Mark Tribe: Learning to Love the Future

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Mark Tribe, Bottsford Hollow, 2012, inkjet print, 24” x 38”. From the series Rare Earth.

A founder of Rhizome, Mark Tribe is known for his early contributions to the field of new media art and his socially-engaged performances and installations. His current practice engages the power of aesthetic experience to illuminate the challenges we and future generations will face in the climate crisis. Since 2012, he has made landscape pictures that unpack American ideas about nature and land, from Manifest Destiny to contemporary environmentalism. In this interview, Mark talks about his views on the climate, his landscapes, and his integration of machine learning tools (AI) into his latest project Learning to Love the Future.

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Envisioning Adaptation – Symposium on Art and Adaptation to the Climate Crisis at the Catskill Art Space

David Brooks, installation shots of Budding Bird Blind, at Planting Fields Arboretum, Oyster Bay, NY, and maquettes showing the future forest succession as the trees supplant the building

On April 23rd, Earth Day, 2023, at the Catskill Art Space in Livingston Manor, NY, I moderated a panel on artists’ responses to the climate crisis titled “Envisioning Adaptation.” The panel was one of the many events the director of the CAS, Sally Wright, has hosted at the arts and performance space newly refurbished in 2022. The concept for the symposium was to create a forum of artists whose practices addressed the idea of adaptation to, as opposed to mitigation of, the climate crisis. The panel participants included David Brooks, Simone Couto, Alexandra Hammond, Brian Kelley, and J. Morgan Puett.

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Sa’dia Rehman walks you through memories of displacement on the colonized lands of Governors Island

Installation view Desire Lines, photo Argenis, courtesy of KODA

Sa’dia Rehman: Desire Lines is a solo exhibition as part of artist’s residency with KODA on Governors Island, New York. Rehman’s exhibition focuses on the building of the Tarbela dam in Pakistan in 1968-1976 – a hydroelectric dam responsible for the displacement and forced migration of 184 villages and the climate devastation following the completion of this project.

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Collage and Then Some: Vitamin C+

Book Review
Vitamin C+ Collage in Contemporary Art. Introductory essay by Yuval Etgar. Phaidon (back cover)

Recently released by Phaidon, Vitamin C+ is another noteworthy addition to the publisher’s boundlessly malleable series of anthological volumes gathering scores of artist profiles into luxuriantly illustrated, conceptually cohesive tomes. Medium, era, genre, or movement tend to be the organizational binders for these books, as might be expected, and they’re generally wonderful and inspiring as such. But they’re sometimes wonderful and inspiring in less obvious ways as well, furnishing readers with much more to delve into, reflect on, and revisit time and again.

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Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens: Nancy Nowacek

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Video still from Nowacek’s, TO THE FUTURE MAYOR: Single channel video 13:14 2021

Bay Ridge through an Ecological Lens is a multi-faceted public art exhibition hosted by Stand4 Gallery and presented in collaboration with ecoartspace

This interactive, public, community arts exhibition is curated by Jennifer McGregor, featuring artists  Rebecca Allan, Aaron Asis, Chris Costan, Kate Dodd,  Peter Edlund, Kristin Reiber-Harris, Ellen Coleman-Izzo, Sergey Jivetin,  Nathan Kensinger, Rita Leduc, Christopher Lin, Nikki Lindt, E.J. McAdams/ Jimbo Blachly,  Nancy Nowacek in collaboration with Carla Kihlstedt and Carlos Alomar,  Benjamin Swett and filmmakers:  Aaron Assis, Nate Dorr, Sean Hanley, Nathan Kensinger, Nikki Lindt, Emily Packer and Lesley Steele, and Kristin Reiber-Harris.

It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel will feature a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration, here with artist Nancy Nowacek.

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Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens: Peter Edlund

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Peter Edlund. Photo courtesy of the artist

Bay Ridge through an Ecological Lens is a multi-faceted public art exhibition hosted by Stand4 Gallery and presented in collaboration with ecoartspace

This interactive, public, community arts exhibition is curated by Jennifer McGregor, featuring artists  Rebecca Allan, Aaron Asis, Chris Costan, Kate Dodd,  Peter Edlund, Kristin Reiber-Harris, Ellen Coleman-Izzo, Sergey Jivetin,  Nathan Kensinger, Rita Leduc, Christopher Lin, Nikki Lindt, E.J. McAdams/ Jimbo Blachly,  Nancy Nowacek in collaboration with Carla Kihlstedt and Carlos Alomar,  Benjamin Swett and filmmakers:  Aaron Assis, Nate Dorr, Sean Hanley, Nathan Kensinger, Nikki Lindt, Emily Packer and Lesley Steele, and Kristin Reiber-Harris

It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel will feature a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration, here with artist Peter Edlund.

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Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens: Jennifer McGregor

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A group of people looking up at the camera

Description automatically generated with medium confidence
Kate Dodd, E. J. McAdams & Jennifer McGregor enjoy haiku installed in the ceiling lamps by E.J. and Jimbo Blachly as part of Kate’s Bay Ridge Tree Collection at the Bay Ridge Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. Photo courtesy of E. J. McAdams.

Bay Ridge through an Ecological Lens is a multi-faceted public art exhibition hosted by Stand4 Gallery and presented in collaboration with ecoartspace

This interactive, public, community arts exhibition is curated by Jennifer McGregor, featuring artists  Rebecca Allan, Aaron Asis, Chris Costan, Kate Dodd,  Peter Edlund, Kristin Reiber-Harris, Ellen Coleman-Izzo, Sergey Jivetin,  Nathan Kensinger, Rita Leduc, Christopher Lin, Nikki Lindt, E.J. McAdams/ Jimbo Blachly,  Nancy Nowacek in collaboration with Carla Kihlstedt and Carlos Alomar,  Benjamin Swett and filmmakers:  Aaron Assis, Nate Dorr, Sean Hanley, Nathan Kensinger, Nikki Lindt, Emily Packer and Lesley Steele, and Kristin Reiber-Harris

It consists of nature walks and community interventions in the gallery and various locations throughout the Bay Ridge community from April 15 through June 17, 2023. Art Spiel will feature a series of interviews related to this project throughout its duration, here with curator Jennifer McGregor.

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I Make My Own Weather at the MAC

Featured Artist
Bonny Leibowitz “I Make My Own Weather”, “Raindrop installation”. photo courtesy Bonny Leibowitz

In her installation-based exhibition titled I Make My Own Weather at the MAC in Dallas, Bonny Leibowitz explores the validity of social constructs and the reliability of acquired or assumed perceptions, implying separateness, otherness and disconnection. Leibowitz’s work utilizes and expounds upon the landscape painting traditions of idealized histories, such as the Hudson River School, Romanticism, and Baroque. The installations act as deconstructed paintings, as though walking through fragments of represented landscapes—a tree root painted epoxy green, an Astro turf tarp in the shape of a pond, a peeling away of a blue sky.

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On the Waterfront: A View from the Coast (Line)

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On the Waterfront: A View from the Coast (Line)

From its founding in 2009 by Maddy Rosenberg, CENTRAL BOOKING has focused on the exploration between art and science with emphasis on aspects of the environment and social justice issues. In many collaborative projects with organizations such as the New York Academy of Medicine and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, artists researched their work in the collections, libraries and grounds of these institutions and exhibited the resulting work in several venues. Rosenberg says that after years of living along the Brooklyn waterfront of Buttermilk Channel and incorporating the imagery into her own work, she sensed it was time to take a deeper dive into the ecosystems of the Brooklyn waterfront and the last surviving section of functioning port within New York City’s boundaries. The life along the harbor integrates the wildlife, land and neighborhoods of human-made architectural elements seemed to her like “a perfect barometer for exploring climate change”. A collaboration with the New-York Historical Society was a natural step, as their collections preserve many of the earlier roots along the way to the transformations we live with today. Rosenberg says that in addition, by forging partnerships with other area organizations such as Kentler International Drawing Space, Pioneer Works and the RETI Center, the project became truly emblematic of the Brooklyn Waterfront.

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Interview with Izabela Gola on ECO Solidarity

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©ECO Solidarity 2023 designers team. Courtesy of Dalia Stoniene and WantedDesign

Izabela Gola is an artist, curator of visual arts and design, and climate activist through her cultural programs. She was born in Poland and her background is visual arts, art history, and interior design. She came to the US to study art, and graduated with an MFA Degree from Hunter College in New York. She joined the Polish Cultural Institute New York in 2016 and has collaborated with Wanted Design since 2017. Her own art practice is multidisciplinary and she says this approach is important also in her curatorial capacity. She investigates structures of memory and identity as mediated through porcelain sculpture, video, and installation art. She also co-hosts a podcast called I Art New York on Radio Free Brooklyn.

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