped
on the Bronx River Parkway as the water rose and the car started flowing. And,
you know, the car just are floating and shut off.
Here we're looking over the area where the water
from the pond goes directly into the sewer under Broadway. It starts here
and then it crosses the park and ends up underneath the street of Broadway.
This is an opportunity to solve the problem of the flooding by getting the extra water out of
the sewer system and putting it in an alternative corridor and creating a park. At the same time,
at the city's living lab, we've been orchestrating this idea of engaging artists
in the development of this dream, especially artists from this neighborhood of the Bronx,
to come up with ways to find this a place that they want to be that is meaningful to them.
The vision that I really hold is that we have many artists in many communities working and
engaging people in a very direct way. I think this totally goes back to those early years of
feminism, of finding an alternative to singular structures. Networks are what it's all about.