Top Page-Section features a selection of my concept designs and finished projects. Each Title links to a separate page with more images and a short project description. [Concept designs for public art are only initial ideas to begin a conversation with partners.]
Bottom Page-Section reveals how my training and past art-making (in printmaking, crafts, wearable art, mixed-media art, kinetic art, interactive art, environmental projects, and biophilia art), influence the style and functionality of my engagement strategies.
Click on *red titles* below for associated images and project details.
Agri-Culture: SOIL BigHats
I’m working on a new series of Climate Change BigHats to be intriguing conversation-starters and worn in public engagement PopUp events. This first hat is about eco-regenerative farming and that Dirt Is Not Soil. Others will be about livestock, pollinators, water, waste, and food innovations. (I’m seeking a farm residency to finish this series 🙂
Climate Change Activist Pop-Ups
Instead of the body-language and loud voices of street marchers, Climate Troubadours are silent, wear uniforms with big/dramatic Climate Hats, and use flash-cards to create an “opening” for thoughtful conversations.
Climate Troubadour Jumper: Too Hot
Covid-19 prevented my Climate Jumpers from making-it onto Main Streets or into city parks, so I re-envisioned this one as a graphic image for an outdoor activities’ ad campaign. Being outside was made even more important to our health via the Covid-19 epidemic!
Climate Change ThinkingCap: Composite
This was my first Climate Hat (2019). Click the link to see all four sides: Each of the four sides represents a devastating climate change impact: melting polar ice caps/rising sea levels, California wildfires, Houston floods, and HABs (Harmful Algal Blooms) along Florida’s shorelines.
This Climate Change EmergencyCap was inspired by the sentiments of the brave young climate activist, Greta Thunberg, who speaks truth-to-power and activated a global climate youth movement of millions.
Concept sketch for an indoor, interactive, multi-media installation experience designed to help shift public perceptions of their relationship to nature, its power, and our dependency on it for our “life-support” systems.
The local, national, and international community is invited to submit images and poetic, one-liner texts about the wind for an intriguing digital display in which the wind also powers the artwork.
This community crafts workshop enlists fisher Elders on Small Island Nations to share TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) with participating “makers,” and ends with a new performative ritual celebrating endangered ocean species.
Teens become armatures and “listening-boards” of portable, temporary, “living sculptures” for city parks. After attracting people, teens ask “visitors” how they feel about climate change — the best way to begin a conversation.
Repurposing My Past
My previous artworks and projects, including art-sci exhibitions designed/organized/and co-produced for ASCI (Art & Science Collaborations, Inc.) and mostly held at the New York Hall of Science, fall into the distinct visual art categories below:
Clicking on each Category brings you to its Index-Page.
For a while, my mother was an amateur landscape painter and my surroundings living in NYC, after years in Vermont/NH, have crept into my art. Experiencing nature on forested dog walks, riding my bicycle cautiously on city streets, or waiting for a subway train, all allow time for observation.
My college training in printmaking and photography reflected NYC’s energy and structures into my wearable city-scapes.
After years of working in 2D, I could not contain my desire to add textures and patterns to low-relief works and then small 3D art.
NYC is a 24/7 kinetic world! Experiencing George Rhoads’ audio-kinetic sculpture, 42nd Street Ballroom, showed me the power of movement and change in art. This led to designing kinetic art exhibitions and creating a large-scale aquatic sculpture with a solar-powered light system.
I learned a lot from watching children at NYC’s hands-on museums, which led me to designing and leading “maker” workshops with teens and families. Both informed my later museum commissions utilizing public interactivity.
Having a heartfelt purpose and exposure to the work of exceptional artists via my work with ASCI, enabled my design intuition for producing environmental projects and exhibitions.
Sometimes when I watch a docu-film about atrocities to animals (since they cannot speak for themselves), I feel compelled to express myself artistically, rather than keep my sadness and outrage inside!