Arts Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment 9780429427176, 9781138385252, 9781138385269

Citation preview

“Finally a down-to-earth, practical guide to navigating the challenges and opportunities of developing place-based field learning programs in the arts! Higher education has been yearning for innovative pedagogical models to address 21st century problems from interdisciplinary perspectives. This book offers a cross-cultural set of field-tested examples that are imaginative, instructive, and inspirational.” — Teri Reub, University at Buffalo, USA “Part sourcebook, part institutional critique, part post-commodity road trip, Arts Programming for the Anthropocene records and analyses the legendary annual voyages of the Land Arts of the American West program, one of the most innovative learning environments in the world. It offers alternatives for students and teachers alike who are otherwise mired in what has become the universal bureaucracy of institutionalized art studies.” — William Fox, Nevada Museum of Art, USA “An important book to help reimagine pedagogy and practice in the arts, Arts Programming for the Anthropocene offers insight to individuals and institutions seeking to meet contemporary challenges in a time of pressing environmental crisis.” — Alan Boldon, University of Brighton, UK “Once your children have been let out of the house to explore their environments and once they have (hopefully) been educated about the complex relationship of culture to nature, this book provides the next step – a much needed manual for ecological artists and educators out in the world. With encouragement to work locally, often with indigenous communities, and the story of the founding of the renowned Land Arts of the American West programs, GiIbert provides a new model for universities and art schools that successfully combines art and life.” — Lucy R. Lippard, author of Undermining: A Wild Ride Through Land use, Politics and Art in the Changing West

“Bill Gilbert is a leader in the field of art and environment and a champion for relevant and cooperative community engagement. Arts Programming for the Anthropocene provides a road map for how to creatively respond to our time of human species as a geological force.” — Christie Davis, Program Director for Art, Lannan Foundation

ARTS PROGRAMMING FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE

Arts Programming for the Anthropocene argues for a role for the arts as an engaged, professional practice in contemporary culture, charting the evolution of arts over the previous half century from a primarily solitary practice involved with its own internal dialogue to one actively seeking a larger discourse. The chapters investigate the origin and evolution of five academic field programs on three continents, mapping developments in field pedagogy in the arts over the past twenty years. Drawing upon the collective experience of artists and academicians in the United States, Australia, and Greece operating in a wide range of social and environmental contexts, it makes the case for the necessity of an update to ensure the real world relevance and applicability of tertiary arts education. Based on thirty years of experimentation in arts pedagogy, including the creation of the Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program and Art and Ecology discipline at the University of New Mexico, this book is written for arts practitioners, aspiring artists, art educators, and those interested in how the arts can contribute to strengthening cultural resiliency in the face of rapid environmental change. Bill Gilbert is Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Art and Ecology and Lannan Endowed Chair of Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico. He completed his undergraduate work at Swarthmore College and Pitzer College and received an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Montana. Anicca Cox has a BA in photography from the University of New Mexico, an MA in rhetoric and composition from Humboldt State University and is currently pursuing her doctoral degree at Michigan State University in their Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures program.

Routledge Environmental Humanities Series editors: Paul Warde (University of Cambridge, UK) and Libby Robin (Australian National University) Editorial Board Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK Alison Bashford, University of New South Wales, Australia Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia Georgina Endfield, Liverpool, UK Jodi Frawley, University of Western Australia, Australia Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia Christina Gerhardt, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, USA Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA Iain McCalman, University of Sydney, Australia Jennifer Newell, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia International Advisory Board William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China Rob Nixon, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Centre, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Germany Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA Kirsten Wehner, University of London, UK The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that today’s world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture. The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences. We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

ARTS PROGRAMMING FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE Art in Community and Environment

Bill Gilbert with Anicca Cox Drawings and Illustrations by Erika Osborne

First published 2019 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Bill Gilbert and Anicca Cox The right of Bill Gilbert and Anicca Cox to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gilbert, Bill, 1950– author. | Cox, Anicca, author. Title: Arts programming for the anthropocene : art in community and environment / Bill Gilbert with Anicca Cox ; drawings and illustrations by Erika Osborne. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge environmental humanities | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018035930 (print) | LCCN 2018047395 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429427176 (eBook) | ISBN 9781138385252 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138385269 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780429427176 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Art—Study and teaching (Higher) | Artists and community. | Art and society. Classification: LCC N345 (ebook) | LCC N345 .G45 2019 (print) | DDC 701/.03—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035930 ISBN: 978-1-138-38525-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-38526-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-42717-6 (ebk) Typeset in Goudy by Apex CoVantage, LLC

FIGURE 0.1  Points

Further Out, UT

CONTENTS

CONTENTSCONTENTS

Contributorsx Acknowledgmentsxvi List of figures xix List of tables xxi Foreword by Subhankar Banerjee xxiii 1 Introduction

1

2 A place to stand: the rationale for field programming

7

3 Art in academia

13

4 Five programs

33

5 Participant voices

61

6 Land Arts of the American West: a case study

113

7 Conclusion

151

8 Manual: nuts and bolts of field programming

155

Bibliography240 Index244

CONTRIBUTORS

Program Directors Catherine Page Harris, Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program direc-

tor, 2010–2011. Catherine Page Harris teaches Art and Ecology and Landscape Architecture at the University of New Mexico in the College of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture and Planning. She received her BA from Harvard University (1988), MLA from UC Berkeley (1997), and MFA from Stanford University (2005). Her built work resides at Marble House Project, VT; Deep Springs College, CA; McCovey Field, SF, CA; and The Violin Shop in Albuquerque, NM, among other sites. Recent projects include sharing a drink, analyzing video-to-print 3-D drinking forms based on how animals drink water. Trans-species Repast – sharing meals with animals in North Jutland, Denmark, and Vermont, USA, exploring hierarchy, resources, and landscape, showed at the Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe (2016); UNM Art Museum (2016); the Land Shape Festival (2015) in Hanstholm, DK; Marble House Project, VT (2015); and the Wignall Museum, CA (2014). Harris works in art/design and digital/analog expressions. Jeanette Hart-Mann, LAAW, student (2000), field coordinator (2009–2013), program director (2014–present). Jeanette Hart-Mann is the director of Land Arts of the American West and assistant professor of Art and Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico. She is an alumni of Land Arts of the American West (2000) and earned a BFA, summa cum laude, and University Honors, summa cum laude, from the University of New Mexico (2001) and an MFA in Visual Art from Vermont College of Fine Arts (2012). She is co-founder and collective cohort of SeedBroadcast, a creative multiplatform AgriCulture project employing collaborative engagement, grassroots story making, and free-source seed action. Her artistic practice is centered in a

Contributors  xi

desire to counter oppressive power structures through examining and cultivating interspecies relationships and ecologic processes as acts of resistance to germinate resiliency. Her methodologies span disciplinary boundaries – video, sculpture, photography, installation, experimental media, print, performance, farming, writing, and activism. Yoshimi Hayashi, LAAW, student (2000), Land Marks of Art (LMoA), program director (2002–present). Yoshimi Hayashi is an installation and performance artist who resides and works in Oceanside, California. As a curator, he has developed numerous site-based exhibitions at international venues, as well as shows that have traveled nationally. He holds a BS in psychology from the University of California Los Angeles, an MS in behavior analysis from California State University, and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Currently, he is the chair of the Art and Art History program at MiraCosta College. A lead instructor in 3-D and ceramics, he developed the Landmarks of Art as a field course at the community college level. The field-based program at MiraCosta College is now in its 17th year and has been recognized by both the University of California and California State University system. Erika Osborne, LAAW student (2003–2004), program director (2005–2007), Place Appalachia (PA), program director (2008–2013), Art & Environment (A&E) director (2014–present). Erika Osborne is currently an associate faculty member at CSU in Ft. Collins, CO. She did her graduate work in painting at UNM, where she participated in both the Wilderness Studio (WS) and LAAW field programs. Post-graduation, she served as co-director of the LAAW program with Bill Gilbert and field director of WS. In 2008, Erika moved to WVU, where she created the Place Appalachia program, and in 2013, she moved to CSU, where she instituted the Art and Environment program and serves as a faculty scholar for the interdisciplinary School of Global Environmental Sustainability. Heike Qualitz, Field Studies (FS), student (2007–2009), field coordinator (2011–

2013), Balawan Elective, program director (2014–2015). Raised in the outskirts of Berlin, Heike Qualitz spent her formative years on the spacious and ancient continent of Australia. She was awarded a BA (honors, first class) in Visual Arts/ Sculpture from the Australian National University (ANU) in 2009 and a graduate certificate in higher education (ANU) in 2013. The intricate systems of the natural world and our complex human relationship as part of yet often apart from it inspire much of her observational work. Her practice explores the threshold of perceptions using the body as recurring theme and material, interweaving sculptural techniques with photography and video. Heike has participated in the ANU Environment Studio’s Field Studies program as a student and after graduating as a program coordinator and lecturer in the Environment Studio and has co-developed the Balawan Elective.

xii Contributors

Now, back in Berlin, she is adapting her practice and community engagements to an urban setting. John Reid, FS (1996–2014). John Reid is an emeritus fellow of the Australian National University. He has a BA (ANU) (1973) in Southeast Asian civilization and the philosophy of science and an MFA (UNSW) (1995) in media arts and is an associate of the Industrial Design Institute of Australia (AIDIA) (1972). He works as a consultant specializing in the creative engagement of visual artists in science-based communication strategies. John Reid was a staff member at the Australian National University (ANU) School of Art from 1978–2013. During this period, he integrated a visual art practice in photography, collage, and performance about the environment, human rights, and cultural identity into his role as a tertiary visual arts researcher, educator, curator, and graphic designer. John Reid developed the nationally awarded ANU School of Art Field Study Program in 1996, convening and field coordinating programs in remote, rural, and suburban environments across all eastern Australian states. Amanda Stuart, FS, student (2008–2010), field coordinator (2011), BE, program director (2015–present). Amanda Stuart is a Canberra based visual artist, writer, and art educator. Her sculptural works produce objects that sit in the environment to invite psychic re-imaginings of old, unhealed wounds between humans and unwanted animals. Embedded in a materiality of the Australian regional landscape and its fauna, her works refer to the social, cultural, ethical, and political difficulties surrounding estranged human/animal relations within contested landscapes. Stuart’s practice embraces drawing, installation, object making, and in-situ photographic documentation. Stuart has a PhD in visual arts (sculpture) and a bachelor of science (land management) – the latter of which quietly informs her art practice and ongoing concerns regarding relations with the country. She currently lectures in the Environment Studio and Foundation workshops at ANU School of Art and Design and co-coordinates the Balawan Elective with co-founders Amelia Zaraftis and Heike Qualitz. Yannis Ziogas, Visual March to Prespes (VMTP), program director (2007–

present). Yannis Ziogas holds a degree in math (BS, University of Athens), MFA from SVA (1991, New York), and a PhD from the University of the Aegean (2013). He has realized solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions. He is an associate professor at the Department of Fine and Applied Arts of the University of Western Macedonia (Florina). He is the author of several essays on art theory and of the books The Byzantine Malevich (2000), Tarkofsky in Chalkis (2007), Censorship in Visual Arts (2008), The Diary of a 407/80 (2012), Visual March to Prespes 2007–14: a process of experiencing the landscape (2015), and Forbidden! Censorship of Visual Artworks in Greece 1949–2016 (2016). Since 2007, he has organized the process Visual March to Prespes, and his artistic and research interests are focused on relational practices and community projects in the area of Prespes and Western Macedonia.

Contributors  xiii

Student Participants and Program Assistants Julie Anand, LAAW, student (2003). Julie Anand is an associate professor of

art and a Senior Sustainability Scholar at Arizona State University. Her interdisciplinary projects explore material culture, body/land relations, and issues of interdependence, drawing on her background in the natural sciences. Her project Material Histories, large montages of artifacts collected on walks that act as socio-environmental mirrors, was published in the text Art & Politics: A Small History for Social Change after 1945. Her ongoing collaborative practice with artist Damon Sauer, begun in 2005, uses combined authorship as a lived pursuit of boundary-questioning that mirrors the content of their projects. Their current project, Ground Truth: Corona Landmarks, was recently added to the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and they look forward to a solo exhibition at the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. The project was recently featured in Wired magazine, Hyperallergic, and National Geographic magazine. Keith Bender, BE, student (2015). Keith Bender is an emerging sculptor based in the Canberra region who explores his passion for the environment through assembled, constructed, and cast forms. Upon graduating from the Australian National University in 2016, he received a number of Emerging Artist Support Scheme awards, including Artist-in-Residence at Canberra Grammar School’s Art, Design, and Technology Centre. In 2016, Bender installed the first contemporary sculpture at Norwood Park Crematorium in Canberra, entitled Mourning in Time and Space. Bender’s work often involves an investigation into negative and interactive space. Bender is inspired by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s philosophy, “energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within”. Eden Evans, LMoA, student (2012). Eden Evans is an interdisciplinary artist working mainly in textiles and found materials. She holds a BA from San Francisco State University and has been a Recology Student Artist in Residence and an Artist in Residence at StudioSpace in Emeryville. She has exhibited work at Root Division, Incline Gallery, Palo Alto Art Center, Recology’s Environmental Learning Center, San Francisco State University’s Fine Arts Gallery, Martin Wong Gallery, ASG Gallery, San Rafael’s Artworks Downtown, Session Space Gallery, The Honey-Hive Gallery, and the Kruglak Gallery. Benjamin Gazsi, PA, student (2013). Ben Gazsi is an artist/fabricator living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in Sculpture from WVU in 2014, where he created a series public land works made from natural and found materials. He then continued with an MFA from Alfred University in 2016. His current work reflects how personal mythologies and perspectives are built on physical and intangible interactions with our environment. An ever-present sense of self, represented in video and use of technology, blurs the lines between

xiv Contributors

worlds. Expressions of tenderness and violence coalesce, revealing complex, nuanced relationships between humans and the natural. Ryan Henel, LAAW, student (2004, 2011), field coordinator (2012–present).

Ryan Henel is the field coordinator for the University of New Mexico’s Land Arts of the American West program. He has a BAFA, University of New Mexico, in Studio Art-Sculpture (2004) and an MFA, University of New Mexico, in Art and Ecology (2014). He is a practicing artist who develops site-specific public artworks and temporary installations that use perspective, patterns and scale to prompt the viewer to experience a different understanding of their place in an environment. In 2014, Henel received the Land Arts Mobile Research Center’s Post-MFA Grant. He developed case studies that incorporated land art into public infrastructure. These functional artworks made the infrastructure visible, highlighting its relationship and impacts to the surrounding environment. The project sought to address the growing dissonance between humans and their habitats and encourage the development of human-built systems that are more congruous with nature. Christos Ioannidis, VMTP, student (2009–2014). Christos Ioannidis is a land-

scape photographer. With a major in Fine Arts (University of West Macedonia, Florina) and an enduring love for nature and mountaineering, he has worked many years as a photographer, an art teacher, and a ski instructor. He works mainly with big frames and a distant viewing angle. He tries to capture the strength and the entirety of a place and highlight a distinctive view, which brings up the identity of a place, as if every picture is the indicative example of it, representative of its integrity. He wants to offer a view in the sublime landscape, a transport to the scenery, to wake up to the feeling of exaltation. Also he works on documentary pictures that form a photo story and in nature photography, both in general and detailed images, capturing an interesting form, shape, color, or structure that can be visually appealing. The sense of scale and various uses of natural light are often his tools. Ernie Williams-Roby, PA, student (2010). Ernie Williams-Roby is an artist and

musician from area code 304. Roby received his bachelor of fine arts in sculpture and printmaking at West Virginia University in 2011. He is the son of deceased train engineer Cecil Williams, who worked on train engine Old 113 on the Beech Mountain Railroad for the majority of his life. Cecil is survived by Roby’s mother, Judith Williams-Roby, who is a crafter and caregiver by occupation and a sweetheart in disposition. Currently, he resides on the former staging grounds for the “Internationally Unknown, Totally Unfamous” circus known as the Rainbow Traveling Show in Alachua, Florida. He received his master of fine arts from the Department of Art and Technology at the University of Florida in 2018. Roby teaches at the University of Florida and today is working to establish an artist residency on the old circus grounds in Florida.

Contributors  xv

Cedra Wood, LAAW, student (2009). In love with the wilderness and with the

equally complex and lonely terrain of the human heart, Cedra Wood makes paintings and drawings that marry the elements of both worlds in unlikely ways, creating narrative metaphors for humanity’s relationships with the environment. She received her BA and MFA from Austin College and the University of New Mexico, respectively; has been a research fellow at the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art; and received grants from the Land Arts Mobile Research Center, the Harwood Emerging Artist Fund, and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation. She has been artist-in-residence at the Teton Artlab, Playa, Ucross, and the Sagehen Creek Biological Field Station in the US; Gushul Studio and Kluane Lake Research Station in Canada; and The Arctic Circle, a ship-based residency in Svalbard, among others. She calls New Mexico home.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I will begin by thanking Anicca Cox for being willing to commit to this project in its early and unformed stage. Her initial inquiry, “Who is your audience?”, was instrumental in my expanding the scope of the project beyond the original intention to produce a field programming manual. Anicca’s design and implementation of the survey and interviews have shaped the “Five Programs” chapter. Her edits of early drafts demonstrated insight and patience in equal measures. This book is the product of considerable back and forth between us. I also thank Bill Fox and Teri Reub for their insightful critiques of early drafts of this manuscript. Land Arts of the American West has followed a course of ongoing change. I am deeply grateful to those partners who shared the program with me along the way. John Wenger had vast experience with field programming in the southwest when I approached him about joining me in the semester-long LAAW program. I thank John for his generosity in sharing that experience with me. His legacy lives on at UNM. Chris Taylor was a friend and collaborator before joining LAAW. His interest in architecture and infrastructure expanded the frame of our conversation in the program and his relationship with Matt Coolidge added an important new dimension to our program. Chris now runs his own successful field program in architecture at Texas Tech. Erika Osborne made a seamless transition from graduate student to co-director and provided an all-important stabilizing influence as LAAW transitioned out of our partnership with University of Texas (UT) and back to a wholly UNM program. As a native of the west, her knowledge of southern UT was essential in expanding our explorations of that region. Erika left LAAW to start her own Place Appalachia program at West Virginia University and more recently Art & Environment at Colorado State University. This book is greatly improved by her wonderful drawings. I thank her, as well, for her contribution in editing drafts of my essays.

Acknowledgments  xvii

Jeanette Hart-Mann and I have worked together since 2009. I value her commitment to the program and relentless search for ways to improve the focus of our investigations of our home bio-region. Ryan Henel has taken over her role as logistics coordinator, as Jeanette has assumed the directorship of the LAAW. I thank Ryan for his efforts to keep the train on the tracks out in the field. Next, I would like to thank my co-directors, Yoshi Hayashi, Jeanette HartMann, Erika Osborne, John Reid, Amanda Stuart, and Yannis Ziogas for their willingness to participate in this project and share the details of their experiences in forming and running their respective programs. I have learned a great deal about field programming through the process of writing this book. In this text, we have acknowledged the challenges program directors face in meeting the demands and definitions imposed by contemporary academic institutions. I should therefore acknowledge that I have also experienced significant support from administrators at UNM. I particularly thank Dean Christopher Mead for his support for my effort to initiate the LAAW program, Dean Tom Dotson for his help with the early experiments at Acoma Pueblo and Juan Mata Ortíz, and Dean Jim Linnell for his commitment to expanding the LAAW pedagogy model through college-wide initiatives. Department Chairs Joyce Szabo and Mary Tsiongas provided funding when possible, and I should also acknowledge Provost Chaouki Abdallah’s support in preparing the Andrew W. Mellon grant proposal. Over the years, we have hosted many visitors in the field. I thank you all for being willing to get out there with us. Your contributions have kept the program fresh and greatly expanded the possibilities for both individual and collective actions. There are several artists, writers, and activists who have participated in many of our journeys and as a result should be acknowledged for the significant impact they have had on the program. I start with Mary Lewis Garcia and her husband, Marvin, without whom none of this would have happened. Matt Coolidge has been a major influence both through his work in the Center for Land Use Interpretation and as our host at the CLUI-Wendover Unit. Our work with Matt started us down the road looking at a much broader frame of the cultural interventions in our home region. I thank Ann Reynolds for her brilliant “exit interviews” with the students in Marfa at the end of our time in the field and her Smithson workshops at Spiral Jetty. Hector Gallegos and Graciela Martinez have been our hosts in Juan Mata Ortíz, Mexico, over the years, making us welcome in the village and sharing their ceramics process. Joel Glanzberg introduced the program to a collaborative project model with his Permaculture workshops at Anaya Springs and Valle del Oro in New Mexico. Bill Fox has probably visited the most sites of any of our guests. His writings on isotropic spaces have been a core component of our reading list for years, and his empathetic ear has helped our students sort through their ideas and move forward with projects in the field. I am grateful to Bill as well for his work in bringing the LAAW archive to the Art + Environement Center at the Nevada Art Museum. Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos have created a place for us in

xviii Acknowledgments

the Buena Vista neighborhood of El Paso and been our partners in numerous collaborative community projects. I have also benefited from the generosity of our collaborators. John Reid hosted Cedra Ardec, Yoshi Hayashi, Joseph Mougel, Blake Gibson, and me on a month-long tour of Australia in 2011. Sharon Dynak and Ucross Foundation invited Cedra Ardec, Cynthia Brinich Langlois, Yoshi Hayashi, Ryan Henel, Joseph Mougel, Erika Osborne, and me for residencies in 2012 and 2013. Charlie Bettigole of Yale University joined our collective at Ucross for projects presented at Ucross, Yale, and the Lannan Foundation. Land Arts of the American West has been able to continue well into its second decade largely thanks to the generosity of the Lannan Foundation. I can’t thank Patrick Lannan and the Lannan Foundation board enough for their steadfast support. I also greatly appreciate Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s contribution to our research initiative. Our graduate students, in particular, have benefited from the funding they provided. And finally, I want to thank my students. Your openness of spirit in embracing the program has made all the difference.

FIGURES

0.1 0.2 1.1 2.1

Points Further Out, UT Storm Over Deming Ranchettes, NM Goblin Valley, UT America’s Big, Jonathan, “Dirty Monke”, Loth and Gabe, “Bunny Krunk”, Romero, North Rim Grand Canyon, AZ 3.1 Hole, Joseph Mougel, Wendover Air Force Base, UT 4.1 Landmarks of Art, Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA 5.1 John’s Arrest, New South Wales, AU 5.2 Man of the Mountain, Appalachia, WV 6.1 Leap, Sam Macfarlane, Bonneville Salt Flats, UT 6.2 Mary Lewis Garcia, Acoma, NM 6.3 Do Not Enter, Chaco Canyon National Park, NM 6.4 San Rafael Swell, UT 6.5 Gone Fishing, Blue Notch, Lake Powell, UT 6.6 Hole to China, CLUI, Wendover, UT 6.7 Bingham Mine, Salt Lake City, UT 6.8 Chicos, Hog Waller Farm, Dinétah, NM 6.9 Clean Livin’, Wendover Air Force Base, UT 6.10 US-Mexico Border Monument, Animas Valley, NM 6.11 Walking the Border, Animas Valley, NM 6.12 Road to Nowhere, Barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX 6.13 Mural, Barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX 6.14 Buena Vista Grocery, El Paso, TX 6.15 Cement Lake, Barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX 6.16 Cuidado el Tren, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX 6.17 Hector Gallegos, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX

viii xxii xxvi 6 12 32 82 97 112 115 125 128 130 135 136 137 138 138 138 139 140 141 141 142 143

xx Figures

6.18 6.19 6.20 7.1 8.1

Headwaters, Rio Grande, Creede, CO Rio Grande Diversion, El Paso, TX (Cement Arroyo) Compressor, Dinéah, NM, Hands in Clay, Juan Mata Ortiz, MX Hands in Clay, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX On the Road Again to Lucin, Utah

Drawings and Illustrations are based on photographs taken by program participants. (Cover) Chappell Ellison, (0.1) Jane Taylor, (1.1) Chris Taylor, (2.1) Jonathan Loth and Gabe Romero, (3.1) Joseph Mougel, (4.1) Yoshimi Hayashi, (5.1) Jacky Ghossein, (5.2) Erika Osborne, (6.1) Sam Macfarlane, (6.2) Nick Abdalla, (6.3) Jessica Murray, (6.4) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.5) Ledia Carroll, (6.6) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.7) Carly Reese, (6.8) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.9) Steve Badgett, (6.10) Bethany Delahunt, (6.11) Bill Gilbert, (6.12) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.13) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.14) Bill Gilbert, (6.15) Tim House, (6.16) Joseph Mougel, (6.17) Jonathan Loth, (6.18) Elizabeth Shores, (6.19) Jeanette Hart-Mann, (6.20) Andre Gohl, (7.1) Kyrsten Sanderson, (8.1) Bill Gilbert

144 144 146 150 239

TABLES

LIST OF TABLESLIST OF TABLES

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Institutional context Funding Leadership Curriculum Logistics Publication and Dissemination

35 39 42 47 52 57

FIGURE 0.2 Storm

Over Deming Ranchettes, NM

FOREWORD

A classroom underneath a cottonwood canopy In 2015, I spent a week at the University of New Mexico (UNM) as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation visiting artist. The itinerary was simple: I would spend four nights in one of the sites of the Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) field program and then, on returning to Albuquerque, give a public lecture on campus and do a few studio visits with graduate students. The LAAW site I chose to visit was Turkey Creek in the Gila National Forest. I throw my backpack behind the passenger seat and get into Professor Bill Gilbert’s white pick-up truck. The city of Albuquerque has given way to the expansive desert landscape of northern New Mexico. During the six-hour-long drive, as Bill continues to share stories of his vision of field-based arts education and the evolution of the Land Arts of the American West program that he founded at UNM at the turn of the century, the landscape outside the truck window is transforming – from the open desert, to higher-altitude pine forest, down to the piñon-juniper woodland – and finally, we arrive at the Turkey Creek campsite in the Gila River Valley. This reasonably isolated site is situated a mere couple of miles from the southwestern edge of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, the first federally designated wilderness in the United States. “Grab a cup; serve yourself some coffee; pull up a chair and sit with us”, Professor Jeanette Hart-Mann (Jenn) tells me. Jenn, a former student of Bill’s, took over the helm of the LAAW program in 2015. Students are busy making baskets using willow stems, sotol leaves, and bear grass, which they harvested earlier in the day. They are learning the craft from local artist Orien MacDonald, who lives mere miles downriver from the site. An open area shaded by a large, old, beautiful cottonwood tree serves as the classroom. Each day, the group gathers in a circle for meals and conversations,

xxiv Foreword

underneath the cottonwood canopy: 7:00 a.m. for breakfast and 7:00 p.m. for dinner. It is mid-October. The cottonwood leaves are beginning to turn yellow. The students are here to engage in a collaborative project about the Gila River and raise public awareness about the impending threat to the diversity of life and the social ecology of the watershed due to a proposed river diversion project. They are making a site-specific art object with local materials and plan to share their work with the public through exhibitions and blogs. At Turkey Creek, they are engaging with the land and its diversity of life – and with local knowledge, by learning from Orien and ecologist Carol Fugali, who visited the camp the previous day. I witness a meaningful blending of art and activism informed by local knowledge and practices to address a significant bioregional concern. In academia, hardly anyone would doubt the efficacy and the significance of a field-based science program, say in biology or geography. But when it comes to establishing a field-based arts program, as this book painfully highlights, it becomes an uphill struggle on all aspects: financial, institutional, logistical. Despite these challenges, Bill and his colleagues, in the US and other parts of the world, have persisted and blazed new trails in establishing various field-based academic arts programs. Art Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment details the nuts and bolts of how they have accomplished this against seemingly insurmountable odds. On top of the financial, institutional, and logistical challenges – there is also the problem of perception. According to some critics, as this book points out, a field-based arts program looks too much like a “safari”. The chapter, “Land Arts of the American West: a case study” pushes back against this unfounded and disparaging perception. Since its inception, reciprocity with the communities that the program engages with has been a core value of LAAW. One notable example is Pueblo pottery. When Bill started LAAW, Pueblo pottery was not part of arts education at UNM despite the distinguished history of this Indigenous art practice in New Mexico. He reached out to the well-known Acoma Pueblo potter Mary Lewis Garcia, who became a collaborator of the LAAW program and a mentor to the UNM students. Today, Pueblo pottery is taught at UNM by Tewa artist, Professor Clarence Cruz from Ohkay Owingeh (formerly known as San Juan Pueblo). As I was returning from Turkey Creek, I began to wonder if the field experience would leave an indelible impression on the lives of some of the students and even contribute toward becoming a turning point in their creative practice. Back in Albuquerque, I did studio visits with two first-year MFA candidates in the Department of Art: Hollis Moore and Kaitlin Bryson. Hollis and Kaitlin graduated at the end of spring 2018, each with stellar thesis work – Hollis on the Colorado River Delta on both sides of the US-Mexico border and Kaitlin on mycology, bio-remediation, and environmental justice. Their work included extensive research, impressive and multi-disciplinary creative output, and sincere community engagement. Both credited taking the Land Arts class as the highlight of their graduate study and a turning point in their creative practice.

Foreword  xxv

We are no longer living in the environmentally stable Holocene Epoch but have entered, according to many prominent scientists, a new human-caused geologic epoch, the Anthropocene. To apprehend our tumultuous time, which includes climate change and the sixth mass species extinction, we need a deep understanding of ethics and justice as much as we need science – and for that to happen, we would have to support education in arts and humanities, not abolish or marginalize it. Art Programming for the Anthropocene: Art in Community and Environment is a pioneering and practical guide for our time, as it shows how education can engage with place, culture, and social-environmental concerns. Subhankar Banerjee Subhankar Banerjee is the Lannan Foundation Endowed Chair and a professor of Art & Ecology in the Department of Art at the University of New Mexico

FIGURE 1.1 Goblin

Valley, UT

1 INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

This book is written for arts practitioners, arts administrators, art educators, and those interested in how the arts can contribute to strengthening cultural resiliency in the face of rapid cultural and environmental change. This work draws upon the collective experience of artists and academicians in the United States, Australia, and Greece to examine models of field programming1 tested in a wide range of social and environmental contexts. The impetus for this work springs from a concern that the problems we humans face at this point in our history are immense and can only be surmounted by the long-term commitment of individual citizens, communities, corporations, and nations to make fundamental changes in our relationship with each other and the planet. Moving amongst academic analysis, personal interviews, and stories from first-hand experience, this text intends to chart a course for a revision in arts education in the face of a looming global ecological crisis. The five programs and seven directors represented in our study are involved in the long game of preparing the next generation for what lies ahead. We all navigate the barriers and compromises inherent in accepting salaries from cultural institutions driven by agendas beyond our control and, at times, in opposition to our beliefs. We have turned away from the charismatic hero model so beloved in our culture to invest in the idea that the solutions lie in the power of our collective creative intelligence. We are committed to making a difference in the places in which we live by investing in the young people of our home regions and our public institutions of higher learning. We advocate for the importance of field programming, not as a replacement for a traditional academic curriculum but as an expanded frame. Under the current administration in the United States, the fundamental value of higher education has been called into question. This text is written from the position that

2 Introduction

universities and colleges play an essential role in our societies. Our collective commitment is to public institutions of higher learning as an essential component of the cultural commons. The physical and temporal space universities continue to provide for quiet contemplation is of ever-greater value in a world operating at rapidly increasing speeds. The importance of the utopian community they create as a safe space for people of all gender, ethnic, cultural, and class identities to freely interact on an egalitarian basis cannot be overestimated in an increasingly polarized world. The efficacy of academic institutions as incubators for new ideas and technologies has been proven over and over again. Our contribution is to simultaneously expand both the physical and conceptual territory of academic institutions by adding experiential learning through engagement with environments and communities. The programs discussed constitute a small selection from the broader practice of field programming. The focus here is on academic Fine Art programs in public institutions with which I have had direct experience in my role as director of the LAAW program. Excellent work in field programming is being done by other Fine Art programs, such as the Art and Rural Environments Field School at UC Boulder and in other disciplines within academic programs, such as Land Works in the Department of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism of Alghero (UNISS) and Land Arts of the American West in architecture at Texas Tech University. A separate group of field programs operating outside of academic structures includes programs such as Signal Fire, Cape Farewell, The Field School Project, Unknown Fields, The Arctic Circle, and Artemis Institute. These programs, both academic and independent, share with our cohort a nomadic operating methodology that differentiates them from the even larger group of location-based residency programs, such as A-Z West, Broken Hill Art Exchange, M12, Mildred’s Lane, and US National Parks Airs to name a few. The conceptual territory occupied by our cohort of field programs ranges from environmental art to interdisciplinary collaboration and social practice. The issues that have arisen in our investigations touch on major cultural themes globally. Specific topics are being rigorously explored at present by an ever-expanding list of individuals, groups, and organizations. Of particular relevance to this discussion is the work currently undertaken by collaboratives and collectives around the globe. In our investigations of the possibilities for interdisciplinary work amongst teams of artists and scientists, we look to Cape Farewell and The Arctic Circle as highly successful examples. Unknown Fields Division takes a global approach to their explorations of contemporary environmental and social issues, while Platform London’s projects address social and environmental justice from their base in the United Kingdom. The Danish group Superflex focuses its activities on energy and economic issues. In France and Thailand respectively, la r.O.n.c.e. and The Land have created contemporary utopian agrarian communities. In the United States, the Center for Land Use Interpretation has been greatly influential in expanding the frame and focus of our understanding of artistic practice. In the emergent realm of social practice,

Introduction  3

groups like Black Lunch Table are leading the way. Metabolic Studio addresses the issue of environmental sustainability in the urban center, while Simparch is doing important work in sustainability in the nether regions of the American West. Our explorations of arts activism have been informed by a wideranging group, each with its own particular approach. Future Farmers has been a pioneer in exploring the possibilities for comingling sculpture, design, and performance in community actions. Highlander Folk School has a long history of combining crafts, music, and activism in Appalachia. Critical Art Ensemble brings their activist form of performance to an international set of issues. The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, Labofii, consists of “an affinity of friends who recognize the beauty of collective creative disobedience”,2 while Post Commodity adds a focus on Indigenous political activism to their community engagements. This is merely a partial list of collectives and collaborative groups that is offered here as evidence of the depth and breadth of these emergent practices in the arts. We have learned from all these groups, and the work of individual artists as well, and have drawn upon their examples in refining our pedagogies. Our focus in this text is on five programs operating within academic institutional structures with a focus on interdisciplinary, ecological, community-based arts education. In the following chapters, we explore the initial conditions that engendered the individual programs, the pedagogies created, the logistic systems developed, and the results experienced by the contributing authors. The Land Arts of the American West (LAAW) program at the University of New Mexico (UNM) serves as the primary case study. The other programs presented include Field Studies (FS) and Balawan Elective (BE) at Australia National University (ANU), Landmarks of Art (LMoA) at Mira Costa College (MCC), Place Appalachia (PA) at West Virginia University (WVU), Art and Environment (A&E) at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, and The Visual March to Prespes (VTMP) at Western Macedonia University (WMU). These programs are connected by a series of direct programmatic links forming an international community of field programs in the arts. Erika Osborne and Yoshi Hayashi are LAAW alumni who have gone on to create their own fieldbased programs in the United States – at West Virginia University and Colorado State University (Osborne) and at Mira Costa Community College (Hayashi). John Reid has directed his field studies program at Australia National University in Canberra, Australia, since 1996, and Yannis Ziogas has led the March to Prespes program at Western Macedonia University in Florina, Hellas, since 2007. Jeanette Hart-Mann has succeeded Bill Gilbert as director of the LAAW program; Erika Osborne has moved to Colorado State University Fort Collins, where she has started the Art and Environment (A&E) course; and Amanda Stuart has continued the FS tradition John Reid started at ANU by forming the Balawan Elective (BE) field course. A significant aspect of this study is the degree of active interaction amongst the programs. Collaborations amongst the programs have occurred in

4 Introduction

several forms over an extended period. In 2009, LAAW alumni Cynthia BrinichLanglois, Blake Gibson, Yoshimi Hayashi, Joseph Mougel, and Cedra Wood accompanied Bill Gilbert on a month-long project with John Reid and FS at the Sinaloa Research Station and Jigamy Reserve in New South Wales and Calperum Station in South Australia. In 2011, John Reid and Marzena Wasikowska joined the LAAW program in the field for our investigation of the US–Mexico border in southern New Mexico and Arizona. John Reid’s assistants in FS, Amanda Stuart, Heike Qualitz, and Amelia Zaraftis, participated in the LAAW program in 2012 and 2013. Exhibitions featuring the work of FS, LMoA, PA, and LAAW faculty and students were presented in the United States and Australia in 2011, 2013, and 2014.3 Yannis Ziogas, Erika Osborne, and Bill Gilbert collaborated on the Exit Cities project for the International Visual Sociology Conference in Brooklyn in 2012. The LAAW and VMP programs collaborated on field projects related to our shared interests in national border zones in 2012 and 2013. This work was presented in an exhibition in Greece in 2012 and a related book in 2015.4 The list goes on. The salient point being that while these programs were created independently, they have evolved as part of a shared community. The cross fertilization has informed the development of the individual programs, and our students have benefited from the networks created. The shared collaborations amongst these groups have revealed similarities and distinctions in the programs’ social and environmental contexts. Going forward in this text, we will discuss the particularities of each program while investigating the common issues that translate across the three hemispheres in the effort to provide the specific information necessary to form and operate a field program. We intend to build a case for field programming in the arts as a significant component of contemporary arts pedagogy that is worthy of institutional support globally.

Notes 1 Field programming in this text refers to curriculum delivered outside of the geographic boundaries of the university in the social and environmental context of the world at large. 2 http://labofii.net/ 3 Watershed Bounding, Albuquerque, NM: Open Space Visitor Center, 2014, Boundless Horizons, Ft Collins, CO: Clara Hatton Gallery, Colorado State University, 2013, Boundless Horizons, Oceanside, CA: Kruglak Gallery, MiraCosta College, 2011, Mallee [maeli:], Canberra, NSW, Australia: Australian National University Gallery, Far Enough, NSW, Australia: Bega Valley Regional Gallery. 4 Invisible Cities Festival – A Cosmography, Thessaloniki, Greece: National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012.

FIGURE 2.1 America’s

Big, Jonathan, “Dirty Monke”, Loth and Gabe, “Bunny Krunk”, Romero, North Rim Grand Canyon, AZ

2 A PLACE TO STAND

A PLACE TO STANDA PLACE TO STAND

The rationale for field programming

This book makes a case for field programming as an important component of a contemporary academic curriculum and provides the collective experience of field programs on three continents as a guide for those wishing to implement new programs of their own. While the focus is on academic programs, the basic concerns of social and environmental sustainability are societal in scope, making our emphasis on engagement transferable to other contexts. The LAAW and FS field programs began in the late 1990s as the United States marked the height of a decade-long economic boom. In the United States, the dotcom bust was just around the corner, but as LAAW launched at UNM, we were in a mind-set of growth and possibility. At that point in time, the environmental movement was pushing the warnings of Silent Spring1 and The Population Bomb,2 but the potential effects of climate change were not part of the mainstream cultural dialogue. Race relations and immigration issues simmered below the surface of other societal concerns. In the intervening decade and a half, we have experienced terrorism, endless wars, a major economic interruption, severely increased polarization of our society, and an ever-growing awareness of the possibility for human-induced ecological collapse. As nations around the globe struggle with the difficult issues of dislocation, migration, environmental degradation, economic inequality, and racism, the arts have an important leadership role to play in the cultural dialogue. The longterm commitment in western societies to the primacy of science has resulted in the availability of a vast resource of data regarding these issues. Our fascination with technology has produced the Internet, and, as a result, our populations now have unprecedented access to vast troves of information. And yet, we can’t seem to synthesize this information and act. There is now a pervasive awareness that humans have altered the planet in such significant ways over a sufficiently

8  A place to stand

extended period of time that we have entered a human-driven geologic epoch entitled the Anthropocene in which there will be major disruptions for all species, including humans. These environmental disruptions will only exacerbate the current mass dislocations and resulting migrations of human populations that will in turn cause increased stress and strife amongst cultural groups. The concepts of the “Sixth Extinction”3 and “Deep Ecology”4 have entered the cultural discourse. We logically know the import of all of this, and yet, we can’t manage to make changes in our behaviors. The United Nations Agenda 21 makes a clear case that education will have to be an essential contributor if we are to return the ecosystem of planet earth to a sustainable balance.5 For those of us involved in this sector, the advent of the Anthropocene requires a rethinking of our approach. To teach art as a discreet discipline involved in a closed conversation with its own history, removed from the larger social and environmental context, no longer makes sense. To focus on the fleeting moments of popular culture when the issues encompass the expanse of planetary time is to miss the point.6 To successfully prepare our students to be agents of change requires a significant reorientation of our curriculum. More than ever, we need the arts and humanities to help us make sense of the world. In facing these apparently intractable issues, processing our emotional responses is as important as synthesizing factual information.7 Lifting the human spirit and engendering a sense of our shared humanity is perhaps the most important first step. If we are to succeed at making the necessary changes, it will be the result of creating an increased sense of interconnectivity with each other, our fellow species, and the planet itself. The efficacy of the arts in this regard is indisputable.8 Artists have a further role to play in forging connections amongst professional spheres. Artists are trained to navigate open-ended situations that require new approaches and non-standard analyses. We are comfortable with risk and familiar with failure as merely one step in ongoing processes. Artists operate easily in the shared zones of work and play. Our approach to creative thinking helps drive the interdisciplinary process toward a new set of questions leading to “out of the box” solutions. Operating free of the constraints of other disciplines’ mandates, artists act as both provocateurs and instigators, challenging assumptions and limitations and opening up new avenues of inquiry leading to new and different solutions. Most projects in the public sphere are driven by a problem-solving mentality that rules out the pursuit of lateral connections in the search for answers to the specific charge at hand. Artists, having no specific conceptual territory of responsibility, are free to pursue lines of inquiry that may appear at first to be tangential but in the end lead to more holistic solutions. In recent years, public projects have trended towards including artists in the process. In order to make a meaningful contribution to the cultural dialogue, contemporary artists must be fully conversant with the larger interdisciplinary discourse in our culture. To successfully interject our perspective into the dialogue, we must be able to communicate in the language of the other disciplines. To have

A place to stand  9

a positive impact on outcomes, artists must be prepared to communicate with and work alongside academics, professionals, and community members from diverse cultural traditions. This requires a very different skill set than the one delivered by a traditional academic arts curriculum. At present, responses in societies around the globe to this period of change and turmoil pull in two distinctly opposing directions. On the one hand, there has been the understandable tendency to respond to the increased stress by pulling back – back into groups of people who look like us, practice the same religion, occupy a similar economic niche. In this mindset, the solution is to build walls to keep both immigrants and the rising oceans out of our neighborhoods and people of other religions and races locked in prison. We cut off contact with the natural world, retreat to our apartments or homes, and turn the air conditioning up, as if we can isolate ourselves from the global problem of climate change. We sit focused on our computers in the attempt to save the planet one click at a time, growing ever more removed from the actual lived experience of the environment that supports us. On the other hand, many have realized that this is a time to reach out and engage. There is a dawning awareness that the solutions to our environmental problems will only present themselves through lived experience of the planet as an ecological system. The idea of saving the planet by creating wilderness preserves cordoned off to balance human development has run its course. The colonialist history of removing Indigenous populations to create parks or reserves is under intense scrutiny. There is a growing recognition that solutions to environmental problems will necessarily include a human element, and that “culture” and “nature” coexist across a continuum not as oppositions. People of all walks of life are seeking to build bridges between diverse communities based in shared local economies. Some have reengaged the natural world in the effort to forge a sustainable relationship with the planet and the other species that call it home. Many have come to realize that concepts of human centric Dominion9 must be replaced by a respect for the inherent rights of all creation. Voices in support of a new relationship between the human species and planet earth are being raised in both western10 and Indigenous cultures.11 The implementation of field courses in the arts is part of the latter response. The leaders of the programs covered in this book share a belief that change begins with each of us developing a personal, physical, and emotional connection to the planet. Increasingly, our focus is on the issues surrounding the linkage between environmental and social justice. It is our intention to provide students with the tools they need to be effective agents of positive change.

Notes 1 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994. 2 Ehrlich, Paul, The Population Bomb, Cutchogue, New York: Buccaneer Books, 1971. 3 Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 2014.

10  A place to stand

4 Naess, Arne, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” Inquiry Vol. 16, 1973. 5 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf 6 “Critical ecological educators posit that an ecological crisis necessitates the transformation of education and a corresponding alignment of cultural patterns with the sustaining capacities of natural systems”, Gruenewald, David A., “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” Educational Researcher Vol. 32, Issue 4, pp. 3–12; American Educational Research Association, 2003, pp. 4–5. 7 “If we accept that solving environmental problems requires changing attitudes and subsequently behavior towards the environment, then we should acknowledge the role of those subjects that are concerned with the emotions, and, Art is of paramount importance here.” When it comes to making decisions, the research of cognitive and brain sciences has demonstrated that emotions have the steering wheel role, “[W]ithout emotion, you would not know what to want, since like and notlike would be meaningless to you.” Lakoff, George and Young, Carolyn, “The Artists’ Experience: Exploring Art and Environment Education at the Tertiary Level,” Ph.D. Diss., The Australian National University Press, Canberra, 2017, p. 10. 8 “Artists are needed in the communication of complex environmental problems because they communicate the emotions, help people make sense of abstract concepts through the use of metaphors, and are needed to contribute to a pro-environment narrative.” Ibid., p. 13. 9 “And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Genesis 1:28. “[O]ur common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs.’ This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air, and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she ‘groans in travail’ (Romans 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Genesis 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters,” Pope Francis, Laudato Si’ (May 24, 2015) http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/ encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html 10 “These objects (rivers, forest, etc.) have traditionally been regarded by common law . . . as objects for man to conquer and master and use. . . . Even where special measures have been taken to conserve them . . . the dominant motive has been to conserve them for us –for the greatest good of the greatest number of human beings.” Christopher, D., Should Trees Have Standing, Dobbs Ferry, NY: Ocean Publications, 1996, p. 12.   “The critical question of ‘standing’ would be simplified and also put neatly in focus if we . . . allowed environmental issues to be litigated . . . in the name of the inanimate object about to be despoiled, defaced, or invaded. . . . Contemporary public concern for protecting nature’s ecological equilibrium should lead to the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.” Ibid., p. X. 11 “Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra”, Plurinational Legislative Assembly, Bolivia, 2008.

FIGURE 3.1 Hole,

Joseph Mougel, Wendover Air Force Base, UT

3 ART IN ACADEMIA

ART IN ACADEMIAART IN ACADEMIA

The programs covered in this text are situated within public, tertiary institutions. The story of how they began and why varies from one to the next. In all cases, these explorations have been driven by the search for alternative models for educating artists in academia by moving art practice out into the field. In this chapter, we will review the history of the MFA degree, discuss its relevancy in contemporary culture, and suggest changes to better prepare students for the world they face upon graduation. Upon graduating, our students enter a world in which they will, most likely, hold multiple jobs through the duration of their working lives. Few will be supported entirely by their art practice.1 They will operate in professional contexts that are socially diverse and professionally interdisciplinary, and their artwork will be understood and valued through an increasingly complex set of cultural canons and appraised in an economic system that prioritizes experiences over objects.2 To remain relevant in these changing times, the MFA degree must evolve to address current and future conditions and contexts. A review of the possibilities for an updated arts curriculum should perhaps begin with the question of whether the arts actually belong in academia. The addition of the arts to college and university curricula in the United States began in the mid-1920s. However, its ubiquity in academic programs is a relatively recent phenomenon driven largely by the post–World War II expansion of higher education enabled by the GI Bill.3 The implementation of these new programs in the1950s and 1960s was driven by a lack of professors, not artists. In a process of circular reinforcement, the infusion of large numbers of students in universities nationwide created the need for a large number of art professors, which in turn created the need for a large number of artists with master of fine arts (MFA) degrees. That period of expansion is now

14  Art in academia

long past, and yet, the number of MFA programs has only increased as has the number of students graduating with MFA degrees.4 Some have questioned whether the master of fine arts was ever really a teaching degree at all. Howard Singerman, in his book from 1996, cites the College Art Association on this subject saying, [T]he degree of Master of Fine Arts is to be used as a guarantee of a high level of professional competence in the visual arts; it promises not only a certifiable level of technical proficiency but also, and without equivocation, “the ability to make art. . . . Having earned the degree does not necessarily guarantee an ability to teach this proficiency to others.”5 Beyond producing MFA graduates to serve as professors in new university arts programs, the utility of an academic education in training professional artists is unclear at best. With the realistic possibility for most students of an MFA leading to a university or college teaching position removed, it seems that the MFA in the contemporary economy is now of questionable value. To justify the cost of a graduate education, it can be argued that the MFA must have standing as a professional degree in other contexts. [B]ut the value of the degree remained a question, as did what exactly it certified. Unlike law or medicine wrote sociologist Judith Adler, there are “no legal licensing requirements for the practice of art (and) a formal degree gives only minute competitive advantages to its holder in any market place other than that of teaching (the claim of being a ‘certified sculptor or a qualified poet being fruitless’)”.6 To a certain extent, colleges of fine arts have addressed this issue with the addition of a PhD in the creative arts. The Field Studies program at ANU and the Visual March to Prespes at WMU from our study would be two examples. The PhD in the arts elevates the arts within the university system to the level of degrees granted in other disciplines. It does not, however, address the fact that terminal degrees in the arts do not provide actual professional certification equal to recognized professions, such as engineering, law, and medicine. Some of us inside of academia consider the training of students to be artists and training them to be academics to be two different, though related, matters. If MFA programs have been producing far too many graduates for the number of academic positions available, what are the alternatives? One possibility is that the MFA prepares students for the role of artist in our society as producer of aesthetic content for the art market. Over the past few decades, the commercial art market has experienced boom and bust cycles that mimic larger economic trends in our society with the parallel result of ever-greater stratification. With a few notable exceptions of universities and art schools located in or near major art centers, a tertiary art education as the ticket to a successful commercial art

Art in academia  15

career is a questionable investment. As a replacement for the previous models of apprenticeship with established artists or progressing through the ranks of a guild, MFA programs have not proven particularly successful in training artists to succeed in the commercial sphere. Critic Jerry Saltz asks, “How is it [the MFA] a viable choice for young artists who are not independently wealthy?” He suggests, What’s different now is that MFA programs are exorbitantly priced luxury items. At the top-shelf East Coast schools like Yale, RISD, SVA, and Columbia, the two-year cost can top $100,000 . . . we’re now at the point where only the offspring of the very rich can attend these schools.7 Coco Fusco frames the argument in terms of the debt students incur: Art and design schools are disproportionately represented among those institutions that force students into high debt. The possibility of repayment for art majors is very low by comparison to those who prepare themselves for more stable careers. This economic precarity infects the entire art-school system by excluding the majority who cannot borrow or otherwise obtain money to pay.8 This study documents a specific response to these concerns regarding tertiary arts education. The originating faculty directors have each investigated possible paths forward by designing and developing pedagogic experiments in the form of field programs. Doing so has required a reckoning with the structural relationships enforced by their institutions. The experiments in radical pedagogy undertaken by the program directors occur at a particular moment in the history of tertiary education. Over the past two decades, academic institutions in the “developed” world have been subjected to a crash course in corporatization. Public institutions of higher learning have been systematically defunded with remaining resources increasingly allocated to STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) disciplines at the expense of the humanities. This is not a new phenomenon in our society. It can be seen as merely another wave in the periodic assaults on public education. John Dewey railed against similar attacks in the late 1930s. I do point out that this organized drive against the public school system of the country, typified in the action of representatives of concentrated wealth in the two largest cities (NY & CHI), and being taken up all over the country is against the public welfare and that it comes from those who have the least amount of personal concern with public education. Their children, for the most part, do not attend the public schools. . . . They are the ones who have steadily fought from the start all enrichment of the curriculum, calling art, music, physical education, handicrafts, etc. – the things which they demand as a matter of course for their own children – fads and frills

16  Art in academia

when they are to be made a part of the educational facilities for the poor and for the masses.9 Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this new corporate vision of a university is the change in the relationship between faculty and students. As Mark Fisher explains, faculty are now expected to conceive of their students as both consumers and products of the educational experience.10 In this model, the bond between the two groups as collaborative participants in an educational experience is lost. Faculty are currently seen as the repository of knowledge charged with its delivery to passively receptive students. As a group, the program directors share the belief that this is not a viable model for an education in the arts. The field programs in this study were created out of a desire on the part of faculty directors to reestablish the affinity between faculty and students as co-conspirators in a grand experiment. This can be understood in terms of moving from a relationship “where knowledge is seen as a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable, upon those whom they consider to know nothing” to one that is far less hierarchal and is centered on posing problems for consideration and a relationship where students and tutors develop, simultaneously, powers of “critical solicitude”.11 With people living together for extended periods in a tightly knit group, sharing the responsibilities for maintaining a functioning social unit, and working in parallel on art projects, the hierarchies of the traditional classroom break down and a collaborative relationship is formed. The effect is beneficial to students and faculty alike. Students gain control of, and become responsible for, their education, and faculty become participants in the experiment as artists as well as teachers.

In search of a path forward We will now turn to the LAAW program as one example of an attempt to act upon this analysis. At UNM, the task of searching for a viable path forward for a revised MFA degree began with identifying two primary issues to address. First was the need to design an updated model of arts education to better prepare students to succeed as independent creative individuals and to bring creativity back into a central position in the academic equation. And second was the question of how to revamp the education we offered to reflect the economics of contemporary society. The decision to emphasize creativity in planning the curriculum of LAAW harkens back to a previous definition of a university education articulated by John Dewey, amongst others, focused on preparing students to reach their fullest potential as human beings with the goal of living full and meaningful lives as members of our democratic society, [P]ublic education is not a business carried on for pecuniary profit, that it is not therefore an occupation to be measured by the standards which

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bankers and real estates men and big industrialists seek for themselves in working for personal gain and measuring success and failure by the ledger balance, but that money spent on education is a social investment – an investment in future well being, moral, economic, physical, and intellectual, of the country.12 It ascribes an inherent value to creative thinking and production independent of possible commercial application. It is predicated on the idea that if we successfully equip students to function as creative thinkers and doers, they will succeed at adapting to the succession of changes they encounter over the course of their adult lives. All the field programs discussed in this book share an inherent belief in the importance of supporting creativity and aesthetic expression. None of us believe that the arts have an exclusive claim to creative practice. And yet, as the model in the sciences moves further and further from a laboratory dedicated to basic (creative) research to one based on directed research,13 the arts provide a particularly open umbrella under which an unfettered expression of creativity is possible. Quite simply, our position outside of the primary drivers of corporate capitalism leaves us largely free of its agenda. Pursuit of the question of how one teaches young artists to be creative and what underlying paradigms drive our sense of aesthetics lead to the particular characteristics of the contributing programs. While the definitions of “field” range between remote wilderness and urban center, with all points in between, the fundamental desire to support creative investigation and expression underlies all of the programs included in this text. The attempt to redefine an educational model at UNM was guided by what I saw occurring for art students in the academy. Contemporary students’ experience is complicated by the need to navigate between two very different identities. On the one hand, they are learning how to be artists in contemporary culture, and on the other, they are trying to successfully complete an academic degree. Too often, questions of what great art is, how is it made, and by whom are sidestepped as too subjective or too difficult to quantify in a system based on attributing grades to students’ work leading up to the awarding of degrees. It is much easier to make evaluations of our students based on their successful and timely completion of assignments. If the problem with developing creativity in this system is that the agency lies with the faculty, not the students, then the difficult question for professors is how to invert this relationship to make students the drivers of their own educational experiences. In academic art programs, students are positioned to consider faculty as authorities possessing knowledge available for transfer. Students accept a system that equates an A on an assignment with good art, a degree with being certified as an artist, and an MFA with official recognition of their status as artists in our society. Some of us would argue that this is not how it works. As professors, we can teach the techniques necessary to complete objects of a certain structural integrity and formal resolution. We can teach

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the history of the discipline to ensure that our students are cognizant of the larger culture dialogue, and we can teach critical skills to prepare students to analyze their work and the work of others. It is less clear that we can teach students to be creative. Art is not the endpoint of the mathematical equation Craft + Historical Knowledge + Criticality = Art. An A on an assignment doesn’t make a student’s work art, and an MFA doesn’t make a student an artist. In art, the ineffable, the unquantifiable, the ultimately subjective is an essential element that defies the academic desire to identify, assess, and critique. In short, there may well be a polarity inherent in the academic pursuit of art. If creativity is not something that can be taught in a direct linear fashion, if our primary job is to support student agency, then perhaps our focus is best placed on enhancing the conditions necessary to support creativity. In this pursuit, I began to look at whether those conditions are present in the contemporary academic classroom setting and, if not, what better contexts are available. Most studio classes take place in industrial concrete block or steel buildings designed to a sliding scale of determinates with cost at the top, followed by utility, and with aesthetics at the bottom. The classroom is the usual site of engagement with a specific discipline, its methodology and subject matter. In the dominant mode of instruction, classroom educational experiences are fixed and confined within the university’s geography, disciplinary structure, practices, values, and definitions of discourse. In the words of John Dewey, “Our whole educational system suffers from the divorce between head and hand, between work and books, between action and ideas”.14 The classroom is more often than not isolated from the experience of dynamic changes in creative artistic practices in contemporary culture, from the cultural knowledge rooted in communities, and from the environment as a physical experience. The typical academic arts studio is intentionally an impersonal space, designed for the greatest possible utility for the most possible students. Florescent lighting, the audial hum of equipment, and the rapid removal of any and all odors by the ever-present HVAC system all work to deaden sensory experience. What if there is a direct link between the characteristics of a physical space and the creativity it engenders? One argument for field programming then would be that a shift in venue is necessary to better support creativity. Indian educator Rabindranath Tagore makes exactly that argument in designing his school at Shantiniketan. In this critical period, the child’s life is subjected to the education factory, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls staring like eyeballs of the dead. We are born with that Godgiven gift of taking delight in the world, but such delightful activity is fettered and imprisoned, muted by a force called discipline which kills the sensitiveness of the child mind which is always on the alert, restless and eager to receive first-hand knowledge from mother nature. We sit inert,

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like dead specimens of some museum, while lessons are pelted on us from on high, like hail stones on flowers. In childhood we learn our lessons with the aid of both body and mind, with all the senses active and eager. When we are sent to school, the doors of natural information are closed to us; our eyes see the letters, our ears the abstract lessons, but our mind misses the perpetual stream of ideas from nature.15 In field programs, the sterility of the concrete block studio is replaced with the complex sensory world of wide-open spaces.16 The field studio experience is full of changing natural light, sound, and odor, a day-long progression of temperatures and the tactile experience of moving air and moisture. To all of this, field programs add the inspiration of spending time staring at the heavens from inside Roden Crater in Arizona, tracing the Bundian Way in New South Wales, or gallery hopping in Los Angeles, California. This haptic mode of learning engages both the body and the mind, providing an educational experience that is more holistic and far less passive. We balance artistic freedom with personal responsibility to engender the greatest possible agency in our students by encouraging a comingling of joyful play and work. Another factor in any effort to support creativity is the issue of time. Most university studio classes are three-hour (plus or minus) blocks with students taking one or two a day in a mix with other academic courses, jobs, social media, and so on. It is rare for students to experience their art practice as an open-ended engagement that begins, continues, and ends based on its own internal logic. In field studios, the jagged switches, gear changes, and over-stimulation of contemporary American culture are replaced by “the solace of open spaces” and seamless time to work. Once situated on a site, LAAW students meet at 7:00 a.m. in the morning for breakfast and 7:00 p.m. for dinner. The time in between is theirs to work without interruption. As the flow of time extends and continuity replaces segmentation, new ideas emerge, and new projects become possible.17 The third major factor driving creativity is community. Like many contemporary public universities, UNM is, in large part, a commuter college. Students are often older than the classic 18–22 demographic of an undergraduate student body. They juggle complex relationships and responsibilities in their lives. They take classes on campus but live elsewhere. Whether on campus or off, very few live in an art-based community where their interests are shared, supported, and revered. In the LAAW field program, the alienation of contemporary urban life is replaced with a community of like-minded souls who share a commitment to making art. Students and faculty travel together as a mobile arts collective, our responsibilities being to take care of the land, support each other, and make art. Over the course of the semester, through the daily acts of constructing and dismantling camp, cooking, cleaning, packing, and unpacking vans, as well as sharing in collaborative art projects, students build bonds of community that last long beyond the frame of the semester program. As they move forward in their

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lives and careers, they carry with them the experience of the positive effects of community. This question of how creativity happens and what can be done to encourage it is not new. It runs throughout human history, across cultures and epochs. We are aware that we follow in the footsteps of previous experiments. John Dewey’s pioneering work in public education in the US informs much of our thinking. In the field of education in the arts, the Bauhaus,18 Black Mountain College,19 and the Free International University (FIU) for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research20 provide important examples. The Indigenous cultures in the western hemisphere and Australia offer more holistic models for the integration of creativity in the shared experience of daily life. The programs cited here seek their place in this expansive lineage. And yet the problem remains. Can you teach creativity? Walter Gropius, regarding his work in Bauhaus, argues that [L]ately the artist has been misled by the fatal and arrogant fallacy, fostered by the state, that art is a profession which can be mastered by study. Schooling alone can never produce art! Whether the finished product is an exercise in ingenuity or a work of art depends on the talent of the individual who creates it. This quality cannot be taught or learned.21 If Gropius is correct and art cannot be taught, how can we create a situation that supports individual exploration and investigation? In developing LAAW, my thinking was heavily influenced by the model of an arts community that underpinned the pedagogy of Black Mountain College. The college began with a small number of students and organized decision-making processes in “Quaker meeting style, meaning the community achieved consensus on an issue by speaking in turn”. Additionally, in this model, students and faculty shared living and eating spaces, working together to create a community “as much as they were to be a school”.22 I was also fortunate to have first-hand experience with field programming experiments in my undergraduate educations at Pitzer College, spending a semester studying ceramics with Dennis Parks in Tuscarora, Nevada, and having close friendships with participants in Guy and Candy Carawan’s program in Appalachia. I borrowed from these in constructing the initial LAAW experiment out of similar basic building blocks: a close-knit, egalitarian community of artists; the greatest possible interdisciplinarity; direct physical engagement with environments, individuals, and communities; extended, uninterrupted time to work; and the greatest amount of self-definition in projects undertaken.23 The original conception of LAAW was further shaped by experiments from the 1960s by psychologists including Abraham Maslow into the linkage between peak experience and creativity. [I]t is quite characteristic in peak-experiences that the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole. . . . To have a clear perception

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(rather than a purely abstract and verbal philosophical acceptance) that the universe is all of a piece and that one has his place in it – one is a part of it, one belongs to it – can be so profound and shaking an experience that it can change the person’s character and his weltanschauung forever after . . . part of what this involves is a peculiar change which can best be described as non-evaluating, non-comparing, or non-judging cognition. . . . The person feels himself more than at other times to be responsible, active, the creative center of his own activities and of his own perception, more selfdetermined, more a free agent, with more free will than at other times.24 In LAAW, peak experience is driven by direct engagement with the environment over extended periods of time. Students are removed from their normal routines, their support structures, and their creature comforts and exposed to the vast space of the western desert and the severity of the elements. Students living day to day in the cycle of light and dark imposed by the movement of the sun with only a small tent as protective enclosure are often pushed out of their normal mindset into a peak experience. The resulting shift in perceptions opens new avenues in their practice both in the field and for years afterwards. LAAW students experience a related dislocation upon reentering urban life. All the things previously taken for granted – electric light, heating and cooling, water from a tap, and so on – are now viewed with fresh eyes, no longer as givens. Fundamental to the process of creating LAAW was the understanding that the program is a research experiment, that its development is a creative act, and that success would depend on maintaining an ongoing openness to change. We started with a set of initial conditions and suppositions and let them play out in the field. The goal was (and is) the greatest possible explosion of creativity. In LAAW, faculty operate from a position of “Lead by example. Turn the artists loose. Do your best to get out of their way. Be there when they need help”. Over time, the experiment has been refined in response to lived experience, changing student demographics, and evolving cultural conditions. In the harsh light of contemporary economic realities, this focus on creativity can seem simultaneously idealistic, elitist, and naïve. It appears idealist in believing that the aesthetic language of the arts is a meaningful and potent pillar of humanist values, that there is something that the visual arts add that touches aspects of the human experience that cannot be quantified, let alone monetized. It is elitist in its disregard for the grinding economics of contemporary culture, in this commitment to pursue the ineffable, to turn away from prioritizing economic gain or political change. And it is naïve in the belief that this choice for the focus of an artistic life will be valued and respected by the larger culture. Young artists in the US face a culture that elevates economic value over all others and educational institutions that have adopted this emphasis. To remain relevant, field programs have to walk a fine line in preparing students to survive in an economic system defined by corporate capitalism while maintaining a commitment to personal creativity and communal action. Whatever our personal

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aesthetic or political positions, we have a responsibility as educators to help students find their own path, meet their own goals, and develop their own ethics. It is our job to inculcate inquiry, not provide answers. To further this initiative, the Department of Art and Art History at UNM added Art and Ecology (A&E) as a new area with a focus on expanding the master of fine arts into a professional degree alongside the masters of business administration, master of architecture, master of law, and so on. Art and Ecology was chosen as the name of this new area as a creative disruption of the disciplinary silos that form most art departments. Taking its place alongside Ceramics, Sculpture, Printmaking, Painting and Drawing, Photography and Electronic Arts, Art and Ecology represents a commitment to interdisciplinary practice not merely within the arts but with any and all disciplines in the institution. LAAW serves as the primary, but not the only field program for this new area. We undertook this initiative with a keen understanding of the difficulties inherent in establishing the equivalent professional identity in the arts. Securing placements in public projects, performances, exhibitions, community actions, and publications, as well as entering the public discourse through social media and the publication of critical reviews are all part of the process. Early in the evolution of Art and Ecology, it became clear that in order to prepare our students to find sustaining work in contemporary art, it would be important to establish professional networks connecting our students in New Mexico to the global art centers while also facilitating students’ relationships with communities in our home region. A&E now fosters mentorship opportunities with arts practitioners and communities. We build connections with private and public institutions and provide post-MFA research grants with the aim of creating a smooth transition for students from the university into active careers in contemporary culture. This turn away from creativity for its own inherent value is disconcerting on certain levels. Over the years, the LAAW program has proven effective in providing an opportunity for students to turn off both internal and external editors and fully embrace the creative instinct. In those precious moments, they have produced works of force and beauty that cannot be explained or justified in logical terms and yet which have an ineffable presence. The value of these expressions cannot be overstated in a culture that seems in many ways to have lost its heart and soul. That said, it can be argued that this turn toward the professional is the inevitable result of art’s effort to reintegrate with American culture. This change does not necessarily represent an abandonment of our belief in the power of aesthetics. It is rather an attempt to move the discourse from the white box gallery to a more integrated social context. No longer the spiritual balance to a materialistic society, artists are taking their place as part of a new cultural mainstream. During the reign of modernism, the dominant model had been the asocial, if not antisocial, solo artist, alienated from the mainstream capitalist society, maintaining a spiritual practice as a counterbalance to the soulless direction of industrial,

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capitalist culture.25 This stance led to an ever-greater marginalization of the arts. The students we teach today are, for the most part, not interested in the “starving artist in the garret” model. They want to be an active, contributing part of their communities and are searching for a way to make the role of artist a sustainable component of a healthy society. The majority of our students are more interested in pursuing the possibilities for “social practice” than climbing the “art star” ladder to commercial success. They are pioneers in the shift from an “I” based society to one that emphasizes “we” and as such represent a fundamental break with the dominant western individualist paradigm driving our culture.26 The awareness that our LAAW curriculum needed to change in order to better prepare our students to operate as professionals in the world they face upon graduation started us down the road toward the second phase of the Land Arts of the American West program. We accepted the challenge laid out in the previous century by John Dewey to ask ourselves to what end we were applying the freedom our field program provides.27 Part of our time and focus in the field is now allocated to developing “particular problem-solving skills based on esoteric and theoretical knowledge”28 and the language necessary to apply these skills and knowledge to cultural and environmental issues. In this effort, more time is committed to collaborative (we) work within the environments and communities of our region. Our focus has shifted from solely supporting personal expression to also developing the skills necessary to work with others. We operate from a position that culture is part of nature, thereby dissolving the previously discussed opposition between the natural and the manmade, between wilderness and zones of habitation. We engage in collaborative projects that include participants from diverse cultural groups in an interdisciplinary approach to effecting change. LAAW provides a fundamentally collaborative experience in which students, faculty, and staff share both the logistics of day-to-day life in the field and the completion of site and community-based projects. Our visiting artist, scholar, activist program brings students into a trans-disciplinary vocabulary, connecting students with a diverse set of professionals from other academic fields, including scientists, planners, architects, lawyers, and writers. We introduce students to the expertise residing outside of dominant culture by establishing mentor relationships with artists, scholars, and elders in traditional communities. Students learn to access the capabilities of their colleagues in the program to complete interdisciplinary projects and join with community members to conceive, design, and realize collaborative projects. This embrace of social practices raises a new set of criteria for the program. Entering into an issue-based practice adds layers of judgment to any assessment of the art produced. As Dewey articulates, Serious social troubles tend to be interpreted in moral terms. That the situations themselves are profoundly moral in their causes and consequences, in the genuine sense of moral, need not be denied. But conversion of the situations investigated into definite problems demands objective

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intellectual formulation of conditions; and such a formulation demands in turn complete abstraction from the qualities of sin and righteousness, of vicious and virtuous motives that are so readily attributed to individuals, groups, classes, nations. . . . Approach to human problems in terms of moral blame and moral approbation, of wickedness and righteousness, is probably the single greatest obstacle now existing to the development of competent methods in the field of social subject matter.29 In short, the application of moral criteria for assessment can easily override aesthetics, resulting in artwork that is valued purely for its political position or efficacy. Resolving the inherent friction between these two directions (purely creative versus agent for social and environmental change) is a problem for our time. The question of a fundamental connection between aesthetics and ethics remains an open one. As artists, we are comfortable with this ambiguity and are prepared to proceed while balancing these two aspects in our practice. The potential synthesis offered by our field-based curriculum resides in our ability to forge a pedagogy that simultaneously supports individual creativity, an interdisciplinary professional vocabulary, and the ability to work collaboratively in diverse social groups. It is our intention to provide a skill set that prepares our students to survive and prosper in contemporary society.

A curricular model Each of the programs in this study has developed its own unique curricular structure. In the following, we will focus specifically on the thinking behind the development of the LAAW curriculum at UNM. The beginning of this exploration for a curricular model that would be relevant in the lives and careers of contemporary students began with the decision that our experiment could not be conducted within the physical confines of the institution. In my assessment, the constraints of the ivory tower model of education outweighed the value of remaining close to the resources available on campus. From the very beginning the intent was to expand the territory of the university by constructing a curriculum on the foundation of the social and environmental communities of our region. I began with the question of what constitutes a place-based curriculum. Young cites Woodhouse and Knapp’s list of place-based curricular aspects: • It emerges from the particular attributes of place. The content is specific to the geography, ecology, sociology, politics, and other dynamics of that place. This fundamental characteristic establishes the foundation of the concept. • It is inherently multi-disciplinary. • It is inherently experiential. In many programs this includes a participatory action . . . component.

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• It is reflective of an educational philosophy that goes beyond the standards in which the institution is assessed nationally (such as financial viability) and has broader objectives. • It connects place with self and community. . . . These curricula include multigenerational and multicultural dimensions as they interface with community resources.30 David Gruenewald, in his essay entitled “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place”, posits a distinction, if not an opposition, between placebased and critical pedagogies. He characterizes place-based pedagogies as tools that have “direct bearing on the well being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit”. Additionally, for Gruenewald, critical pedagogies do the work of challenging “assumptions, practices and outcomes” that a dominant culture espouses in educational settings. Rather than support “individualistic and nationalistic competition in the global economy”, he argues that we need to consider the commons and education that “is in the best interest of the public life in a diverse society”. Fundamental to this distinction is his idea that “place-based education emphasizes ecological and rural contexts” while critical pedagogy – in a near mirror image – emphasizes social and urban contexts and often neglects the ecological and rural scene entirely.31 In this sense, place-based pedagogies comingle public education and public lands, while radical pedagogies bring public education to shared social spaces. That said, both provide students with a layered experience of the commons. It is exactly this separation between nature and culture, the social and environmental definitions of place, and “placed-based” and “critical” pedagogies that LAAW set out to bridge. From the very beginning, we have sought to balance extended time in the remote environments of the southwest with immersion in the widest possible range of cultural communities, to be ecological rather than environmental in our thoughts and actions. The design of our place-based program in New Mexico began by asking whether there can be such a thing as an arid lands arts pedagogy. And if so, why is it necessary and why is it different from art pedagogy in other climatic zones? There is an assumption operating in most university art programs in this country that the Euro-American canon is a universal that is equally applicable in all regions of our country (if not the world). What, then, is the argument for an art education based in a specific geographic, socio-political, and environmental place? Again, we return to Gruenewald: Though the ecologically grounded emphasis of these place-based educators differs from the socially grounded emphasis of critical pedagogy, taken together, a critical pedagogy of place aims to evaluate the appropriateness of our relationships to each other, and to our socio-ecological places. Moreover, a critical pedagogy of place ultimately encourages teachers and students to re-inhabit their places, that is, to pursue the kind of social action

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that improves the social and ecological life of places, near and far, now and in the future.32 In getting started, an analysis of the facts on the ground in New Mexico helped answer questions such as what are the particularities of place associated with building a program at UNM and what form of program would best facilitate our students’ development of a contemporary practice in the arts? In the LAAW program, a sense of place is understood to have both an environmental and social aspect. The University of New Mexico, as an institution, is an under-funded university in a poor state that functions as a colony of the power centers in the United States. The economy of New Mexico is driven by the extraction industries. The state budget is dependent on the export of oil, gas, and coal and experiences the associated boom and bust cycles.33 It is further the sacrificial zone for the US government’s ongoing experimentation with nuclear technology for which it receives in return significant federal largesse.34 In New Mexico, cultural values are defined as much, if not more, by Hispanic and Native traditions as Anglo ones. While our nation as a whole strives to successfully integrate immigrant populations and ease ethnic frictions, New Mexico serves as a model with over 500 years of experience with multiculturalism. Native, Hispanic, and Anglo populations, in particular, have shared in the social, political, and environmental life of New Mexico since the times of the Spanish Entrada and the Santa Fe Trail. As a university with a Carnegie Very High Research designation, high Hispanic enrollment (33%), and one of the highest percentages of Native American students in the nation (12%), UNM is uniquely situated to conduct an exploration of new arts pedagogy. Located at the nexus of the major cultural migrations of human populations that have driven habitation on this continent – the north-south migrations of first Native and then Hispanic cultures and the east-west migrations of northern European cultures – New Mexico encompasses cultural elements as diverse as the traditions of twenty-two federally recognized tribes, the history of the Camino Real, a vibrant contemporary arts scene, and national centers of innovation for science, defense, and energy. Cultural friction remains a component of contemporary New Mexican society; however, over centuries of contact, the various groups have developed mechanisms to address the inevitable tensions that arise. In New Mexico, our collective culture values connection to family and to the land over personal fame and economic gain. New Mexican students bring these values to their approach to art. Art as a practice is seen to be of inherent value, and personal expression is balanced with community engagement. In order to take advantage of the specifics of culture and environment in New Mexico, the LAAW program was designed to be a strategic interruption of the existing educational paradigm in the College of Fine Arts and UNM.35 The standard ivory tower academic model is predicated on removing faculty and students from the everyday events of contemporary culture to support a

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contemplative atmosphere for reflection, research, and production. The LAAW program balances this dominant academic paradigm with a model based in creating engagement for our students and faculty in interdisciplinary projects that are conducted in collaboration with particular individuals and communities and that address specific social and environmental issues. Our field-based pedagogy in the arts weds content and context. It takes a fundamentally different stance on how it is that students in the arts learn. By making both physical place and human interaction a core part of the learning process, it offers an alternative educational approach aligned with how art is actually made. It requires an engagement of the entire being, an integration of both body and mind in dialogue with place and community. It re-empowers body knowledge and sensory perception to establish a balance with the abstract and theoretical. From the environmental perspective, we realize that the common perception of Americans from other regions is that New Mexico is one vast desert. In fact, New Mexico, and the Southwest as a whole, is one of the most environmentally complex regions in the country. The LAAW program provides art students with time living and working in an intimate relationship with the full range of alpine, mesa, low-desert, and riparian eco-niches. Perhaps the most important element of LAAW is the direct physical engagement it provides. Globally, contemporary urban culture is largely cut off from the environment. Fewer and fewer of our students at UNM have any real knowledge of Albuquerque’s place in the ecology of the Southwest. Although they have a political understanding of the importance of the environment, it is not rooted in any real intimacy with place. LAAW situates students in the variety of ecological niches that together comprise the southwestern environment and encourages them to explore and create their artworks in direct dialogue with place. In Gruenewald’s words, if we are to be successful in changing our relationship to the planet, “It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relationship to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for the land, and a high regard for its value”. At present, “The most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land”.36 We take the same approach to our investigations of cultural interventions present in the landscape. Spiral Jetty is an entirely different work of art when students walk out onto it along the shore of Rozel Point from the one they experience in the iconic aerial-view photographs.37 The understanding students gain of the Ancestral Puebloan site Moon House38 as an architectural presence in the landscape after hiking to it through slick rock canyons and climbing from the arroyo bottom to a precarious ledge is fundamentally different from the one gleaned from a book. LAAW further broadens the scope of an education in the arts by opening our exploration of place to an interdisciplinary context. Inviting guests to join us at sites in the field adds new perspectives from the sciences and humanities. Engaging with elders from traditional Indigenous and Hispanic communities expands

28  Art in academia

the concept of interdisciplinarity to include multicultural perspectives. LAAW embodies a different, open model of the classroom that is intrinsically permeable situating our students within New Mexico’s Pueblos, Hispanic communities, and rural towns, in a variety of eco-niches and in cyber space in the effort to align course content with our geographical and cultural place. It engages both the body and mind of our students as integrated participants in learning. The LAAW program experience brings together cultural and environment issues to create one cohesive narrative. In our field-based model, our classroom is inherently mobile, moving in an annual nomadic cycle of journeys from place to place in an extended exploration of our home bio-region. LAAW furthers the initiative at UNM to support our diverse student population by expanding the geographic context of the UNM campus to include traditional communities in our region. It recognizes the human resources that reside in these communities and provides a context for their interaction with our students. Over time, we have identified core social and environmental issues on our region and conducted extensive investigations of the Rio Grande Watershed, the US–Mexico Border, the nuclear and oil and gas extraction industries, utopian architecture, and the New Mexico foodshed. Each new investigation provides the students with a lens for exploring place and a possible avenue to follow in developing their art practices. In the Land Arts of the American West program, students receive an education steeped in the specifics of social and environmental place that prepares them to contribute in a wide range of social and environmental contexts as they go forward in their lives and careers.

Notes 1 “Of all arts graduates in the US, 18% work in sales and other office occupations, 17% are educators, 14% have not worked in the last five years, 11% work in various professional fields, 9% are managers, 8% make a living as artists, 8% work in service jobs, 5% work in various blue collar occupations, 4% are working in business and finance, 4% now work in science, technology or engineering, and 2% now work in medicine.” http://censusreport.bfamfaphd.com/schooltowork 2 Blake, Morgan, NOwnership, No Problem: Why Millennials Value Experiences Over Owning Things. www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2015/06/01/nownershipnoproblem-nownersmillennials-value-experiences-over-ownership/2/#45148a4b77ca, 3 The original GI Bill offered veterans up to $500 a year for college tuition and other educational costs – ample funding at the time. An unmarried veteran also received a $50-a-month allowance for each month spent in uniform; a married veteran received slightly more. Other benefits included mortgage subsidies, enabling veterans to purchase homes with relative ease. . . . College campuses did become grossly over-crowded in the postwar years: approximately 7.8 million World War II veterans received benefits under the original GI Bill, and 2.2 million of those used the program for higher education. 4 “The first M.F.A.s were awarded in the mid 1920s at the Universities of Washington, Oregon, Yale and Syracuse . . . but the Master of Fine Arts did not become widespread until much later. At the beginning of the 1940s there were 60 graduate studio candidates enrolled at eleven institutions; in 1950–51 there were 320 candidates at thirtytwo institutions . . . In 1994–95 there were at least 7,100 students enrolled full-time

Art in academia  29

for the M.F.A.; more than ten thousand degrees were awarded between 1990–1995. Singerman, Howard, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 6. 5 Directory of M.F.A. Programs in the Visual Arts, re. ed., New York: College Art Association, 1996 in Singerman, Howard, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 187. 6 Adler, Judith, Artists in Offices, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1979 in Singerman, Howard, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 187. 7 Saltz, Jerry, “We Need to Reconsider Art School,” www.vulture.com/2014/12/we-needto-reconsider-art-school.html 8 Fusco, Coco, “The Brooklyn Rail: Critical Perspectives on Arts Politics and Culture,” December 9th 2015, www.vulture.com/2014/12/we-need-to-reconsider-art-school. html 9 Boydston, Jo Ann, Ed., John Dewey, The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 9: 1933– 1934, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1986, p. 114. 10 “Neoliberal ideology in state funded ‘public’ university education – aka ‘corporate pedagogy’ cast-as-technocratic market rationalism (managerialism) is creating a dysfunctional relationship between student and tutor, one which is more akin to that of consumer/customer and ‘knowledge provider’. This reciprocal commercial relationship is further muddled, because, as Fisher has written, it’s never too clear if the students are the consumers or the actual products being produced.” Fisher, M., Capitalist Realism, Great Britain: Zero books, 2009, p. 42 in Beagles, John, “In a Class All of Their Own: The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education,” Variant Vol. 39/40 (Winter), 2010, p. 31. 11 Beagles, John, “In a Class All of Their Own: The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education,” Variant Vol. 39/40 (Winter), 2010, p. 33. 12 Boydston, Jo Ann, Ed., John Dewey, The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 9: 1933– 1934, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1986, p. 123. 13 The Changing Nature of U.S. Basic Research: Trends in Funding Sources, State Science & Technology Institute. https://ssti.org/blog/changing-nature-us-basic-researchtrends-funding-sources. 14 Boydston, Jo Ann, Ed., John Dewey, The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 9: 1933– 1934, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University, 1986, p. 124. 15 Tagore, Rabindranath, “Talks in China,” in A Tagore Reader, Amiya Chakravarty ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961, p. 214. 16 Boris Groys makes this point using a biological metaphor. “[A]rtists (and art students within the confines of an art school) need to “modify their immune systems of their art in order to incorporate new aesthetic bacilli”. For Groys, this means artists/students/ educators opening themselves up to distinctly different forms of work, experiences, subjectivities and identities.” Groys, B., “Education by Infection,” in Art school: (propositions for the 21st century) Madoff, S.H., ed., Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2009, p. 29 in Beagles, John, “In a Class All of Their Own: The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education,” Variant Vol. 39/40 (Winter), 2010, p. 34. 17 The constraint of the semester as a unit of time, however, remains. Projects that require years to mature by necessity must span across several cohorts of students, making continuity in the field an issue and culmination elusive for the individual student. FS has addressed this problem by extending the program across two semesters, while UNM has added a concentration in Art and Ecology, in part, to allow student involvement in field projects to extend. 18 “The Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar . . . with the idea of creating a ‘total’ work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. The Bauhaus style later became one of the most influential currents in modern design, Modernist architecture and art, design

30  Art in academia

and architectural education. The Bauhaus had a profound influence upon subsequent developments in art, architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography,” Wikipedia.   “The Bauhaus pioneered a new educational approach. Its founding tenets were indebted to the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement in Britain . . . the Bauhaus soon evolved to embrace industrial production and new technologies.” Bush, Kate, Bauhaus: Art as Life, London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2012, p. 6. 19 “Founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, Frederick Georgia, and Ralph Lounsbury . . . Black Mountain was experimental by nature and committed to an interdisciplinary approach, attracting a faculty that included many of America’s leading visual artists, composers, poets, and designers,” Wikipedia. 20 “The Free International University (FIU) for Creativity and Interdiscipli nary Research was a support organization founded by the German artist Joseph Beuys together with Klaus Staeck (1st chairman), Georg Meistermann (2nd chairman) and Willi Bongard (secretary), based on principles laid down in a manifesto written by Joseph Beuys and Heinrich Böll. It was founded as a (sic) ‘organizational place of research, work, and communication’ to ponder the future of society,” Wikipedia. 21 Bush, Kate, Bauhaus: Art as Life, London: Barbican Art Gallery, 2012, p. 6. 22 Molesworth, Helen, Leap Before You Look, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015, p. 30. 23 “It is in the mountains and the landscape is superb. But it is not in the physical aspects of this place that is (sic) interesting. But a principle of community living and education that I have heard about but never saw in practice. These people are willing to take the consequences of what they preach – which is most unusual. In essence there exists the utmost freedom for people to be what they please. There is simply no pattern of behavior, no criteria to live up to. People study what they please, as long as they want to, idle if they want, graduate whenever they are willing to stand on examination . . . They can attend classes or stay away. They can work entirely by themselves, or they need not work whatever.” Ibid., p. 42. 24 Maslow, Abraham, Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1964, pp. 59, 60, 67. 25 The Rothko Chapel is perhaps a prime example of this pursuit. An abstract expressionist painter dedicated to exploring the interior reaches of the human psyche, Rothko covered the walls of the space with his painting creating a space of contemplation before committing suicide in 1970 at age 66. 26 “Social practice is an art medium that focuses on social engagement, inviting collaboration with individuals, communities, and institutions in the creation of participatory art. It is also referred to by a range of different names: public practice, socially engaged art, community art, new-genre public art, participatory art, interventionist art, collaborative art, relational art and dialogical aesthetics. Social practice art came about in response to increasing pressure within art education to work collaboratively through social and participatory formats,” Wikipedia. 27 “The commonest mistake made about freedom is to identify it with freedom of movement, or with the external and physical side of activity. Now this external and physical side of activity cannot be separated from the internal side; from freedom of thought, desire, and purpose. The limitation that was put upon outward action by the fixed arrangements of the typical traditional schoolroom . . . put a great restriction upon intellectual and moral freedom. . . . But the fact still remains that an increased measure of freedom of outer movement is a means not an ends. . . . Everything then depends, so far as education is concerned, upon what is done with this added liberty. What end does it serve? Boydston, Jo Ann, Ed., John Dewey, The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 13: 1938–1939, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1988, p. 31. 28 Singerman, Howard, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, p. 190.

Art in academia  31

29 Boydston, Jo Ann, Ed., Dewey, John, The Later Works 1925–1953, Volume 12: 1938– 1939, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1986, pp. 488–489. 30 Woodhouse, Janice L., and Clifford E. Knapp, Place-Based Curriculum and Instruction: Outdoor and Environmental Education Approaches, Charleston, WV: AEL, 2000, pp. 1–2. In Young, Carolyn, The Artists’ Experience: Exploring Art And Environment Education At The Tertiary Level, Canberra: ANU Press, 2016, p. 26. 31 Gruenewald, David, A., “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” Educational Researcher Vol. 32, Issue 4, pp. 3–12; American Educational Research Association, 2003, p. 2. 32 Ibid, p. 10. 33 “In January 2014, the New Mexico Tax Research Institute released a study entitled, Fiscal Impacts of Oil and Natural Gas Production in New Mexico. According the study, 31.5% of New Mexico’s General Fund Revenues were attributed to the oil and natural gas industry for fiscal year 2013 . . . that’s over $1.7 billion in General Fund revenues that are attributed to oil and natural gas of the nearly $5.6 billion in total General Fund revenues received in fiscal Year 2013.” http://newmexico31.com/ 34 NM ranked fourth behind Alaska, Wyoming, and Delaware amongst the states in federal dollars (over $2,400) per capita received. www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/fas-10.pd 35 “Perhaps the most revolutionary characteristic of place-based education . . . is that it emerges from the particular attributes of place. This idea is radical because current educational discourses seek to standardize the experience of students from diverse geographical and cultural places so that they may compete in the global economy. Such a goal essentially dismisses the idea of place as a primary experiential or educational context, displaces it with traditional disciplinary content and technological skills, and abandons places to the workings of the global market.” Gruenewald, David, A., “The Best of Both Worlds: A Critical Pedagogy of Place,” Educational Researcher Vol. 32, Issue 4, pp. 3–12; American Educational Research Association, 2003, p. 10. 36 Ibid., p. 8. 37 Kastner, Jeffrey, Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Books, 1998, Cover image. 38 Moon House is a Pueblo III-period cliff dwelling located in southeastern Utah on Cedar Mesa. It was inhabited by Ancestral Puebloan peoples between the 960s and 1270 with most of the construction taking place between 1125 and 1250.

FIGURE 4.1 Landmarks

of Art, Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, CA

4 FIVE PROGRAMS

FIVE PROGRAMSFIVE PROGRAMS

We now turn to an investigation of five programs on three continents in the attempt to create a more comprehensive picture of the possibilities for field programming practices in the arts. Many of the issues raised are revisited in the following chapter in which we take an in-depth look at the history of the Land Arts of the American West program. Each of the programs discussed, in its design and implementation, provides important insights into the larger context in which field programming occurs.1 In this chapter, we employ a survey as a tool to investigate both the shared aspects and specificities of the various programs. The survey review is then followed in chapter five by interviews in which the directors speak to the topics directly in their own words.

Program study design In the fall of 2016, the authors conducted a survey with the program directors to identify similarities and differences in the design, implementation, and evolution of the individual programs. Based on those surveys, we then developed a set of questions for in-person interviews. In the conversations Anicca Cox conducted in the spring of 2017 with both the directors who conceived of the programs originally and those who have succeeded them and carried on this work, the essential nature of field programming and the values driving this particular variation on art pedagogy become evident. Participant reflections range from the origins of their programs to the interdisciplinary possibilities inherent in the work; the institutional conditions which shape, challenge, support, and constrain field programming; pedagogical philosophies, principles of practice, and community building; and what each director sees as the intrinsic value of place-based art making for themselves as practitioners and for their students and host communities. After

34  Five programs

reviewing the conversations with the program directors, Bill Gilbert conducted a follow-up survey with student participants from all five programs to gather their thoughts on the issues discussed.

Survey summary Our goal in conducting the survey was to more fully articulate the specific program characteristics and create a visual tool (table) for exploring the differences. In our questions to the program directors, we chose to focus on conceptual framing components that for us speak to the most important elements of program design and practice that all share: Institutional Context, Funding, Leadership, Curriculum, Logistics, and Publication and Dissemination. And while the subsequent, “Participant Voices” chapter elucidates the qualitative and philosophical nature of approach that each program takes, this collection of survey responses adds yet another layer to our examination of field programming, a side-by-side comparison of context and practice, and a picture of what each program must navigate in order to exist and thrive. In the process of reviewing the survey responses, it became clear that the division of topics in the survey sections is somewhat arbitrary as each category works relationally with the others. For example, institutional context and funding have a direct bearing on the curriculum and its delivery, the leadership structure, the apportionment of time between campus and field, and the extent of publication and dissemination. The following tables can then be seen as a set of layers that when combined produce a nuanced and somewhat holistic picture of field programming as a pedagogic practice.

Host Institution Type

Associate Professor

Full Professor

Assistant Professor of Painting

Associate Professor of Painting

2005–

PA, WVU 2010–2013

A+E, CSU 2014–

Sessional Lecturer & Field Studies Coordinator

Senior Lecturer, Field Study Convenor, Field Logistics Coordinator

University with BFA, MFA

University with BFA, MFA

Community College with Associate Degree

University with BA, MFA & PhD

Lecturer, Field Study Convenor, University with BA, MFA & Field Logistics Coordinator PhD

Role/Title of Director

LMoA, MCC 2001–2004

BE, ANU 2015–

2000–2014

FS, ANU 1996–1999

Program/Institution

TABLE 4.1  Institutional context

Research & teaching

Research & teaching

Teaching

Research & teaching

Research & teaching

Institutional Focus

(Continued)

Department of Art & Art History, College of Liberal Arts

School of Art & Design, College of Creative Arts

Sculpture & Ceramics, Art Department

School of Art, College of Arts & Social Sciences

School of Art, College of Arts & Social Sciences

Location of Program in host institution

University with BA, MFA & PhD

Research & teaching

Assistant Professor of Art & Ecology, UNM

2016–UNM

Assistant Professor of Painting

Art & Ecology, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Art, UNM

Distinguished Professor of Art & Ecology, UNM

2015 UNM

VMTP, WMU 2006–

Art & Ecology, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Art, UNM

Professor of Art & Ecology, UNM

2009–2014 UNM

Fine & Applied Arts, Department of Visual Arts, WMU

Art & Ecology, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Art, UNM

Ceramics, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Art, UNM

Ceramics, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Art, UNM & Design, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Arts, UT

Ceramics, Painting & Drawing, Department of Art & Art History, College of Fine Arts, UNM

Location of Program in host institution

Professor of Ceramics, UNM

Research & teaching

Institutional Focus

2007–2008 UNM

University with BA, BFA & MFA

Host Institution Type

Professor of Ceramics, UNM & Assistant Professor of Design, UT

Professor of Ceramics & Professor of Painting, UNM

Role/Title of Director

2002–2006 UNM  & UT

LAAW, UNM 2000 UNM

Program/Institution

TABLE 4.1 (Continued)

Five programs  37

Institutional context As mentioned in previous chapters, institutional context remains one of the most salient features of implementing these types of programs as well as maintaining and developing them over the long run. This conceptualization, we feel, is useful in understanding some of the interpolations in the programs between curricular and theoretical concerns as well as logistical and organizational ones – it dictates both constraints and specific choices within the programs. Responses to our summary delineate the differing sizes, configurations, and changes over time that exist in the programs in terms of features such as institutional type and the role each director fills. They offer a sense of institutional scope, highlighting some of the common features programs must negotiate in order to ensure effective and sustainable work in the field. They also illuminate some of the possibilities institutional configurations offer to field programming, giving it a “home” and a place from which to move outward into local communities and across disciplinary spaces. Most important, the survey demonstrates that field programs can thrive in a range of institutional contexts. The first and perhaps most important distinction in this category amongst the programs in our cohort is between Landmarks of Art at Mira Costa College, a community college offering an associate degree, and the other programs all of which are situated in research institutions with vital graduate programs; the further differentiation being that Field Studies at Australia National University and Visual March to Prespes at Western Macedonia University offer both PhD and MFA degrees. The import of this distinction can be seen in the demographics of the student body, with LMoA students being younger, less advanced in their education, and, as a result, conceivably less committed to art as their major focus. LMoA director Yoshi Hayashi has responded by providing a wide variety of field experiences, within limited time frames as opposed to lengthier ones offered by LAAW and FS. Conversely, the advanced requirements of the PhD degree at WMU and ANU emphasizing critical writing as an equal component to art production selects for an older student body with a more intellectual approach to their practice. This institutional difference manifests in many, if not all, aspects of the respective programs – the curriculum offered, time in the field, requirement for artistic production, and so on. It has a direct bearing on the role of the program directors. In research universities, the definition of the program director’s job as tenure track faculty is quite different from that of a professor of art at a community college. In particular, at ANU, UNM, WMU, and WVU, faculty evaluations consider exhibition/publication and teaching, whereas at MCC, teaching is the important category. The effect of this differentiation becomes particularly evident when we investigate the exhibition/publication records of the various programs. Faculty in research institutions are expected to publish/exhibit their personal creative research, as well as work from the program and in so doing educate students in this aspect of art practice explicitly.

38  Five programs

Finally, there is the question of what sort of structural position the programs have within their institutions. FS is housed within a school of art in a College of Arts and Social Sciences. The inclusion of the social sciences makes for a much broader set of degree offerings than those provided by the College of Creative Arts, College of Fine Art, College of Creative Art, and School of Fine Art at PA, UNM, WMU, and WVU, respectively. The presence of the social sciences within the same college should make it easier for students to pursue an interdisciplinary education and for faculty to implement interdisciplinary courses. Operating in colleges of fine arts, PA, WMU, WVU, and LAAW faculty and students have access to a wide range of arts disciplines. LMoA’s position in a department of art is the most focused on visual art per se. Regardless, these programs arise out of existing disciplinary spaces and then expand, redesign, and build in ways specific to their institutional context.

Faculty & field coordinator salary Participants responsible for transportation, food & camping equipment

Faculty (Program Director) & field coordinator salary Transportation Exhibition & catalog Promotion Food Camping equipment

Faculty (Program Director) & field coordinator salaries

Faculty (Program Director) salary Transportation Food Lodging Site fees

Faculty (Program Director) & adjunct faculty salaries, Transportation Food Guest honoraria Camping equipment Site fees

Faculty salary Transportation

FS/ANU

BE/ANU

LMoA/MCC

PA/WVU

A+E/CSU

Faculty salary Transportation

Faculty salaries University grant for innovative summer course offerings University grants for program start up & marketing Special student course fee for equipment rental, transportation, site fees & food

Faculty salary & transportation Students responsible for transportation, food, camping equipment & site fees

Lecturer and field coordinator salary

Campus funding sources

Program operating costs/expenses

Program

TABLE 4.2 Funding

Volunteer student aids

(Continued)

Murray-Darling Basin Commission grant AUD ACT Government grant Australian Research Council Linkage grant for program procedural research

External funding sources

Program operating costs/expenses

Faculty (Program Director) & field logistics coordinator salary Teaching assistantships Scholarships Transportation Exhibition Publication Food and kitchen supplies Guest honoraria Equipment/Technology Field Projects Site fees

Faculty (Program Director) salary Transportation Food Lodging

Program

LAAW/UNM

VMTP/WMU

TABLE 4.2 (Continued)

External funding sources Lannan Foundation grant: Scholarships Transportation Guest honoraria Equipment/Technology Field projects Exhibitions Publication Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant: Student research projects International travel guest artists honoraria Municipality of Prespes Prefecture of Western Macedonia Small fee from non-student participants Participants share food, lodging & transportation costs

Campus funding sources Faculty salaries Teaching assistantships Student course fee for food, kitchen supplies & site fees

Faculty salary

Five programs  41

Funding It is not surprising that the level of funds and their source influence many aspects of these programs from faculty staffing to the amount of time spent in the field, the curriculum delivered, and the level of publication/exhibition activity. That said, program leaders have proven adept at working with minimal institutional contributions. Our interest here was in how programs adapt, thrive, build, or shape around material limitations. What is required at the most basic level, in terms of institutional funding, and what can be sourced elsewhere? LMoA and VMTP are supported by their home institutions solely in the form of faculty salaries. All other costs are born by the participants. The absence of funding is one of the factors limiting the time LMoA can spend in the field. VMTP has adapted by running the program for no credit as a community-based project with equal numbers of student and community artist participants. The other programs have found ways to match funds from their home departments with sources both inside and outside of the institution. PA receives support from a university-wide freshman learning program, which in turn influences when the program is offered, the length of time in the field, course requirements, and assessment. FS and LAAW have been successful in attracting outside funding to augment institutional support. FS has received national grants to support student involvement in collaborative, community-based projects, whereas LAAW has utilized contributions from major private foundations to support all aspects of maintaining a program in the field for extended periods. Funding also becomes a major contributor to the continuity of these field programs across transitions in leadership. In the case of LAAW, funding from private foundations enabled a seamless transition in leadership from Bill Gilbert to Jeanette Hart-Mann and Subhankar Banerjee. Funding for FS, being grant based, came to an end with John Reid’s retirement. Amanda Stuart’s BE program continued with marginal support until stabilized by a commitment of institutional funding from ANU. Arguably, the more institutional funding provided, the greater the possible scope of field programs. It should be acknowledged that sourcing outside funding in the form of donations or grants adds yet another layer to the work of directors, and there is no easy equation between funding levels and the quality of the educational experience.

LMoA/MCC 2002–2004 2005–ongoing

BE/ANU 2015–ongoing

FS/ANU 1996–2014

Program

Leadership responsibilities

One junior faculty member One senior faculty member

One part-time lecturer & one paid assistant

Oversee all program logistics Direct curriculum development Provide instruction & critique in the field & on campus Secure funding Manage interpersonal relations

Oversee all program logistics Direct curriculum development Direct program development & promotion Coordinate guest artists, scholars, activists & community partnerships Secure funding Provide instruction & assessment of undergraduate participants Oversee safety in the field Manage interpersonal relations

One senior faculty & one paid Oversee all program logistics assistant Direct curriculum development Direct program development & promotion Coordinate guest artists, scholars, activists & community partnerships Secure funding Oversee public exhibitions on campus & in host communities Publish program catalogue Oversee safety in the field Manage interpersonal relations

Leadership structure

TABLE 4.3 Leadership

Teaching assistant responsibilities

LMoA is currently being offered by one instructor Transition plan is to share existing program and/or develop new courses with department faculty colleagues

Transitioned in 2015 from Field Studies Program directed by full-time senior faculty to Elective Studies Course directed by parttime lecturer

Transition plan

LAAW/UNM 2000

A+E/CSU 2014-ongoing

PA/WVU 2008–2013 Oversee all program logistics Direct curriculum development Direct program development & promotion Provide instruction & critique in the field Coordinate guest artists, scholars, activists & community partnerships Liaison with Adventure West Virginia Oversee safety in the field Manage interpersonal relations

Two senior faculty & two TAs Oversee all program logistics Direct curriculum development Direct program development & promotion

One senior faculty member

One full-time faculty & one part-time faculty

Kitchen Camp Coordinator oversees all aspects of field food operation (Continued)

No transition in the near future

No transition plan in place when program founder left WVU to take a position at CSU

VMTP/WMU 2007–ongoing

LAAW/UNM 2016–ongoing

One faculty coordinator, one teaching assistant & one administrative assistant *Scientific committee consults on the annual focus of program

One junior faculty, one research faculty & two TAS

One senior faculty, one junior faculty & two TAs One senior faculty, one research faculty & two TAs

2000–2007

2009–2015

Leadership structure

Program

TABLE 4.3 (Continued)

Tech-Archive Coordinator oversees all aspects of program technology use & maintenance, Both serve as back up drivers, if needed

Provide instruction and critique in the field and on campus Provide student advisement and assessment Coordinate guest artists, scholars, activists and community partnerships Oversee public exhibitions on campus and in host communities Secure funding Complete annual grant reports, Oversee safety in the field Manage interpersonal relations Manage staff and TAs Collate archive materials

Oversee all program logistics Direct curriculum development Direct program development & promotion Secure funding Oversee safety in the field Manage interpersonal relations

Teaching assistant responsibilities

Leadership responsibilities

Currently no transition plan in place

With retirement of senior faculty, position split in two: senior faculty position serves as Lannan Chair & director of the Land Arts Mobile Research Center & junior faculty position as LAAW field program director

Transition plan

Five programs  45

Leadership This survey section illustrates for us the role the directors, assistant directors, and conveners of each program must navigate within their home institutions as they deliver their program’s curricular content. It documents the changes over time that many of the programs have both instituted and been subject too from internal and external exigencies and points to future plans for leadership transitions and the solvency/sustainability of their visions. Responses to our survey questions show clearly that, though the programs may structurally be housed within departments, the directors individually bear responsibility for their programs in the significant aspects of administration and implementation. The range of capabilities required to successfully lead these field programs is quite extensive. Directors must be able to articulate a pedagogic vision, teach and mentor their students effectively, produce and publish significant creative research, manage staff and budgets, be effective ambassadors to diverse communities, secure funding, navigate complex bureaucracies, and, in some cases, drive large vans. The actual leadership structures employed vary with the complexity of the offerings. Size of the group, length of time in the field, and relative remoteness of sites visited appear to be determining factors. At one end of this spectrum, LMoA takes two- or three-day trips in which students drive their own vehicles and are given directions to a meeting place in a managed campground. On this basis, the program is able to function under the leadership of a single faculty member. At the other end, PA includes a backpacking component, by design taking students far beyond the reach of public services. The risks involved make the argument for the two faculty positions. LAAW spends three weeks at a time camping in remote locations and has developed the largest leadership structure, which includes two faculty and two TAs who help with the logistics of maintaining large groups of students and guests in the field. The increase in community-based projects (versus wilderness), in VMTP and FS, conversely, relieves some of the logistical complications associated with maintaining groups in the field while adding greatly to the complexity of social organization. Another point of differentiation amongst our group is the standing of the program directors in their home departments. Both Gilbert and Reid were tenured faculty members when they implemented their programs. This provided them with much greater leverage and security than Hayashi, Osborne, or Ziogas experienced as they sought to begin. It also clarifies the challenges faced by HartMann and Stuart, as part-time faculty, in their efforts to maintain momentum in a period of transition for FS and LAAW. Whether in terms of securing funding, both inside and outside of the institution, recruiting students, or even being able to afford the required investment of time in the field, operating from the position of senior faculty was a distinct advantage for Gilbert and Reid. Given the breadth and depth of responsibilities program directors assume, the potential for burnout in field program leadership positions is a very real issue. It seems to be almost an inherent conundrum that this type of pedagogy generates

46  Five programs

from an individual, personal vision and then becomes difficult to develop and maintain on that basis. It seems even more challenging to secure the program’s continuation beyond the tenure of the originating faculty. For example, in LMoA, Hayashi is a pursuing a unique solution designed for the particularities of his situation at MCC. He is proposing to transition from the single faculty director model to share LMoA amongst various faculty members in the art department, thereby increasing the institutional buy-in while reducing the burden on a single faculty member. Others, like LAAW and FS, have chosen to, in effect, “pass the torch” to those who have already worked closely with and been trained with the original director. This allows for both continuity and innovation as the new directors pursue their own visions of this work.

(Continued)

Via ‘Workshops’ – painting, sculpture, printmaking, photography, glass, textiles, wood, gold & silversmithing, ceramics Undergraduates submit a folio of artwork for assessment Undergraduates Community participate as one engagement of three optional is an integral Elective Studies part of the courses curriculum

Not required Required Undergraduate reading list for Elective Study undergraduates students required to produce folio of artwork

BE/ANU

Program Review of Access to labs Student Work Via ‘Workshops’ – painting, Undergraduate sculpture, printmaking, group critiques photography, glass, of work-intextiles, wood, gold & progress at regular intervals silversmithing, ceramics Non-compulsory review sessions for undergraduates. Honors and graduate reviews occur in the field and on campus

Path to Degree

Field Study Distinction Submission of program taken in made artwork for conjunction with between catalogue & honors project or ‘community public graduate students’ consultation’ exhibition is MFA/PhD thesis. and not compulsory ‘community Undergraduates participate in FS engagement’ All participants as one of three optional Elective ‘consult’ with the field Studies community In second semester ‘engagement’ takes place in pursuit of mutually negotiated aims

No required No specific reading list requirement Reference for honors & material is graduate made available students by program director, field experts & participants

FS/ANU

Artistic Production Public Presentation Community Requirements of Creative Research Engagement Requirements Requirements

Course Readings

Program/ Institution

TABLE 4.4 Curriculum

Students are Suggested reading One work for each No requirements Students engage Place: Appalachia required often leads to BFA directly with list for all course topic: and MFA thesis work to present coalfield students Coal, Water, completed work and farming Prepares students for Wilderness and for critique the courses in Global communities Agriculture last evening at Positioning Studies presented in the each site curriculum field only No campus requirement

PA/WVU

Students present N/A 2002– work for critique Listed as one course at each site in a number of general education and elective courses in the art and art history program 2012– Fulfills CSU requirements for specific certificates in art 2013– Accepted for UC art major requirements

Access to labs

Students required Students required None to participate in to create work an exhibition inspired by on campus each trip

Digital reading list provided

LMoA/MCC

Program Review of Student Work

Path to Degree

Artistic Production Public Presentation Community Requirements of Creative Research Engagement Requirements Requirements

Course Readings

Program/ Institution

TABLE 4.4 (Continued)

In field only, VMTP/WMU No required no campus reading requirement Program provides a bibliography related to the field experience, issues of relational practice & the aesthetics of peripatetic walking

Research paper Finished art works Documentation of work in the field Documentation of other students’ work Upload of all images to archive

Students present No access for work for group undergraduates discussions in Graduate students have the field, on 24 hour access to campus & final personal studios & course review graduate facility

All participants No requirements Community There is no meet to discuss engagement immediate relation projects is an integral between the part of the student’s practice & process the degree Program participants are half students & half community members

Students required One required Curriculum provides four upper community to submit level courses in based project art work for undergraduate and per year jurying into graduate A&E annual LAAW Continued volunteer exhibition engagements in community projects in following semesters

Required reading One work for each No requirements Consultation Offered as an elective Students required Students have access to all Art Department labs with host list for all course topic: for undergraduates & to produce a with permission of area finished piece communities students Earth & Sky, graduates in the supervisor for each course No required Department of Art Environmental topic with engagement and Art History issues, is critiqued beyond field Listed as a Sustainability trips recommended course formally by the group for Art students pursuing a SoGES minor

LAAW/UNM Required program reader related to the chosen sites & journey themes Students are responsible for leading discussions in the field based on the readings

A+E/CSU

50  Five programs

Curriculum This section highlights the cohesiveness of vision and approach of curricular design across programs. It demonstrates that curriculum indicates a cornerstone of field program values: that each program responds to its local conditions and geographies, as well as sociocultural realities, in order to form effective curricular programming. Here, the survey provides an exploration of the range of curricular activities across the five programs and offers a vision of what field programming can and does achieve in a variety of institutional contexts. While the programs in our cohort share a fundamental commitment to the importance of moving art education and practice out of the academic studio into the environments and communities of their regions, there are significant variations in the specifics of how each operates. Each has developed a specific curricular approach that fits its environmental and social context, student demographic, and funding level. Given their position in tertiary-level institutions, it is not surprising that all the programs provide a list of texts to support the intellectual aspect of contemporary art practice.2 LAAW, FS, and PA place the greatest emphasis on this form of research. LAAW students enroll for a full semester’s load of four courses and fulfill requirements for both academic research and artistic production. In FS, students bring the responsibility for research associated with their MFA and PhD degrees with them from their home disciplines. Students enrolled in PA range from incoming freshman to MFA candidates, which greatly complicates the design of a program reading list. A fundamental consideration for program directors is the relationship between campus and field, and there is significant variation in our group in how that relationship is balanced. VMTP and PA occur entirely in the field. As such, they represent a greater dislocation from on-campus education. In PA, all artistic production is completed and presented for assessment on site in the field. VMTP students receive no academic credit, and therefore, the program occupies no direct link in the path to a degree. There are no requirements for individual artistic production, and assessment takes the form of group discussions amongst all participants. Students enrolled in FS divide their time between field and campus over a full year. Undergraduate and graduate student participants register in FS through their major discipline on campus, and faculty in those disciplines take responsibility for establishing requirements and providing assessment for work done in the field. LMoA and LAAW both combine time in the field with seminars on campus. The LMoA director provides preparatory lectures and leads discussions on campus before leaving campus. Artistic production is presented and assessed in the field by the director in individual and group critiques. LAAW creates an evenly divided time structure between field and campus. Students enroll in a full semester’s load (four courses) and have requirements for both academic research and artistic production. Assessment is conducted in individual and group discussions with faculty, students, and program guests. Students are required to submit work

Five programs  51

for a culminating exhibition. FS also presents an annual exhibition; however, participation is not required. Part of the dislocation students experience in these field programs is felt in their removal from campus studios and labs. Being entirely field based, LMoA, PA, and VMTP provide no lab access on campus to students enrolled in their programs. FS is structured around intensive segments in the field, bracketed by time working on campus. Students have access to labs and studios through their home disciplines. LAAW also combines field and studio components; however, only graduate participants receive access to labs and studios. The question of access to facilities on campus speaks to the relative level of integration each program enjoys within the larger departmental curriculum. All the programs, with the exception of LMoA, have moved strongly in the direction of a community engagement component in their curriculum.3 They are now introducing students to a model of art practice that is inherently collaborative. This change in focus alters the terms of artistic production, exhibition, and publication and as such redefines conceptions of assignments and assessment. Perhaps of all the survey topics, this has proven to be the most revealing of the educational experience provided. It seems evident that each of the program directors has reached his or her own decisions regarding academic requirements, relationship with their departmental curriculum, and focus in the field.

Program Procedure: campus & field

Field only: 2 x 3- day trips

Campus: 4 weeks

LMoA/MCC

Remote, rural, Rural, agrarian & suburban & Indigenous urban locations communities in subtropical & temperate rain forests, semiarid, alpine, coastal precincts & cultivated landscapes

Type & location of Communities engaged field sites by program

Remote, suburban, Campus: urban locations Lectures on Land Art and in Los Angeles, site strategies Sonoran Briefing before and after Desert, Pacific each trip Coast & Laguna Mountains

Field: Field only: 3 x 5-day trips or 2 Briefing, orientation, & x 10-day trips program overview Artists take notes, interview community members, photographically document, make field notations, collect materials Option for participants to return to places of particular interest & devise their own field itinerary

Time allocation: campus & field

BE/ANU

FS/ANU 1996–2013

Program

TABLE 4.5 Logistics

Campus and field: Scholars, artists, activists, artist in residence

Field: Scholars, artists, activists, farmers, scientists

Liability waiver Digital images & book release

Written contracts with undergraduates Honours students Postgraduate contracts associated with their respective campus courses Students sign risk assessment form Non-enrolled participants sign indemnity form

Collaboration with guest Student contractual speakers, visiting artists requirements for participation in field study

PA/WVU

Campus: Half-day seminar introduction to camp etiquette & field procedures

Field: Daily site specific art work from 7:00 AM–6:30 PM Visits & discussions with community hosts & guest artists 1 hour debriefing at conclusion of program

Field: 1 x 2-3 weeks trip Average stay is 4 days at 4 sites

Field: Starts with group meeting & group activity Daily site specific art work practice Meetings with instructor for one-on-one consultations Daily summary group meeting

Campus: 1 day

Field: 3-4 x 3-day trips

Remote & rural locations in western region of Appalachia

Coal-field, agrarian & activist communities

Field: Farmers, activists & scientists

(Continued)

Written application Liability waiver

LAAW/UNM

Campus: 8 weeks

Field: 7 half day to daylong field trips

Remote, urban & Urban farming communities, urban rural locations neighborhoods in Larimer &Weld County, Colorado

Type & location of Communities engaged field sites by program

Campus: Remote, rural & Rural, urban, 1 week of introductory urban locations agrarian & seminars on camp in the Great Indigenous Basin, Colorado communities etiquette & field procedures, site Plateau & information, possible Chihuahuan research topics Desert 2 weeks of seminars in between journeys to review work in progress & plan for next journey 5 weeks of post-field group & individual studio visits in preparation for exhibition

Field: Gathering of information to make studio work, with the option of returning to the site to create pieces

Campus: Campus: 16 weeks, meeting Lectures, discussion of twice a week readings & films, studio work time

A+E/CSU

Program Procedure: campus & field

Time allocation: campus & field

Program

TABLE 4.5 (Continued)

Campus and field: Artists, scholars, farmers, ranchers, activists

Field: Scientists (ecologists, astro- physicists, soil scientists), activists, farmers, environmental historians Written faculty/ student contract Health questionnaire Dietary restrictions Copyright release for archive

Liability waiver

Collaboration with guest Student contractual speakers, visiting artists requirements for participation in field study

VMTP/WMU

Campus: Remote and rural Rural village Introductory seminars on locations in & communities participatory art & social around Florina role of the artist

Field: Extended walks in the areas of interest to collect images, material & information Completion of the artworks either in specific sites or at a letter stage after the completion of the program

Campus: 1 week seminar

Field: 2 x 8-day trips or 5 x 3-day trips

Work sites: Independent and collaborative site specific art work 7:00 AM–7:00 PM

Investigative sites: Students travel together on program-organized schedule

Field: Field: 3 x 2-3 weeks trips Divided between or 2 x 3-4 weeks Investigative & Work trips sites

Field: Artists & community members

56  Five programs

Logistics Program directors manage a complicated set of logistics in providing for students and guests to live and work in the field. These logistics grow exponentially more complex as time in the field is extended and locations become more remote. As the “Logistics” survey demonstrates, the specific definitions of the term field, the amount of time each spends off campus, the structure of daily time, the level of engagement with community partners, and the various forms required for participation differ across our group. Each has developed its own system based on a dialogue between pedagogical interests and logistical capacities. Due to a host of factors, including funding and staffing levels, number of credits offered, and the participant demographics, LAAW is able to spend the longest time in the field and LMoA the least. Some of the programs, such as LAAW, LMoA, and PA, move across a range of sites, while FS and VMTP tend to concentrate on one (VMTP) or a limited number (FS) of locations. Each of the programs exposes its students to a definition of field that includes a range of ecological niches and social communities in the effort to construct a complex understanding of their home regions. LMoA is unique in that it includes a site visit to a major urban center. PA is the only program to offer a backpacking component. FS, LAA, VMTP, and PA all spend time in rural communities that serve as partners for collaborative projects. All of the programs invite an interdisciplinary set of guests to interact with the students in the field, on campus, or both, and this is clearly a crucial component of what makes field programming an integrative experience. The allocation of time in the field varies, as well. Collaborative projects with community members are inherently more structured than independent days spent on individual art practice. Days dedicated to field investigations of cultural sites and group critiques also require coordination of participants’ schedules. That said, these programs are all able to offer students significant blocks of uninterrupted time to pursue their individual practice. As institutions of higher learning have grown increasingly risk sensitive over the past two decades, field programs have faced a significant increase in bureaucratic oversight. At this point in time, all the programs have forms that participants must sign related to liability, health and dietary needs, and course requirements. In the effort to be better prepared to manage their programs in the field, directors have taken courses in Wilderness Medicine, Driver Safety, and so on. That said, taking the classroom into the field comes with inherent risks for all participants, and learning to manage those risks is an important part of the student’s educational experience.

LMoA/MCC

Campus: Catalogue & word of mouth

Host communities: Meetings with Visitor Information Center staff Local officials Indigenous elders/leaders Land holders Scientists Humanities researchers Community activists Local artists TV and print media Public exhibitions on campus

Public exhibitions on Campus: ANU handbook campus & in host School of Art Forum & website communities National/International Posters exhibitions Announcements in School of Art Workshops Field Study program Survey

FS/ANU

Annual Program exhibitions

Promotion Strategies

Program

TABLE 4.6  Publcation and dissemination

Conferences & exhibitions Student Facebook sites

Conferences & exhibitions Scholarly papers Book chapters Websites Blogs TV programs Social media

Publications

(Continued)

Archive of exhibition catalogues

Program archives

A + E/CSU

Campus: Exhibitions Lectures University-wide news Endorsement by Adventure West Virginia

PA/WVU

Endorsement by the School of Global Environmental Sustainability Participation in SoGES Managing the Planet series Blog posts University news Lectures

Host communities: Not publicized for fear of incidents between mining operators & students

Local community: Newsletters News media

Promotion Strategies

Program

TABLE 4.6 (Continued)

Annual Program exhibitions

Blogs Newspaper Journals Conferences

Conferences & exhibitions Book chapters Blogs Journals Website Facebook page TV interviews

Publications

Program archives

VMTP/WMU

LAAW/UNM

National/International: Invitations to guest artists & critics Conferences

Host communities: Posters Announcements and interviews in local media Website Mailing list

National/international: Faculty lectures LAAW group exhibitions TV interviews Website and blog

Campus: Posters Campus radio

Exhibitions in communities, Conferences national galleries & cultural Exhibitions venues Catalogues Books Website Blog TV

Public exhibitions on campus, Conferences in local community art Exhibitions spaces & host communities Catalogues LAAW book Art journal essays Website Blogs TV interviews

Program maintains archive of digital files  & material objects

Program archive at Art + Environment Center, Nevada Art Museum

60  Five programs

Publication and dissemination In order to secure their program’s standing in their home department and universities, directors are actively involved in an ongoing promotional initiative. These efforts occur at many levels both within the home university and beyond. Directors have developed strategies to ensure that the activities of the program in the field are communicated on campus to engender interest from potential student participants and garner continued institutional support. All programs are listed on their home department’s websites and maintain a presence on social media. They also host workshops and other events to introduce their guest artists and community partners to the university community. We have previously discussed the pressure faculty are under to publish their personal creative research and the work of their programs. The directors as a group have established an extensive record in this area of art practice. In the effort to stimulate the dialogue on campus about field programming, FS and LAAW present annual exhibitions on campus. All of the directors have secured program-related exhibitions in an international list of public museums and galleries and produced catalogues of program-related projects. In 2009, LAAW published a book. It is of further interest to note that as these field programs have developed and deepened their focus on community engagement, the locations for publication and exhibition have shifted. No longer are academic gallery exhibitions and art world publications the default definitions. For example, VMTP has chosen to site the physical aspect of its exhibitions in the local community while maintaining a national and international publication record. FS exhibits work on campus and in its host communities and produces professional catalogues documenting regional collaborative projects. Other programs also work to gain regional and national recognition through print and social media, television, and conferences. While each program has developed its own strategy, the commitment to remaining a presence in the local, regional, and national cultural dialogue is consistent.

Notes 1 Bios for director and student participants included in Front Matter. 2 See reading list examples in Manual section. 3 See Community Partners in Manual section.

5 PARTICIPANT VOICES

PARTICIPANT VOICESPARTICIPANT VOICES

After reviewing and distilling the survey to the categories presented in the preceding chapter, we devised a series of questions chosen to allow program directors to explain in their own words the important aspects of their work. The following edited interviews investigate programmatic responses to these areas in some depth. Rather than synthesize all the interview responses, we choose to include large portions of original discussions with the directors and students in the hope that their voices begin to tell a story of the work of field programming in some nuance, complexity, and depth. These voices illuminate both the shared moments and unique divergences in field programming that make it so rich, dynamic, and responsive. Our decision to employ such a significant shift in voice was made to provide the reader with a sense of the program leaders as distinct individuals and to demonstrate that there are many possible models for successful field programs. What follows is a discussion of some of what we see as the most important shared philosophies, practices, and challenges drawn from the program participants’ experiences in the field. As this section unfolds, it becomes clear that each component of a field curriculum builds on another; the concept of an interdisciplinary conversation overlaps with community engagement, which reinforces the egalitarian aspect of the program, which, in turn, helps support students’ search for a professional identity, and so on.

Origins In beginning to look at the five programs, the question of how it is that they came into existence seems a logical place to start. The origins of each and every one can be traced to the vision of an individual faculty member and his or her educational-entrepreneurial spirit. In no case were these programs formed as part of institutional initiatives based in top-down directives from upper administration.

62  Participant voices

They are all the result of individual faculty members grappling with how to best fulfill their roles as creative artists, teachers, and mentors for the next generation of artists. The successes and challenges delineated here can in many ways be traced back to this fundamental shared point of origin. What follows is a brief record of the initial program conditions according to the original program directors. The way the directors describe their experiences illuminates some of their guiding values as well as logistical negotiations necessary for the implementation of their curriculum. Each of the programs represents an experiment in art pedagogy. These directors share an approach to pedagogy as a creative field of expression parallel to traditional zones of art making. They have operated without a prescribed path, adapting and evolving as they have navigated pedagogical and curricular concerns, research priorities, institutional funding and mandates, staffing changes, and other developmental aspects of the work. Significantly, each of them began with a desire to get outside of the walls of a classroom to create a curriculum and art-making practice that was place-based and specified to local culture, environment, and history. John Reid’s program at ANU was the first in this sample to be implemented (in 1996), and he talked with enthusiasm about the organic genesis of his work. I guess the origins all really occurred, back in the early 80s. I was teaching in the Photomedia Workshop in the art school and it just so happened that there were photographers who were keen backpackers. I’ve just been to New Zealand where they call it “tramping” – where people put a pack on their back and go off for walks for the pleasure of it. It just sort of fell into place. There were several occasions where 4 or 5 students, including myself, would take off for 3 or 4 days and we’d walk into these places with our cameras. It turned out to be a very rewarding enterprise, not just for the soul, but also for seeking inspiration for art making. Yannis Ziogas started his program in 2007 in response to a move from Athens to Florina, a rural area of Greece. It is clear from his interview that his work evolved from, and is deeply rooted in, a desire to explore the history of the place where he and his students work: In the first years, between 2007–2008, I have to say that this art school was located 500 km from Athens, so it was quite far away (from where I was from). So, for me, the first issue was more about discovering something different. The most valuable [thing] we have discovered is our relationship to recent history which is not only Greek, but it is European and it is global. Where we live now is the first place where the cold war was initiated, during the civil war of Greece. [But] It was not only the civil war of Greece, it was also the first confrontation between the East and the West considering [sic] political issues. So, one can consider how the things that happened in 1940 or 1950 still, after 70 years, affect not only contemporary history, but current relations.

Participant voices  63

The programs created by Yoshimi Hayashi and Erika Osborne trace their roots to LAAW and their experiences as students and, in Osborne’s case, co-director. Hayashi describes his path as the result of his experience working with others in a lineage of practitioners from teachers in Japan, to a mentor in California, to his eventual work in LAAW. In his effectively “second generation” status as a director, he describes his evolution in the practice of field programming while carrying on a lineage of the traditions he has been offered: In that sense, learning by not being in a classroom kind of begins with me going to Japan, way early on, to go study in a totally different environment, in a totally different pedagogy. And learning that I can make things, not just sitting in America, in a classroom, but in a totally different place, different language, different everything really. Erika Osborne, who founded her PA program in West Virginia, also brought much of what she learned in LAAW to her programming and began to adapt it to local geography: [From LAAW], well, just living it and the way that it made my work change and the community that I created, it seemed really direct, it didn’t even seem possible to not try to do something similar. [But] I started to think, “ok, I can’t employ the same strategies that I did out west. So, what are the things that drive this place” [Appalachia]? It made me think, what defines “place” here and if I’m going to take students out, what are the things that we need to explore?

Institutional context Institutional context or “institutional economy” remains one of the most salient features in both initiating these types of programs as well as maintaining and developing them over the long run. This conceptualization speaks to both the opportunities as well as the constraints directors face as they attempt to align curricular and theoretical concerns with the logistical and organizational issues in their home departments. There are shared features of institutional economy within the included programs here. For example, each of the five programs in this study is housed within tertiary public institutions. Additionally, program leaders, faculty and staff, hold positions in specific disciplines within departmental structures and receive salaries for the implementation of the department or college curriculum. Further, receiving institutional authorization, integrating field programming into the larger department or college curriculum, and maintaining the necessary flow of funding are issues all the program leaders have been required to address. It should be noted that these programs were created and now operate in a challenging economic environment. The constraints on VMTP are perhaps the

64  Participant voices

most extreme as Greece continues to struggle with a severe economic crisis that greatly affects all aspects of the public sector. In the words of Yannis Ziogas, There was this huge financial crisis in Greece which brought us to our knees, but we survived. In Australia and the US, funding for public education has come under intense pressure. At universities in both countries, allocations to the humanities diminish as the remaining resources are shifted to the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and math). In each of the programs discussed here, we’ve seen in the previous survey section how institutional economy has bearing on everything from funding streams to curricular context to program design, logistics, and recognition or support of these programs within larger institutional paradigms. These material and structural concerns in turn have a generative or constraining relationship with the character of the programs. It also seems evident that institutional conditions did much to shape the work done in the individual programs. For example, because the field programs presented here represent an alternative to, if not a critique of, existing academic paradigms and by definition they occur away from the university or college campus, a common problem for program leaders is basic marginalization of their programs through a lack of understanding in their home institutions of field programming pedagogy and logistics. This problem worked across institutional contexts in a variety of ways. Yoshi Hayashi provides an example: Administrators say they want this program at the college but I don’t know that they necessarily do. It’s not like they are really jumping to support it, they want it, they understand it’s really important, it’s really valuable, blah, blah, blah. . ., but I don’t necessarily know that people understand the scope of it. A perfect example is, early on in this teaching, when I was proposing it to the dean she said, “well, why don’t you just go spend spring break with them?” So, do it, unpaid and spend your spring break with your students. If you think about that further, you want me to hang out with my students on a week long vacation together? Because that’s how you’re seeing it. You’re seeing this as a vacation. So, now I’m going to take my students on a vacation with me? Like, it’s not an educational learning experience. This makes no sense. I think you start to get sick of things like that where administrators just don’t see it. What appears as another fundamental constraint cited by the program leaders is the lack of funding. Field programs are expensive to run and have inherent limits on enrollment. Directors, then, are constantly having to build a case for

Participant voices  65

the value of their programs both in academic and promotional terms. With public education being cut world-wide, access to outside funding has become a huge determinant in the ability of these programs to survive. John Reid’s program at ANU was severely impacted by the loss of institutional support. [I]t’s the big issue challenges really that have had their main impact on the program – and that’s government funding for the tertiary education sector in particular. The sector is under assault, probably world-wide. Money for education is hard to come by. And then within the universities themselves, the internal funding situation in the visual arts is pretty far down the pecking order. So, it’s pretty tough. In fact, my involvement in the program came to an end in 2014, when the Art School could no longer afford to dedicate my position to running the FS program. And really, the program now runs, only if it can get 100 percent external funding. And so, the last time that happened was in 2014, so we’ve had a two-year gap where a full FS program has not operated despite the fact that we’ve tried really hard to get funding. We have a large grant application in at the moment and, if we score, the whole program will instantly revive. So, if it rains money, the program happens. These budget constraints have very real consequences on program delivery. There is clearly frustration amongst the directors over the difficulties in pursuing their vision in the current academic climate. Amanda Stuart, who has delivered a reduced version of Field Study as the Balawan Elective at ANU since 2015, details exactly how her involvement is limited by the absence of any real commitment of funding to maintain the program. There’s so much more I could be doing, I’m sessional [part time], and often I don’t even know up to the week before the semester if I’m going to be teaching. There are no guarantees, which is hard when you’re trying to build these relationships with the communities. I was just thinking this morning, if they could just give me one day a week, I could spend that time expanding and galvanizing these opportunities and avenues. . . . I would like to have BE valued by the institution. I mean, they very proudly support the exhibitions and they like that we’ve got book chapters out of the Field Study program. It’s obviously valued conceptually and theoretically and philosophically, but if it could be valued monetarily, we could really galvanize it and make it something that was a level of certainty in these uncertain times. It’s not, however, all bad news for field programming. LAAW has managed to weather institutional changes at UNM and move forward to new leadership

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because of the outside support it has received from private foundations. As Bill Gilbert relates, In retrospect, it is clear to me that the long-term success of the LAAW program has been directly tied to the funding we received from Lannan Foundation at the outset of the program. We were, also, very fortunate to start with a supportive dean in Christopher Mead. In recent years, as the College under a new dean became less supportive and then overtly hostile to the program, support from Lannan Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation became essential to our survival. We have also benefited from recognition within the upper levels of the institution. For instance, the designation of LAAW as one of the six most important research programs in the university and my recognition as the first distinguished professor in the department provided a certain protection for LAAW. Those types of recognition give the program an institutional status that makes it more difficult for some new dean to come along and decide to give us the ax. And in testimony to how rapidly academic institutions can change, in the year since our interview, the new vice chancellor and head of the art school at ANU have further embraced the Balawan Elective program. Amanda Stuart has been awarded a full-time position in Sculpture plus funding to develop the program. Institutional economy extends well beyond the departments themselves as economic stresses are not, of course, limited to institutions. The student populations they serve are experiencing similar economic pressures that impact their decisions about their education. Regarding ANU, John Reid says, There are a lot of recent pressures on students to work, to pull in money to pay course fees and such. FS programs make that difficult because people are usually away for extended periods and they have to get leave from their jobs. Some of them are very apprehensive because it’s usually casual employment [part time] and they might come back and the employer has hired someone else. Mirroring larger trends in academia, along with the reduction in funding has come a significant increase in the bureaucratic demands on the program directors. The level of institutional concern over liability has skyrocketed in recent years, and with it, the bureaucratic oversight has increased. Several directors speak to this as a double whammy impacting their ability to devote sufficient energy to the essential aspects of their programs. As Jeanette Hart-Mann explains, [I]f I was to think of the most challenging [aspect], it’s bureaucracy. It’s all about economics and funding. Those are really where the challenges

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are, that hamper us in creating different educational models. For us, really responding to crisis and to what we need to be doing today. It’s all about bureaucracy and money, which is totally absurd and crazy. John Reid reiterates the sense of ever-increasing bureaucratic presence: The other change is that, we all used to just jump in a bus and take off. Now, you’ve got to do risk assessments and indemnity forms. So there is a huge increase in logistical demands on a convener and field coordinator. Field coordinators have to have current first aid certificates. There has been a big development in occupational health and safety. And that involves a huge workload. To do the risk assessment for a FS program is probably three or four days’ work. It’s extensive. And that places an extra burden on anyone who is doing field coordinating. But back when we started it was much more cavalier; we just took off. Given the lack of understanding by colleagues and administrators, the increased workload needed to comply with institutional regulations, and the overall complexities of the positionality of field programming within academic settings, it is not surprising that the directors also mention the lack of understanding given for the huge increase in their workloads that field programs represent. Yoshi Hayashi compares his workload teaching on campus with running LMoA: I have no funding whatsoever in my program. I put in way more hours than I would in a normal class. If I wanted to make my load easier, I would never teach this class [LMoA] again. I think there’s a high rate of burnout [in field programs] because of it, because of all of the stuff you have to do. Erika Osborne speaks to the impact of leading a field program on the other aspects of her professional and personal life: In the model of PA, you’re getting a summer salary for that course, you’re doing all the extra prep work beforehand. So, it loads down the spring semester really dramatically with a ton of stuff. You’re on 24–7 and I don’t mind that so much because I think that out in the field, there’s enough space and time, but it’s a challenge. You’re the responsible party for like everything from snake bites to interpersonal conflicts. You’re dealing with much more than just their artwork. For me, the challenge with all these types of courses has been juggling family and the course, especially with young children; juggling all of that: doable but challenging.

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Curricular models Curriculum is the methodology through which the educational experience in field programming is delivered. The identity of these programs is then perhaps best expressed through the curriculum each has initiated and refined. While the curriculum of each program has been shaped by the specific institutional and geographic context, the values guiding field programming span across contexts and enter into a discursive space with one another, illuminating some of the tensions and opportunities field work presents. Though there is overlap across both the structure and content developed by the directors, the following discussion is useful to an understanding of the philosophies and practices that shape field programming at the individual program level. As previously stated, the programs covered here were formed around several shared beliefs. • The value in expanding the geographic frame of the college/university to include experience of the world at large as prospective content for artwork • The importance of grounding an artist’s education in the specifics of place • The positive impact provided by the inclusion of interdisciplinary and transcultural perspectives • The importance of forming a shared sense of community that includes students, staff, and visitors Each program has its own model for how curriculum is delivered in the field and incorporated into the larger path to a degree. VMTP happens entirely on a volunteer/elective basis with no university credit. PA is offered as a summer course rather than as part of the regular academic year curriculum. LMoA is a single class offered as part of an associate degree in the arts. LAAW is a semester-long, four-course program within the graduate and undergraduate Art and Ecology area curriculum, and FS is a year-long program that provides a field research option within BA, MFA, and PhD students’ major studio. By definition, field programs transport students out of campus classrooms and studios into the world at large. This new context for learning and creating can be both liberating and disorienting for students. LAAW student Cedra Ardec discusses the effect of this redefinition on her practice. I’d always thought that you don’t need much to make art: box of pencils, paper, a few walls. In the field, I learned you don’t even need those. It unflattened me. I experimented with the tools I carried around with me (hands, eyes, hair) and the ones I found (rocks, plants, trash, time). Performances I launched into in the field were based on impulse and curiosity . . . a desire, for example, to know what it felt like to be buried face-down in a tinaja, home of tadpole shrimp; to see if I would develop any insights about cottonwood trees by binding myself to one; to find out if I could spend a

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nausea-ridden, tent-bound sick day focusing purely on the sky from sunup to sundown. These experiments stood in sharp contrast to my painting, but they contributed to my painting practice too, gave my later paintings weirder stuff on which to feed. I made a leap to actively creating content for visual narratives, not relying on the circumstantial photos of bygone events that had filled my paintings before. Making stranger, more complex, and more personal stories. Just as each program is structured differently, the method utilized to deliver the curriculum varies widely. The following is a brief accounting of the particulars of each program. The Field Studies curriculum at ANU, according to its founder, John Reid, is as follows: I think the trademark of the FS program at the School of Art at ANU is its repeated return to the same field location. There’s the field exposure but then, really, more of the creative work happens back in the studio than it does in the field. So there is that really important interplay between the field experience where there’s all that “wow” factor like, “look at this, look at that, this is fantastic, let me take a picture or sketches of this or that.” But when that experience comes back into the studio, you’ve got this cultural space, this place where one can reflect. And that is where I think the real creative work is done. And then of course you’ve got this opportunity to go back and augment that with another field experience. Yannis Ziogas has developed a different model in VMTP. His program is offered as an elective for no credit with equal components of student and community participants. It takes place entirely in the field with no on-campus component. In his model, systemic academic hierarchies are dismantled; everyone is there on an equal footing and by their own choice. I have detached this experience from any academic requirement. That was very important for me. There are the academic requirements, the official academic requirements for credits. But I think that in every artistic school we have to have a percentage [of classes] that will only be defined by what is needed and not by what is required. So, in the beginning it was required for students to come and then I discovered that if it was only for people who wanted to come the process became more interesting because those students who wanted to come met those artists who wanted to come. And so somehow, they discovered what is interesting to them was not only to collect credit, to get a degree, but also to get this more spiritual feeling about what art is about . . . I have to say that in this process it is open to students, but it is also open to whoever wants to participate and that has made it broader. The idea of

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creating a closed system within an academy does not represent my position. So it is a 50/50 participation. Students and artists work together. They make art together. So, one part of those who participate are students and one part are those who are deliberately coming because they think that this thematic could be meaningful to them. In LAAW, the emphasis is on extended field time bookended with time on campus for pre-field preparatory seminars and post-field studio creative workshops. The program seeks to establish continuity between the work done in a campus seminar, site investigations, and artworks made in the field and subsequent studio production ending with some form of public presentation. Curricular models include visits to and in-depth work with local communities and landscapes. Current director Jeanette Hart-Mann describes the inherent flexibility of her curricular model: A lot of times, we function in a reactionary mode which can be good because what ends up happening is there is a current issue in our region or there is a partner that approaches us and allows this opportunity to blossom. So, instead of having the curriculum planned out years in advance, it’s like, oh, hey, this is a great opportunity. We just got to know this person who is doing this great work in El Paso or on the border or somewhere else. This is a great opportunity for the students. Let’s just go for it. Just being really open, and experimental and generative. Erika Osborne’s PA program takes place entirely in the field. What makes it unique in our group is that it occurs as a summer program as a three-credit course attached to a university-wide outdoor program, “Adventure West Virginia”. Students create site-specific pieces over the course of the trip and have critique sessions on the last night in each site. PA aligns with other on-campus course offerings and supports the work students do in BA and MFA programs: A lot of time what happened at WVU was, the students would take my Art & Environment class and then they would go out in PA. So, they were getting to know each other intimately in their work. After spending three weeks together, and in the backpacking portion they’re all sleeping together in the same tents, they’re living in the same space, they form a tight community and that continues well into the future. For Yoshimi Hayashi, not only is LMoA the most urban-based of the five, but his position at a community college is unique. His work combines visits to urban sites like galleries and museums, to the desert and mountain environments to the east, and to the coastal landscape closest to campus. The site visits are supported with classroom preparation. His curricular shaping is less aimed at a particular type of

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social engagement and more focused on the inherent value of exposing individuals to a myriad of sites for artistic investigation, with an eye toward open-ended, creative, and direct experience. He says, I’m taking a bunch of kids from the ocean, that have never thought about the desert that’s only 90 miles away. It’s not very far. But to them, there’s only north/south. We’re on the west coast, there’s nothing to the east. And so taking them out to the desert and suddenly they’re in this new environment, that’s huge . . . There are things that I put out there to have them be conscious of and aware of. For instance, we are a border town, a border area. We have things like the nuclear power plant, we have the military (we have camp Pendleton). In fact, we have all of them in one site, all of them put together very closely. [This] is what our campus has, plus the big city. So we have the four major things, which is very unique, right? But having said that, I’m taking eighteen, nineteen-year-old students who are starting at zero and they just need a little lead in to the environmental concept. I bring it up, but I think a lot of them are still dealing with it on an existential basis rather than being ready to take it on as a social cause or an environmental cause. Hayashi’s example points out the complexity in the relationship between the field programming curriculum and the larger education in the arts being provided in the host institution. As outliers or independents, most of the field programs do not occupy a place in the larger curriculum with preparatory and follow-up classes. This lack of continuity presents both challenges and opportunities to the program directors. John Reid solved this question of continuity with a student’s larger educational trajectory by developing a system through which students participate in FS as an extension of their primary studio. This approach not only connects the field and studio aspects of students’ education but also builds a fundamental relationship between FS and the on-campus curriculum. Because we’re really a value-added program, it was very important for students to participate in the FS program who did have support from their major workshop. If you didn’t have that support you had to be a pretty tough student to give your head of department the finger and say, “Well, I’m going to go anyway.” And some students did. Some students bucked the advice they had from their major workshop and they came along. But most young students were too timid to do something like that. So, heads of workshops’ support was always an issue and I spent a lot of time making sure that the head of Painting or Ceramics understood what that program was about so that they would be supportive of their students if they wanted to come along.

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Julie Anand (LAAW 2002) relates the following concerning her decision to sign up for LAAW while in the Photography MFA program at UNM. I had high anxiety when I first entered the prestigious photography program [at UNM]. I found a teacher who was direct and crotchety enough that I figured he would tell me what was what – Jim Stone. Jim was enthusiastic about my participation [in LAAW] and encouraged me to attend the Photo Area seminar whenever I was back in town to try to maintain my relationship within the group dynamic of photography students. Not all of the faculty smiled on my participation. I had one of the harshest critiques of my life when I was back from the program and shared what I still think is easily one of the most important projects of my life (Nomadic Germination). In LAAW, Bill Gilbert addressed this issue by working with Sculpture Area colleague Basia Irland to establish Art and Ecology as a new discipline in the Department of Art and Art History with its own curriculum at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The hard thing for the students was that they would go out on this incredibly intense experience that would open new doors for their practice and artistic identity and then “boom”, they were right back in the same old system the following semester. So, my idea became to create a home area for them on campus [Art and Ecology] that would allow students to continue along the path they’d started down in Land Arts.

Teaching philosophy Another aspect the programs share – though it may get articulated differently for each – is a commitment to redefining the relationship between students and instructors with the goal of creating a more egalitarian form of interaction. Within the sample of the five programs, the articulation of this value appears on a continuum, with VMTP being perhaps the most egalitarian, supported by its distancing from academic requirements and the participant mix being made up equally of community members and students on a volunteer basis model. In the case of FS, the program approaches the issue by removing assessment of students entirely from the director’s role. As institutional constraints changed over time, FS did move toward faculty assessment of student work; however, the incorporation of a robust community-based practice works in some ways to counter this externally imposed constraint by actively engaging participants across demographics, decentering the locus of “expertise” itself. LAAW, LMoA, and PA approach their work in slightly more structured, institutionally guided ways but also work to enact assessment in the field in workshop models or employ group

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assessment practices, thereby keeping the focus not on instructor but rather in community-centered, relationship-based feedback models. Aaron Williams (PA 2010) describes PA in a way that speaks to this open approach to teaching employed in the field. Honestly, we weren’t instructed much to my memory. . . . We were set loose into the world and expected to do what artists do – to investigate; ourselves, each other, our surroundings. Aesthetics literally came from the place in which were currently occupied filtered only through our own skills and intuition. I think each of us reacted to completely different ideas in each place for the most part. – the real work happened over time without assignment, instruction, balance, or focus. John Reid speaks to a similarly progressive orientation in the context of the FS program: The opportunity that this particular program has presented me as an artist and teacher is to literally blur the distinction between the two [teacher and artist]. My practice – I was out there making art with everyone – was my teaching. So it was really through example basically. And it was a kind of organic thing, it was infectious, and it wasn’t just one way. Out on these programs, I absorbed a lot from the students. You’re all out there working together and you all influence each other. So it was really, I thought, a lovely integration between my role as a teacher and my role as an artist. Basically, I taught through people witnessing my research activities in the field and in my studio at school. The students saw how I went about things and what I did and of course you formalize that. In the field at night you would talk about what you’re doing. So, not only would people observe how you go about things but then you would back that up with discussion about it and the intellectual, the mental processes that are going on that aren’t observable. He goes on to speak to the importance of an egalitarian social structure in field programs for this approach to synthesizing teaching and research to be successful. With these field studies programs, we would go out there as a community of artists and I would try and downplay the authority structure. In fact, one of the real benefits of the program is that I was out there as a teacher with students but I was never an authority figure in the field. And that was really important. . . . There was no distinction between faculty and students and I think that was appreciated by the students. They could relax. In fact, this came through in a lot of our feedback from students – there is a tendency in the art school to over-teach.

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Yoshi Hayashi speaks to the difficulty, in his own experience and pedagogy, of establishing an egalitarian model in a Junior College program. [W]hen you’re out there for weeks, you have time to sit there and make work and then other people, your students, are making work and you’re making work together. And I remember John Wenger, who was a previous partner to Bill [in LAAW]. He was like, “I’m gonna paint and you’re gonna be in the presence of what I’m doing. If you have a question, you come to talk to me. I’m not going to you. I’m out here and I’m going to be painting.” I’m not saying that’s good or bad; that’s just how he did it. But with eighteen-year-old students that don’t know whatever they’re doing? Day one, we do a group activity but then they go off and do stuff. But I spend the entire days that I’m there, setting up one-to-one consultations while we’re out there. Just like we’re doing, interviewing and talking to them and making sure they’re going in the right direction. A tension that all of the program directors navigate in terms of curricular delivery and a specific example of how pedagogy in field programming can be transformative is how each program approaches this question of criticism and assessment. In traditional art education, the model of critique is central to arts pedagogy, offering students both summative and formative assessment experience. One of the issues field programming faces is the question of to what degree pedagogy should incorporate these traditional instructional models. Should it form an entirely new model of education? For some of the directors of the programs, they counterbalance these two concerns by incorporating feedback into the field experience itself (PA, LMoA) while others use feedback as an entirely formative process (FS, LAAW), whereby program members engage together either via critique or exhibition. Erika Osborne sees a value in the immediacy of a total focus on the field when it comes to both production and critique. Her students create finished works in a short time span and get feedback from fellow participants on-site. PA ran a little differently in that we would do critiques at the end of each site, at the last evening of each site and that was it, done, pieces are done and that was a really different model than say LAAW, where work begins in the field and gets really fleshed out in the studio . . . we thought, well, because we’re going to spend two and a half to three weeks out, let’s just hit it and see what happens and so we tried that experiment the first year of, let’s just try having a critique in the field, they have to finish a piece. Especially for the backpacking section, because artistically, how do you make work as a nomad, how do you make work when you can only carry materials on your back, the stuff you need to live, survive, eat, sleep, and create? And just that as an experiment in materials, in content, but what I found

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in doing these critiques at the end of each site was that it worked out amazingly because the students were forced to respond. What was beautiful about that was that they didn’t have a lot of time for second guessing. They jumped in and reacted, figured out how to make the piece work. These are three very different stages, and oftentimes the jumping in and reacting presents problems down the road but they had to deal with those problems in the field and that was really great. It worked out super well, and they appreciated it too, for those reasons. They had to sort of confidently get in there. And it also it made them engage in such a direct way. From the student perspective, Christos Ioannidis (VMTP 2014) describes the contrast between critiques conducted in traditional university courses and those he experienced in VMTP. In contrast to the university courses that are all evaluated by numbers (grades), the Visual March to Prespes had an evaluation discussion, moving us further towards an understanding of the procedures and results of our work, of how we accomplished what we aimed to do. The assessment was made informally by the teacher and by the fellow students and the critique was done in a way that was very to the point. Each one of us was presenting our artistic work on the last day to professors, students, and the public. It was not a sterile criticism because we all knew that these people shared the time with us. They also experienced the same journey in their own way, so their criticism was always fruitful. Julie Anand expresses a similar experience of formal, hierarchical critiques being replaced by ongoing discussions amongst peers. I’m not sure I even remember critiques happening. I do remember talking about art at a morning campfire at the frigid north rim of the Grand Canyon. In LAAW, the when and where we spoke about art broke down. It sometimes happened before we brushed our teeth. Reid elaborates by describing the complementary nature of critiques in the field amongst host communities and those held back on campus in the academic setting. We would muster some food and drinks and the community informants would be invited to join us. It was half party and half group critique of everyone’s progress. Although the locals were reticent to comment on the visual aesthetics, they engaged vigorously on the accuracy of the content. They made significant contributions to students’ thinking at a time when it could be taken into account.

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There would be another version of this back at the School – between trips 2 and 3. This time ANU academics who were experts in the field issues that students were addressing weighed in. The academics loved to see research outcomes from their disciplines incorporated into personal opinion and given visual aesthetic expression. A sentiment echoed by several participants in relationship to the productiveness they hope to achieve is a need to work with students who are either underprepared for an arts education or who have narrow conceptions of what constitutes art. In many ways, field programming works to expand the borders of what qualifies as art and arts pedagogy to begin with. The directors have all creatively sought ways to undo some of the preconceptions students arrive with and work to expand ideas about art making, audience, and expertise. Erika Osborne says she frequently encounters a lack of preparation for fieldwork in contemporary art: I think that with the getting rid of the arts in K–12 education what students get is this minimal peek at these sort of introverted, art-centric artists like Pollock, Picasso, Van Gogh. Those are the ones they come to college knowing about. And so, most of the art students and especially the ones that participate in these programs, have the art world in a really defined box which I feel is very strange because as an artist it’s part of the beauty of the discipline that there aren’t very many edges to the practice, there’s no box. If you don’t want there to be, there isn’t. So, one of the amazing parts is that in PA the students are finally making a connection between something that they know and care about and the art work that they make. And up until that point, half of them don’t even know that that’s a possibility. What I’ve seen is that some of the things that they start to think about on PA continue well into their undergrad and graduate programs, and beyond in their artistic practice. It feels like a seed gets planted and they then continue to nurture. And while the desire is continually to move toward new pedagogic models, as we see over and over again, institutional constraints affect what takes place in program design and implementation over time, including pedagogy and the ways it must conform to standard models in order to be accepted in the university. Amanda Stuart articulates some of those concerns: The ways that we’ve changed it is to kind of get it in under the university, get the university comfortable with how we’ve run it. We’ve significantly restructured it in terms of course schedules, outlines, readings. There’s all of that and there’s an online component, so we’ve significantly made it look like a university “product” if you like, but done so with the absolute intent to uphold those kinds of ideas of giving people room to breathe, make mistakes, sample, play, all that kind of stuff.

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Creative research Yet another common theme in our interviews turned out to be the opportunity field programming provides for faculty to bring together their teaching and research. Given the time and energy commitment that directing field programs requires, it is not surprising that for many directors the field has come to complement or even replace the traditional studio in their practices. Their programs provide them with the opportunity to work alongside their students in a model of parallel practice that is rarely duplicated on campus. Many students comment on the benefits of faculty working in the field. In the words of former LAAW student and current logistics coordinator Ryan Henel, [B]eing able to see your professor in his or her practice was a refreshing characteristic of the fieldwork. There is a camaraderie that develops when you recognize that your professor is living and learning in the same environment as you. This functioned to demystify how and when artwork is made. Being able to witness your teacher’s art process first hand, including the trials and tribulations, is a very useful insight. Heike Qualitz of FS speaks to the multilayered roles directors occupy in their programs: In terms of the director as practitioner/artist, that has had a huge effect on me. I just want to emphasize how important it was for me as a student seeing John doing his thing. Being able to juggle it all, being this incredibly diplomatic organizer engaging with everyone but still being this solid and inspiring person who goes out there, does these seemingly ludicrous actions, but then so eloquently talking about them as performance art. To provide the reader with a better understanding of the program directors’ identity as artists, we asked them each to discuss one example of a project that they developed within the context of their field program. Before responding to specific requests, several directors expressed their belief that their field programs are creative research, that in a post-commodity concept of art practice, the traditional separation between academic and professional art practices loses utility. They suggest that their programs be considered as collaborative artworks in the context of relational aesthetics and social practice. Yannis Ziogas: In the field it was rediscovering my relationship to my body. When I came here, I was in my early 40s and I was not someone who wanted, I didn’t have it even in my system to hike in the mountains and see. So, I rediscovered my relationship to my body then to reality. Because only if you go to a place that you are not used to can you discover what

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reality is. Otherwise, you are just in a place you are used to and that is not always creative. What is more important is that as you are distancing yourself from what you are used to, then you are returning. There is this idea of returning to a place, which is a city, a location you are familiar with. And now you have the tools, conceptual and spiritual, to really deal with them. So this is what I relearned from that ten-year experience. The personal research/artistic project that I initiated because of the Visual March to Prespes is named “Magnus Artisticus” and is a project that deals with the identity of the artist while walking in the field. When someone walks in the field, he or she transforms the place and is also transformed by the place. The works that were initiated in the ongoing “Magnus Artisticus” (2010 to now) project were a series of paintings, digital works, videos related to the process, and essays/manifestos. Jeanette Hart-Mann: Since 2009, LAAW and the Field Journeys have been an incredibly vibrant space for my own creative research and practice. What has been so profound for me has been the way that LAAW grants me time and legitimacy to be highly experimental without the end-all pressures of exhibitions, grant proposals, curators, etc., etc. It is a dedicated time for me to explore bioregional environmental issues and ecologic relationships that are very different from my primary practice based in agroecology, SeedBroadcast, and my research farm in Anton Chico, NM. LAAW truly enables a complementary space for me to experience a greater spectrum of ecologic diversity from the domesticated to the wild, and this permeates through all the projects I complete both in and out of LAAW. In 2010, I initiated a multi-year project called terradigest. It began out of necessity during the Foodshed Project field investigations when, as a group, we decided not to put compostable food scraps in the roadside dumpsters. During the field investigations, our camp is set up with a fully functional basecamp kitchen. We carry loads of food in from local grocery stores and stow it away in stacks of ice-packed coolers. The food is prepared by all of us in teams, and we eat masses of fabulous food after working hard all day out in the field. Along with this are the inevitable masses of food scraps. At the end of each day and at the end of our stay in one location, we usually have a sizable pile of compostable waste collected in a trashcan. With this project, I decided to bury these scraps at each site we visited and create a digest and digestible intervention. As a multi-year project (2010–2012), terradigest (www.terradigest.com) was driven by my need to plant compostable waste as a bio-massive-bodypolitic, instead of dumping it into dead-end landfill accumulations. Its ground is literally the dirt beneath our feet, the earth, soils, minerals, biotas,

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and atmospheric conditions of locations around the American Southwest. And its life lives through its performativity, documentation, and becomes literally the digestion and energy movement of place. Yoshi Hayashi: Being a sculptor and having been trained as a ceramicist, you are based very heavily in one location and you don’t really leave the studio because you are very equipment based and the equipment doesn’t travel. When I took field programs in my education what it taught me was that I didn’t need to be in the studio. It helped me to get out of the studio and use different strategies to create work. Rather than thinking I’m an artist when I go into the building, I’m an artist all the time, wherever I go. So one of the pieces that I’ve done is called Helms Alee, in which I build these hand sails in the studio and then take them and walk a certain path depending on which way the wind blows as if I was a walking sailboat. It allows me to do that walk anywhere in either an urban space or nature. Then I bring the documentation of the event back or I can bring it back into the studio and create sculptures based on my walks. Erika Osborne: Ever since the days of LAAW field studio has become my practice, and that way of working continues today. Towards the end of my time with LAAW, I started to really think about these ideas of how I view the west and through what lens. And that started me thinking about the work of Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederick Church, field artists that would go out with these expeditionary teams from the east. Being out in such a different environment with Place Appalachia, I started to dive deeper into this idea of East to West and how the western landscape fell into this particular frame from contemporary postcards all the way back to those early painters. I started to see my work in the context of that East to West model. I researched those artists and the role they played in western expansion and the era in which they came up, which was the era of Manifest Destiny. In that process, I did a residency at the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which is a place that we would take students on LAAW. I started to look at the West more directly through the lens of these artists to see what artifacts of that era were still present in the landscape of the contemporary West. At CLUI, I was in that field-to-studio methodology. I would go out and gather all my material and imagery and then come back to the studio to make the final paintings about the re-manifestation of Manifest Destiny. It was an interesting way of creating work in this cyclical East-to-West, field-tostudio way, which is a direct result of my teaching in these field programs.

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John Reid: Virtually my whole oeuvre has been inspired by a field experience. Probably the most recent is a body of work that goes under the collective title of “Walking the Solar System”. The germ of that idea dates to 2000. I was interested in what is our locus in the grand expanse of space over a twentyfour-hour period. We walk around the campus, the campus is part of planet earth, it’s revolving around the sun, the sun is moving in the galaxy, and the galaxy is moving in the universe. So, in the course of a day, what path do I trace in relation to the sun? So, the work was on about having a daily solar system consciousness. It really came to life in the field trip that my LAAW colleagues joined in 2011. Bill and I went down and did a video on a rock platform next to the ocean. We brought it back that evening and were able to play it for the whole group, and it got a rise out of everyone. So that led to a number of solar walks, and that’s developed into a long-term project that’s gone from a small collaborative work right through to large group performances such as the National Ceramics Conference in Canberra where 150 people assumed an exaggerated walking pose and observed one minute of silence as they contemplated the fact that during that period of time they would walk 1,800 miles relative to the sun. That work was then submitted as part of the Internet component of COP 21. So, that’s been a very satisfying work in that it grew out of a field program, the meeting of minds from different continents, and the stimulus that comes from that. Amanda Stuart: During one session of the Balawan Elective field studies in 2016, an elder put out a challenge to the group. He urged them to find ways to interpret this difficult knowledge from their own viewpoint through their artwork and in so doing, share this enhanced awareness with the wider community. In my art practice, therefore, I strive to not only bear witness to the difficult truths that emerge, but to also incorporate gestures of healing. Working with and listening to Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities on the far south coast has deeply influenced my awareness and commitment to developing such positive cultural relationships. My most recent sculptural work is an installation drawing entitled reConstitution. Its genesis took place over a number of visits to Jigamy Farm, an Aboriginal keeping place for culture on coastal south east Australia, where we camp as a group. re-Constitution incorporates a 1967 Australian Government issue Mining and Resources map – a standard in classrooms

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of its era – which has been immersed in Lake Pambula, on Aboriginal land. I see this immersion as a symbolic cleansing and returning to country of this loaded object. The map has then been dried and rubbed in ochres (gifted to me onsite at Jigamy) and rolled up in a gesture of healing. The rolling not only references a poultice form but also intentionally subverts the map’s original function, effectively obscuring its contents to the scrutiny of the human gaze. The map is then positioned upright, backed into a corner so to speak, but still activated as it appears to be making an ephemeral drawing. This drawing emanates from the point of contact it shares with the ground plane and consists of Australian red desert sand. The title of the work refers not only to the ongoing political debate regarding the rewriting of the Australian constitution to embrace Aboriginal people with more equity, but also to the necessary re-thinking yet to be done by contemporary Australia, around what constitutes a nation. By incorporating actual objects and materiality pertinent to the subject matter, the work calls for a deeper re-Imagining of future paths. I would not have been able to make this work without the accumulated experiences of Balawan Elective and field programming. Bill Gilbert: Since moving to New Mexico in 1978, my work has been focused on establishing a dialogue with place in the west. Prior to starting LAAW that meant, primarily, working with the native materials of my ecological backyard to create sculptural installations and videos. Early on in the LAAW program, I realized I would need to shift to a more mobile, body-oriented, less material-based, performative practice. Over the years, LAAW has become more and more interdisciplinary and multicultural. In response, I have tried to incorporate the idea in my work of simultaneously bringing multiple perspectives to bear in an investigation of place. In the Celestial/Terrestrial Navigations series, I combine the low-tech act of walking with sophisticated GPS satellite technology to navigate my way across unknown (to me) terrain. I choose the mythic images of zodiac to define my walks and then use their star points to create arbitrary transects as a system for sampling the topography, flora, and fauna of each new place. Working with plant ecologists, videographers, graphic and digital artists, and book binders, I create prints, videos, and hand-made books that present a poetic portrait of place in the attempt to capture the sense of the human body as a liquid presence floating with other water-based entities in the vastness of western space.

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Ecosystem Services by John Reid The tarpaulin is the Field Study program’s portable Civic Square. It’s the center for participatory democracy, the hearth, the forum, a gallery, a seminar room, a study, and a shelter. The largest-tarp-ever FIGURE 5.1 John’s Arrest, New South Wales, AU was erected in 2002 in Monga State Forest, which was just as well for we had to cope with plucky, unexpected visitors. The largest-tarp-ever drained water, allowed air to circulate, and looked good. Except for a fold to expel smoke, one had to duck under the perimeter to enter its voluminous interior. There was enough height to accommodate a fire. Kettles added steam to the nightclub atmosphere. Camping chairs were scattered about. It was a joy to behold. It was winter, and it had started to snow. Monga State Forest had not yet been registered as a national park. That came via a community campaign against a state government fixated on logging native forests. We were occupying a contested landscape. Scientists were marshaled to generate knowledge, and forest activists were risking life to disrupt destructive activity. We were there to aesthetically articulate the forest’s cultural values. Snow-flecked artists returned to the tarpaulin for warm drinks and raided packets of biscuits with communist disregard. To our collective amazement, we were suddenly invaded by a courageous antechinus – a small mouselike marsupial rarely seen. This one ran and hopped toward the fire like a streaker on the sporting field. The rustling of packets ceased. Antechinus scurry about at night. Males, charged with a one-off supply of sperm, frenetically mate with as many females as possible. This antechinus, unconcerned about us, took its place by the fire. Had a Disney animator provided a suitably sized deckchair, it would have slumped into it with limbs flopping over the sides. It toasted one half of its furry body then the other.

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Our kindred guest was undoubtedly a male exhausted from protracted sexual frenzy. He was at the end of his one-year life and had nothing to lose. With everyone still bemused and biscuits forgotten, he dug in the grass to unearth the tiniest green frog you could imagine. He ate it like a cookie, and then resumed his place by the fire – nonchalant. A couple of months earlier, I had the privilege to take my place in front of a bulldozer hell-bent on making a logger’s road into Monga Forest. I stood my ground during a polite ritual that ended in arrest. I was soon to face court. With snow still falling and our little marsupial content with its level of palliative care, I decided to work on my statement to the magistrate. A gas lamp hissed light. I reviewed my notes: I stood my ground in front of a NSW Forest bulldozer to send a desperate message to the NSW Government concerning the destruction of the cultural heritage of Monga State Forest. If we depreciate places like Monga, we lose places, here on Earth, that are relatively free of artifact and where successive generations can learn to wonder. As a teacher, I have witnessed artists, musician composers, and scientists draw inspiration and knowledge from the forests of Monga. As an artist, I have experienced the power of this ancient place to recall eternal human relationships with other forms of life. I looked up. It had stopped snowing. I looked at the antechinus. It was dead. I transported it in a biscuit tray to the outskirts of the tarp. A chair, its somber canvas drooping in sorrow, was placed protectively over the body. Meals were prepared to a dominant conversational theme – “fourteenhour antechinus sex”. After that, the discussion shifted to the dirty laundry of NSW State Forests and their wanton rape of native forests. Everyone had a statistic to fuel our collective anger. Someone disrupted the flow by filling a hot water bottle, and that was the end of it. We went to bed. I rose early to continue my court statement before the succession of morning greetings. Hopping around the tarpaulin was a pied currawong, an omnivorous bird resembling a crow. I wrote: I have raised these details, Your Honor, to demonstrate my affinity with Monga and its wonderful forests. I believe that no native forest should be logged for any purpose for which an alternative material can be used.

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The currawong was casing the joint. It would advance, gauge my reaction, retreat, and then, from a different angle, extend its zone of safe passage. I continued These points of view (expand) led to my protest in Monga that subsequently brings me before this Court. The currawong stared at me with piercing yellow eyes. I opened conversation as a gesture of goodwill. “Did you know, Currawong, that Gandhi used civil disobedience as an effective tactic in his ethical quest?” The bird retained counsel. I wrote I believe the preservation of our natural forests to be an ethical quest. I am not in any way disrespectful of the law. Quite the contrary. I subscribe to the view advanced by Wittgenstein . . . “Currawong! Do you know about Wittgenstein?” that laws serve to enunciate meaning and their wanton breaking only serves to destroy that meaning. My stand in Monga was a carefully considered act. The currawong made its move. With wings half spread, it darted under the chair and seized the antechinus. The antechinus with the frog packaged neatly inside took off. It was a fitting funeral procession. The bodies rose through the eucalyptus vapor into the sunshine. The currawong called triumphantly to its family, who, presumably, had eaten breakfast. “I’ve got lunch! I’ve got lunch! I’ve got lunch!” it cried. I hastened to finish my draft: I request the Court’s understanding, in the knowledge that half our precious natural forests are already gone, of the need for drastic and direct action to save what is left. “Morning”, I replied to an artist who looked like he had spent fourteen hours in the cot.

Environmental and social place The five programs share a commitment to a place-based education model that moves the context of learning from the ivory tower of academic campuses to the world at large, providing students with direct, first-hand contact with the

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environments and communities of their region. One of the most compelling reflections offered by the directors was a sense of their direct interactions with geographical place, whether mediated by community, history, or culture, or as an unmediated experience of landscape and weather. In many ways, this sense of place guides and informs teaching practice in the field. The particulars of how place and space interact with communities, cultures, classrooms, and students and even the very embodied experience of doing fieldwork surfaced again and again in our discussions with the directors. As you can see in the following reflections, each program has evolved in response to the particulars of its specific geographical context. To a large extent, the programs in our cohort began with an environmental definition of place and evolved into a more ecological frame investigating the continuum across constructed human environments and wilderness. With the possible exception of LMoA’s focus on Los Angeles and LAAW’s work in El Paso, the emphasis in constructed environments has remained primarily on rural (versus urban) communities. John Reid clarifies why field programming is so important in its move away from more academic models of arts practice and toward connection with embodied, sensory experience: So, there are people who are interested in responding to “place”, and a lot of people are. There are also artists who are, of course, engaged in philosophical, international discourses, and you don’t need to go anywhere to do that, you just need to read the journals, go to exhibitions, and surf the net. So, in many respects, the field program was a reaction against that being, certainly at our school, the only form of input that the artists had. They were only receiving highly processed, cultural information as the foundation for their artwork. Well, how do you develop great ideas from an encounter with everyday life? One can go to an exhibition and pick up on the conversation and make work that is in dialogue with the work that you just saw. But, when you step out into the rest of the world, outside of this highly cultural environment, how do you formulate ideas for art making from this primary experience? In another example of how the specifics of place directly drive curriculum, Erika Osborne reflects on her move from the southwest to Appalachia: Running Place Appalachia was really different from running a program in the West; completely different issues, everything about that was different. . . . Being a westerner, born and raised and really feeling embedded in the West, I felt so uprooted. It was so different for me to be in West Virginia (WV). Part of the difference was, it’s a completely different climate – coming from NM, the average rainfall is like eight inches a year to WV where the average rainfall is forty-two inches a year, more than Portland or Seattle. Another thing was there is very little public land in WV, a lot more private land, definitely no Bureau of Land Management.

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In LAAW, we got very used to operating in BLM, because of the freedom, less restrictions. In WV, I started to think, “Ok, I can’t employ the same strategies that I did out west. So, what are the things that drive this place?” And the other thing that I discovered was that the physical environment really had defined the culture in both places. In the West, people are horizontal. The land is expansive, there are big skies, you can see for hundreds of miles often and the people are similar – they’re open; they’re dreamers. It’s a very different type of person. I don’t think it matters even on which side of the political line we fall. But in WV, everything is tucked in. Appalachia, if you’re flying over it, it looks like someone crumpled a bed sheet and threw it down. There are so many nooks and crannies and holes, and people are a lot more insular. But at the same time, they run really deep. It’s really hard to get to know them quickly, but once you do, there is this real depth. I found that really interesting, the deep ties there. It made me ask, what defines “place” here, and if I’m going to take students out, what are the things that we need to explore? And what I landed on was: water, it’s hugely different. Communities, they’re built in hollers and by rivers, and it just rains all the time. So, water was one focus. Coal was another, which is not only just its history, but it’s this monolithic economy, and it’s totally, completely altered the landscape. And then, looking on the flip side of that to this agriculturally driven influence. So a lot more farms, a lot more grass, for ranching. I mean, we think of ranching so differently here. Everything is grass-fed there. They don’t need sprinklers. And so, agriculture, coal, water. This focus on the many aspects of place can clearly be seen to have defined the experience of place for her students. Ben Gazi: We got to see the environment in varying states during our course. We experienced landscapes as wilderness, seemingly void of human influence. We walked on land stripped and cut down by mountaintop removal. And finally we got to see how humans could work together in harmony with the land at a small perma-culture farm. This scale of experiences hit home the idea that our perspective on the environment is a human one, and the relationship a particular culture or individual has with the land can make all the difference. LAAW subscribes to a mobile model to provide students with exposure to a wide variety of eco-niches to construct a sense of place. Julie Anand describes the

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impact of moving from a traditional fixed-in-place studio on campus to this fluid, mobile studio based in a series of environmental sites. Growing up, we moved every three to four years to chase my father’s career desires. I learned to pick up my roots and carry them around with me. I made a project throughout the Land Arts program called Nomadic Germination that was partly autobiographical. At each site we travelled through, I carried gourd seeds in tiny pots with me and slept over them to keep them warm at night. They germinated at Lake Mead. For Act II, Inhabitation, I made a trellis for the plants in the shape of a cocoon and returned the grown plants to the site of the first planting, the Bisti Badlands. The plants I had sheltered now sheltered me, evoking the generational cycles of care within a lifetime. There is an incomplete Act III of the project that I’m still attached to fifteen years later. Yannis Ziogas explains the importance of focusing on social as well as environmental place: Prespas is not only a place where ecological issues are taking place but also where historical issues are important. Even after 60 years, all these issues of cultural and historical involvement are very important for Greece because we are the third generation after a civil war, after a trauma, and psychologically speaking, as happened with the holocaust issues, it is the third generation that is able to deal with that. The first generation was affected; the second generation wanted to have a distance from it. The third generation tried to come to terms and see how they can record it, rediscover it in a creative way, so this is where we are now . . . How can this be translated into art terms, translated to a younger generation, which is both myself and my students? We are the third and fourth generation after a trauma and generally speaking, how do we deal with that trauma? How do we elaborate on a trauma issue. For Amanda Stuart, place is most importantly articulated in a sense of community connection, which is directly related to knowledge of and interaction with the land itself via its inhabitants. When we were staying at a place, that was maybe 150 years old that was a whaling station, but underpinning that was thousands of years of relationships that Indigenous peoples had with the whales in that same spot, which included working with killer whales to round up the whales that they were harvesting. They passed that knowledge on to the white people, and that was kind of like a starting point to open up that knowledge here. The idea is that in all the FS courses, the environmental and social

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concerns are central, but in this course in particular because of the communities and their knowledge of the land, it becomes the overriding factor. Local knowledge. For the students, this focus on community engagement is often an introduction to an entirely new form of art practice that makes a different set of demands than traditional studio courses. As Ryan Henel describes, One of the most important differences is the sense of responsibility. Responsibility as a person in a group that is working to try and do something differently, to take on a new angle of approach in the ways we engaged almost everything. This sense of responsibility extended to the people and places you encounter along the way – whether in the form of stewardship of the environments we inhabit or the recognition that the choices that we make have complex and oftentimes unforeseen consequences. An example is the time Land Arts spent with the community of Barrio Buena Vista in El Paso, Texas. Here we were, students/strangers caravanning in from a university in another state, attempting to engage in a meaningful way with a community that has been deeply marginalized. We met a lot of people with stories to tell. Sometimes these stories told of hardships that were unfamiliar to us, but many times, they were struggles we all could relate to: “It’s hot outside; our old people need shade while waiting for the bus!” So, we came together with faculty and community members to design and build a bus shelter in just a few days. It was an act that carried with it a responsibility that transcended the academic and became something else, more real, more consequential.

Interdisciplinary dialogue Another key aspect of field programming work is how the programs incorporate interdisciplinary models and practice into their curricular design and teaching methodology. In contemporary educational institutions, lip service is often paid to interdisciplinary work as a model of progressive education, but the complex nature of a material articulation of interdisciplinary practice often proves challenging. Interdisciplinary work can quickly become contested space in academic curricular models where individual disciplines thrive by developing their own praxis, lexis, and scholastic hierarchies. Arguably, at the heart of some of these difficulties are the realities of material capitalism as applied to educational institutions with their attendant divisions and often divisive concepts of “expertise”. In a system in which funding and promotion flow through specific disciplines, it is difficult and even dangerous for junior faculty in particular to pursue interdisciplinary projects. A simple example is the intrinsic value placed on singleauthored publications or exhibitions, which garner more merit in tenure files than do collaborative texts or art projects, especially when they do not fit into

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a specific disciplinary dialogue. When there is no tangible reward attached to interdisciplinary work, it becomes difficult to justify this practice as a centerpiece of academic practice. Field programming provides a strong model for dissolving these silos of knowledge and for bringing the work of an array of participants – local/community, scholarly, cross-disciplinary, activist – into successful, generative, dynamic practice with one another. As such, an interdisciplinary focus is a defining aspect of these programs in that it facilitates a layering of voices and provides opportunities for multi-faceted learning. It serves the previously discussed goal of creating a more egalitarian community by expanding communication beyond the authority of a single faculty voice. Practice in field programming has the ability to move beyond the borders of classrooms and thereby frees participants and programs from some of the curricular and institutional constraints that frequently bind disciplinary practice. Several of the program coordinators identified interdisciplinary work as a key to the success of their programs and explained how that gets articulated for them in both philosophy and practice. For example, in Erika Osborne’s field programming work, her focus is on the potential for a true equality between the academic disciplines in the arts and sciences: I’m personally very interested in trying to define a model of a real interdisciplinary course here at CSU. One of the things that brought me here was the School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES). They’ve created a way to do truly interdisciplinary pedagogy. And I’m really interested in that. . . . All of these courses in the arts and the sciences talk about this and we certainly at PA and LAAW and Art and Environment bring a lot of guests from other fields to engage the program, but that idea that it would be truly a mutually beneficial and layered course or interaction is of interest to me, and it’s a model I’d like to develop further in how the course runs. Other program directors view interdisciplinary practice as a way of moving beyond the limits in academic studio art practice to embrace transcultural definitions of expertise. These programs engage more broadly with the world at large and with the knowledge that resides in communities beyond the borders of an academic institutional identity. Jeanette Hart-Mann articulated her approach this way: “Interdisciplinary” [in LAAW] is not just about how we bring all these creative [art] practices together but also engage outside those fields. I’m thinking in terms of having real, deep relationships with people outside of the fields of art. What we do now in our investigations is that we meet with community activists, scholars, farmers, scientists . . . we try to meet with as many different people as we can to understand the spectrum around issues or sites that we’re engaging with. And so, that idea of the

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interdisciplinary derives not only from action and practice but also from thinking about what is the knowledge that is held in the community and respecting that as being as much a part of our experience of those places too. Yannis Ziogas expresses a similar commitment to moving beyond academic definitions of expertise to forge a new practice for contemporary artists: The most challenging is how we explore issues that are artistic but more extended than a regular art issue and how we incorporate that into art practice. We are not sociologists, we are not art historians, we are not technicians, but at the same time, we have to bring these issues into art so there needs to be an equilibrium here between these issues and what we are elaborating on. How can art initiate social involvement? Which to my process and to all of us in this group is very important. For John Reid, much of this work also involves a commitment to a multiplicity of perspectives in a specific site of interaction. So, while much of this demonstrates a commitment to community involvement, a large portion of what he describes as the motivation for his program stems from a value at the core of interdisciplinary work: providing a space for competing or complementary ideas about a topic to come into conversation with each other. He describes the FS program experience of entering community spaces and how that benefited student learning: So you have the mayor and civic officials, you have land holders, and you’d have Indigenous leaders and artists. You’d have local artists who had spent thirty or forty years looking at the landscape through artistic eyes, and they would talk to the students about how they had responded to place. You had scientists talking about environmental issues that were prevailing and helping them to interpret what they were looking at. There are people in cultivated landscapes who cover the full spectrum, people who come from as many different perspectives as possible. I mean, we’d have people talking to students about how important it was to grow rice in this location when in fact, you could find someone the next day who would say, it’s the worst thing you could possibly do. So you can have all these competing perspectives presented to the students on location. Amanda Stuart has taken up this idea and developed a long-range focus in her program of interacting with Indigenous communities in ways that redefine interdisciplinary as a shift of focus from what is traditionally valued in the institution as “expertise” to re-center this conception in a broader context. She describes, for example, in the following anecdote, what expertise beyond

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art-making looks like for BE students as they begin to build relationships with Indigenous communities: One of the elders said to us last year, “[B]y the age of 13 most aboriginal children that have the benefit of growing up with the knowledge in our community have the equivalent of a science degree with their knowledge of the land, in a physical and topographical sense with respect to beneficial plants, flora, fauna, climatology, cosmology; everything.” And so, when you come in and you’re working with communities, everything else falls into place and the environmental and social aspects of it all relate back to the land that you’re on, the country you’re on. And I think that it’s very rare that the students don’t get that.

Change/progression/evolution As outlined in the first section of this chapter, each of the five programs began as an experiment with the vision of creating field-based practice and pedagogy that could speak across disciplines and communities. Inevitably, they have each changed over time with experience gained but also in response to institutional and societal changes. Though each of the programs was initiated as a move away from an existing institutional paradigm, they also each have had to ultimately find a place in the existing institutional structure in order to survive. They have adapted and evolved along the way, taking into account their own institutional economies and dominant curricular priorities. And, while each of the programs began with a loose organizational structure, with one person taking the helm, they have generally proceeded over time to interact with their institutions in more codified and officially recognized ways on the level of particulars, such as student assessment, logistics, and programmatic or curricular design. Each of the programs we examine here has continued to work in a dynamic tension between freedom and structure in order to maintain a strong core focus on offering something that a more traditional model of studio instruction cannot, convincing one of the central values of the work itself – to offer students and communities the opportunity to work in an art practice that is relevant to both local and global conditions of art making. They engage environmental, social, and political economies in intersectional and interdisciplinary ways that are continually co-created with all stakeholders. In the following exchange, the directors discuss some of the changes over time that have occurred in their programs, whether it be under the guidance of the original creator or through the work undertaken by a new director. Their comments reveal shared values and an attention to both continuity and innovation in the development of their programs. Yoshimi Hayashi, one of the participants in the first iteration of LAAW and subsequent director of LMoA, notes that though there was chaos in the first years

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of his experience with the LAAW program, perhaps that chaos also provided some real agency for students to define the program and carve out spaces for their work within it. He sees the challenges in maintaining that spontaneity and openness in his own program over time mirrored in the changes he has seen in the evolution of LAAW: The LAAW years that I went through are very different from LAAW 15 years later. It was like the difference between what was Phoenix in the 1800s vs. what it is now. One was the wild west and now there’s organization and all these things are happening. . . . In 2000, it was kind of like, you just go out there and there weren’t really that many sets of rules in place like we have to have now in 2017, but I also think that freedom gave you a lot more room to succeed or fail. In terms of his own program, he says, The evolution of the LMoA program has gone from the openness, no learning outcomes, “Hey, let’s just go figure it out”, to a much more organized way of teaching. So, I think the organization and the liability issues are the big change. Maybe that’s it; it gets to such a point that you no longer have any semblance of what you originally started off with. Like, oh, now what I’m doing is so different it no longer captures the spirit anymore; it changes. You try to say that you’re keeping it new. You try to say that there’s always new places, but I don’t think the rawness is ever going to come back. Basically, the change is from chaos to organization or maybe chaos to organized chaos. Similarly, for Yannis Ziogas in VMTP, the evolution of his program moved toward a bit more structured curriculum, and this was a direct response to the years of experience in the field and what he saw as being of value for the specific cultural and geographical context he works within: What is interesting is that in the first years, we wanted to create artwork in an environment where people had no idea what art, especially contemporary art, was about. After three or four or five years, I said, “Ok, we have experienced it enough to go to another level.” And that was the reason that I set a different “thematic” for each year of this program. And then, last year, after ten years of being here, we started to build a ceramic kiln in an open space, and then we built a bench which was in a place where people of the area could sit and eventually, all these people who were invisible, who were of the area, came to us and eventually a community was created. Maybe it sounds obvious, in all these experiences, you realize people don’t show up unless you invite them. And then people got in touch with us, and we were not just some people who came here to do something, but we were one of them. And

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that was a big discovery. That was very important for us, how after ten years of working here, we were really affiliated with the local community. From now on, this will be our pivotal point of growing the program. Now we are artists working with the local community, again trying to discover our identity in a global environment. So, a kiln in a remote area where people bring their work to join with us or can cook their meals can be equally as important as any other artist practice. In LAAW, the current director, Jeanette Hart-Mann, works with an everevolving pedagogy in order to shape the program as a model of professional practice for art production that is resilient and responsive to real-world conditions: I think the other thing that has changed over time is our approach, pedagogically. In 2012 or 2013, Bill and I talked about how the old curriculum was really based in the conceptual ideas of Place, Artifact, Space, and Mapping and these theme-based trips that we’d go on. We’d do the Foodshed, and we’d do the Border, and there was always this kind of confusion in the students. It’s not like they were forced to do it, like all their work had to be about Space, Place, Mapping, and Artifacts [the four LAAW courses], but it was meant as sort of a way to ground them, especially the undergrads, as a way of experiencing the field and kind of responding to the field so that they wouldn’t get lost, because it can be quite overwhelming . . . And those four courses were supposed to help students, and I think they did. But in 2012 or 2013, I said, “Bill, I don’t think this is working. What I envision is something totally different. I see this opportunity to kind of map out what a creative practice looks like. It’s like LAAW can be the frame for that. So, we provide an opportunity for students to do research, we provide the opportunity for students to do field investigations, and for them to do field production and to do public presentation-dissemination.” That’s the basic framework of what all creative practitioners do and many people outside the field of art, right? It’s a basic structure. It’s also a model that you can utilize to really practice a professional engagement. And so, I proposed that to Bill, and he was like, “Yeah, go for it”. Another unfortunate trend that emerged in the interview data, and is articulated here by John Reid, is that increasingly institutional demands have become a force moving programs backward in terms of pedagogic goals. In this way, programs must continue to swim “against the tide” of major cultural educational forces which engender a more risk-adverse, more economically based model of curricular delivery. As Reid supposes: It has changed, and if you don’t change, you go out of business. You get out there and you do these things and as a result you get a sense of what works

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and what doesn’t. You would never come to those conclusions sitting in an armchair . . . Now from a philosophical, educational view, we’ve gone backwards on that one because critique in the field is an obligation for a credited Elective Study [BE]. They have to have formal tutorials [critiques] in the field. So it really has brought that classroom structure into the field, and I think that’s a pity, but inevitable, and I think you had to do that; otherwise, the program wouldn’t happen at all. So, that’s one of the concessions. Basically, an educational principle of FS has been traded for a pragmatic model. That’s changed the vibe that you had with the original FS field trips, I think. We’ve sacrificed what I think is a really valuable pedagogic principle of field-based programs in order to survive. Amanda Stuart also articulates how some of the changes over time, due to institutional economies, have shifted the work they do at the ground level with curriculum and with an emphasis on justifying their work to the institutional body: The John Reid Environmental Studio experience chortled along with a handful of three or four enrolled students toward the end of his tenure, but the greater mass was the inclusion of all this wonderful really experienced spectrum of people that would add to the mix. But unfortunately in the transition a few years ago with our university, the “toe cutters” came in [Toe cutter: one who applies instruments of forceful excision to useful but perceived extraneous appendages with the intent of persuasive budgetary/other outcomes], and there was a lot of budget reformation and restructuring of the way things were run, which was seen as a bit loose, so it was a much bigger focus on the phrase here “bums on seats”, people effectively enrolled and willing to pay the fees. On a more positive note, Amanda Stuart explains that not only has the work in the Elective Study course itself changed, but there has begun to be a crossfertilization nationally and internationally amongst the various field programs, and this has informed her work and also strengthened her resolve to continue despite challenges. Here she details some of what has come of collaborations with LAAW: Some of the things we’ve built in from our experiences of observing LAAW has been a much more rigorous formalization. You know, in the beginning of FS, everyone would drive their cars into the bush, and it was kind of free-ranging and loose. What I learned so powerfully from traveling with the Land Arts crew was the cohesion and the bonding that happens in a van, the conversations that are had, the opportunities are just remarkable

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in terms of building – because effectively (in these field programs), you’re building a community – and you’re reliant on each other for so many things, and that is another opportunity to do that, and so we’ve brought that in from the American model, and it’s working really well with our crew too. So, that’s just some of the ideas. As Gilbert explains, this cross-fertilization has worked in both directions: In 2011, John Reid invited me to bring four LAAW veterans to spend a month with FS in Australia. It was inspirational to see John’s decentralized model and realize the degree to which, in the effort to cover as much territory and do as many projects as possible, we had taken on an almost parental role in managing LAAW. I came back thinking that if the goal is maximum student agency, we needed to shift back toward more individual determination and responsibility. Another factor in the programs’ individual and collective evolution has been the rapidly changing cultural contexts in which they operate. A significant theme that emerged in interviews with directors was the idea of how the focus of each program shifted from a making art in response to place model to a radical expansion of what constitutes field programming work. The majority of the programs have shifted from a place-based aesthetics focus to more issue-oriented curricula, from simply providing environmental experiences to an awareness of the interrelationships of social and environmental issues in a more intersectional approach that works with a focus on social and environmental activism, cultural awareness, and community engagement. John explains this evolution in FS. So it wasn’t long after the formal beginning of the field studies program that we moved out of the wilderness into landscapes that were cultivated, into communities. This interaction was fantastic. So, not only were artists going to high-quality sensory environments, but there was a community there and there was this inevitable interaction. Erika Osborne characterizes this shift as adopting the expanded frame of the world at large as opposed to an art-only/art-specific focus. She notes how her program has begun to respond to these changes in the world: The courses have changed as the world has changed. It’s beautiful because we’re not looking at art history or anything that’s more fixed in time. Environmental issues, sustainability, all of that is so dynamic and the courses have evolved in that direction. The courses I’ve run have moved to this art/ science model and to unabashed activism.

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Jeanette Hart-Mann expresses a similar move away from an art-centric perspective: There doesn’t have to be an art overlay there already in order for us to be conscious of it [as a LAAW site] and to be reacting to it as creative people. And I think that really has been a big shift. Now, we don’t go to earthworks sites. And students ask me, “Well, why don’t we go? Can’t we go to Lightning Field or Roden Crater?” And I am like, let’s talk about the relevance, formally, conceptually, let’s talk about Roden Crater as it relates to Glen Canyon Dam and how we can view both as these anthropogenic forces of culture. They both hold a space for us, so why as artists are we privileging one over the other? And I think that’s something academia and the contemporary art world tend to do; they privilege Roden Crater. As artists and creative people, engaged in the world around current environmental and social justice issues, why are we looking at that artwork? Why is that the baseline for our inspiration? We should be looking at Glen Canyon Dam, we should be following the Rio Grande, we should be thinking about the carbon footprint of Albuquerque and how it impacts Indigenous communities and our neighbors. That should be our concern, and I think that is a major shift in terms of where the program has gone. And yet, for some students, engagement with the major earthworks still has value. Heike Qualitz speaks of her experience at Roden Crater. I think about the LAAW journey and experiencing one of the major Land Arts pieces [Roden Crater] also through the lens of not coming from this continent and everything in America being big. You can buy a volcano! Such an excessive take on art, a project you can work on for decades. We had this incredible, immersive experience as the light changes [inside the crater], but what really stayed with me from that time was the conversations we had after in the van and around the fire with you [Bill], talking about the impact of the project. “This is what’s known to the public, and these are the background facts and observations; how close are we to the reservation, who was involved in making this, and how much did it resemble a Kiva?” It was both extremely critical and place-based. That was hugely impactful for me, and it was holistic. You can’t just talk about it [Roden Crater] as a notional thing. It needed that whole journey of walking through, spending six hours in the crater and seeing from the top how close the reservation was, thinking about how important that land was to native people. These conversations don’t often arise talking about the earthworks. They’re not part of the public (art) dialog.

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Bill Gilbert sees this shift as an evolution over time in response to cultural change. Something lost, something gained in trying to move forward and stay relevant in our students’ lives. The focus in the original version of the program was on establishing for our students a direct, physical relationship with environmental place, reconnecting them with Mother Earth. We were enabling a connection that otherwise was largely missing from their lives. It was quite simple in that regard and unstructured in an academic sense. We had faith in the idea that if you gave artists extended time to work in remote places, amazing things would happen. And they did, over and over again. And yet it was impossible to ignore that even in the most remote sites the environment was being affected by human behavior. There really is no separation of human from “natural” environments. Urban and wilderness sites are part of an interrelated ecology. So our focus morphed to the interrelationship between man and the environment and that quite naturally made us want to engage constructively with the places and communities of our region. In turn, Jeanette Hart-Mann has taken up this work in LAAW as a move toward bioregional engagement via art practice: So from the beginning we started playing around with how we as artists were a big part of the world we saw changing and bioregional issues shifting. We saw students responding differently to what it maybe meant to be an artist and be in arts and ecology . . . I feel like LAAW has changed a lot. I think one thing that has really amped up now, is this sort of renegotiation in terms of where the artist places most of their value. In terms of where the focus lies, I think now, it lies more in terms of the bioregional, what is happening in your own backyard.

Man of the Mountain by Erika Osborne In terms of the environmental and social, one of the biggest influences for the students in general and kind of an intense FIGURE 5.2 Man of the Mountain, Appalachia, WV experience was the time that we would spend on Kayford Mountain in coal country. So, we worked with activists there, hardcore activists. Larry Gibson, he passed away in 2012, he was one of the main

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anti-MTR advocates. He’s the super short little guy, from that area, from Kayford Mountain. His family had forty acres of hunting property on Kayford Mountain. He kind of rallied them to refuse to sell it to the MTR coal mining companies. So, it is in essence the last holdout in this area of MTR territory. And it is the only place in coal country that you can see an MTR from the ground without flying over it, legally. So, like, legally, you can be on his property, and you can look and experience this situation. Well, because he’s an activist and he was just, fiery, he was like, I can’t even explain. We would get there, so he’s an old-time West Virginian, right? We’d get to his place, and he would start talking to the students before we would go out to look at the mine. And it would be like, two or three hours later just sitting on his property. He was almost like a preacher, evangelical about the cause, and his eyes would get big, and the students for that entire time, I swear, they wouldn’t move. So amazing. And he’d start talking also about all of this violence on his property. He’d had, like, drive by shootings; this is, like, a mountain dirt road, cabin. Surveillance cameras around, there’s videos, of miners, because he’d do this bluegrass party once a year; there’s these videos where miners will come and throw rocks at people. It’s kind of an intense place. And I was always, I felt like it was super important for them to get that kind of experience. We would come from this Smoke Cold Canyon, this beautiful canoe trip, this beautiful area along the south branch of Potomac, kind of remote, removed feeling of just a being out in the woods kind of feel. And then we’d drive to coal country. It was amazing to watch the students how, the mood in the van would change, slowly. Cause coal country, you get in, it’s very sort of third world, run-down homes, a lot of dust-covered things, the rivers run red in a lot of spots, and we get to this place where we’re kind of driving in this valley and there will be coal trucks just whoosh, whoosh, and they’re not very nice. They don’t like you because they know where you’re going. And you drive up the mountain to Kayford, and you can hear blasting, and it’s just kind of like . . . I remember a student in the car just like, “I don’t like it. I don’t like it, I don’t like this place.” It’s just kind of heavy. And Larry was always really great because he was super passionate, but he also had this backwoods charm, and he was hilarious at the same time so he would kind of just lighten the spirit too. But the social component of that was super fascinating because there would be a rough dirt road that goes up and over the mountain from one valley to the next valley. And Kayford, it goes up and over. Larry Gibson’s property is right on top. So, a lot of people would use the road to get to and from these two valleys. Lots of miners. So, it was always like, is anyone gonna come and throw rocks? Is anyone gonna come and do something really not ok? And in fact, one

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year, Larry had passed away, and the Keepers of the Mountains – that’s his foundation – decided that it wasn’t really safe to be up there that year and so we stayed down in Coal River Valley with Coal River Mountain Watch, this activist group down there. So even just that energy, telling the students, we can’t stay on Kayford this trip; we’re gonna have to go down and stay in the valley. We can come up and work, but at night, we’re going back down because it’s just not safe. Because these incidences have happened. The social and environmental, the way that those two worlds hit, was just really amazing. It was amazing as a professor to watch students, to have them experience that.

Community engagement Community engagement is one of the particular components of field programming work that comingles many aspects when put into practice. The focus on community engagement accesses concerns of pedagogy, interdisciplinarity, ecology, and art-making practice itself. For many, in enacting the decision to bridge the divide between the social and the environmental aspects of place, program leaders were faced with developing a new set of “sites” for their programs in the human settlements of their home region. Program leaders now added initiating, developing, and maintaining relationships with a wide range of artists, writers, activists, and community leaders to their job descriptions. John Reid discusses how negotiating the distance between modernist fine art and social practice involves establishing a shared dialogue through continued community engagement: In rural Australia, there’s a lot of community art activity, community art where the process takes precedence over the end result. It doesn’t matter if you end up with a mud pie; it’s the making of the pie that’s important. Whereas in fine art what is ultimately important is the end product, a quality product that is the best you can do. So, they weren’t as familiar with the fine arts as they were with other creative forms, and as a result they were very curious about what we wanted to do. In LAAW, for Jeanette Hart-Mann, the articulation of the community practice begins with project-based models of art making in multiple spaces – field, gallery, and beyond: These community engaged projects started when Bill and I worked together. There are different models that we [currently] work with and we still do require collaboration. It is very experimental. . . . The last one that

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we did was in the Gila Wilderness around the [river] diversion. As a group, we already knew what we intended to do there. We land in a site, and we get partners, local people, to meet us there and to teach us about where we are. So we had a river ecologist and an ornithologist meet up with us and talk about the riparian zone and talk about the proposed diversion and take us on a hike and teach us while we are there. And we also had an artist take us out and teach us about where we are in a very different way that was based on materials. He harvests materials in this environment, and he makes things out of them – whether it be bows or baskets or jewelry or knives. And so, then we had this intention to do a project. It was like, well, we learned some things, and so how are we going to respond to this idea of the [river] diversion. And so the students decide that they want to build this four-foot-tall willow basket and they want to perform with it in the river and then plant it at one of the diversion sites to see if it’ll grow back. And so they did a really dynamic, collaborative project, and everybody contributed in many different capacities. And then that project was complete, it lived in the field, it actually grew, which is incredible. But then the opportunity for students to take that collaboration and move it forward is also really valuable. So we had students go back to the Gila and build another basket and take it to UNM and do this embedded video in a more traditional gallery context to share what was happening with the Gila to a very different audience. And then another student later was invited to take that work to the state capital building in March, to perform with it again. And so that was an extremely successful collaboration that took place in the field and then took on a life of its own. Ben Gazsi, PA 2013, talks about the impact of grounding the conversation in real experience. I think the guest speakers / experts / activists we met along the way really boosted the experience for me. We were just visitors to many of the places we were working in and hearing from individuals who truly knew the different environments and cultures gave us context for our work. For example, we met with local activists in an area with heavy mountaintop removal activity. They spoke with us about the intricate relationships with the natural environment and the one between the people who live within it. These experiences and discussions definitely contributed to how I think about my work today. In talking about community engagement, whether in Greece, Australia, or the United States, a repeated theme in the interviews was the reference to the fact that rural communities are suffering economically, environmentally, and, as a direct result, socially. To be effective, field programs must cross the inherent

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divide between these rural communities and privileged academic communities from urban centers. This distance is even greater in working with Indigenous cultures that are further marginalized within their home regions. In our interviews, several of the directors spoke to the particulars of their geographical and regional location and the importance of working with a heightened sensitivity to the existing community and cultural issues, focusing that awareness on the presence of their work as playing an “outsider” role, investigating how to build equitable, reciprocal relationships with marginalized communities. In the FS program, Amanda Stuart works carefully to build equitable, mutually beneficial relationships with artists and community members in her region, who may have decidedly different political views and are often from different cultural traditions. You can be inclusive, you can have a reasonable consideration of what at times were difficult conversations to have about logging, about people’s jobs . . . there’s a massive kind of population of young men and suicide in rural areas because of incredibly difficult conditions. So at times, visiting areas that were struck with massive conditions of drought and the environmental concerns is, especially in very conservative places, it’s very challenging to visit those areas. And that’s just in the white population. Our Indigenous population has been incredibly decimated and fragmented, and so they are very deeply emotional issues, and John always had that ability to make sure that everyone could be heard and their opinion would be respected and on the table and I was always really struck by that. Just as field programming comes into contact with marginalized communities in a variety of spaces, for some programs, a particular awareness of the history and cultural assault suffered by Indigenous communities becomes central to the work done in the field. For Amanda Stuart, relationship building between her institution and these communities is a defining moment for her practice of field programming and place-based art making. Under Stuart’s leadership, her Balawan Elective has amassed a history of engagement with Indigenous communities. She says, A component that I very much wanted to bring in was working with Indigenous communities that are some of the most impacted by colonization in Australia. The last thing I wanted to do was to go down and suck more out of them. So, it was very much about, “we come to you, we stay on country by your invitation, we hear from your elders, your people, and anyone who is willing to talk to us in any aspect of knowledge.” Fundamental to this course is the whole relationship that Indigenous people have is with the land. Country is their religion. And so, when you

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realize an environmentally themed course with elders talking to students about their relationship to country, how it’s their mother, you know, it’s not just something students study at the university. Several directors emphasized that a key part of working with rural or Indigenous communities is establishing early on the principle of reciprocity, creating equitable, respectful interactions that are mutually beneficial for both parties and that a large part of that reciprocity comes from establishing a connection between the various cultural groups’ home places. Their programs are not out in the field for some sort of anthropological study of rural groups. They intend to build relationships based in a geographic and cultural dialogue. Making sure that community members are invited to campus and received as authorities with knowledge that is different from, but equal to, traditionally recognized forms of academic knowledge contributes to developing lasting relationships. Amanda Stuart discusses her work with the Yuin people in southeast New South Wales: Especially with Indigenous communities that have been so majorly impacted, there have been a lot of white people that have come down and said, “Oh look this is what we’re gonna do” and then they disappear, and they never turn up, and I just don’t want to turn into one of those. So, we invite artists back to the university so there’s a reciprocal arrangement, if they are able to come to ANU. I’m sure, this happens with members of Indigenous communities where it sounds great on paper but a lot of these people don’t have enough petrol to put in their car (assuming they even have a car), that kind of thing. So, an avenue of conversation that we’ve had with our head of school, is about paying these people for their time, but there’s no funds for that. What we have managed to do is get money for buses, money for petrol, plus money for in-house accommodations in the university should they be able to come up. And also, arrange, if there are artists interested in visiting workshops, we arrange for them to have access to facilities and equipment. So many people have opinions about Indigenous peoples and they’ve never met one. And so, this is like a little microcosm of being able to hold a bridge so that conversations and sharing of knowledge can run both ways. In the past, the university has dealt with Indigenous communities, but by and large they’ve been from flying off in the (Australian) tropics, in the gulf, in areas that are incredibly rich in cultural backgrounds, ones much more intact than the communities we’re working with because colonization reached them a lot later. The level of fragmentation and trauma that some of the communities we’re working with here and dysfunction is just phenomenal, and yet, they’re still willing to have conversations and to open up and share knowledge with us. I find that completely humbling, after all we’ve [white settler culture]

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done. It seems to me, it’s a very powerful and timely conversation to even have a starting point and to do it, even though we’re only in early days with this project – the impact that you can see on the students is phenomenal. The importance of her work for students, many of whom have no real knowledge of or previous contact with Aboriginal communities, is born out in this comment from BE student Keith Bender. The blissful ignorance of my middle-class upbringing and public education both conspired to ensure that important truths about Australia’s first peoples remained beneath the surface, until my experience during the Balawan course opened my eyes, mind, and heart to the plight of Aboriginal people. . . . Today, two years on, I find myself still energized by my Balawan course experience, more attuned to the issues and more than ever committed to changes to our Constitutional and Parliamentary frameworks to recognize and give voice to Australia’s first peoples.

Leadership transitions One issue facing programs created by individual faculty members is the question of how to transition to new leadership so that the program will continue beyond the individual’s tenure. The original program leaders in our study range from three full professors (FS, LAAW, LMoA) to one Associate Professor (PA, A&E) and one Assistant Professor (VMTP). Four of the original program leaders are male, one female. The recent retirement of John Reid at ANU and Bill Gilbert at UNM has resulted in a significant shift in the leadership demographic. At ANU, a male senior lecturer has been replaced by a female junior lecturer, while LAAW has transitioned from a male full professor and endowed chair to a female assistant professor. As a direct result, the leadership of the field programming cohort as a whole has become significantly younger, less secure academically, and more female. This, in fact, matches larger trends in academic spheres, a move toward more precarious and also (increasingly) feminized labor pools.1 These trends complicate the consideration for any program of the necessary change over time to new leadership. Two of the programs (FS, LAAW) have already managed a transition process and can provide models for this component. In some ways, this concern indicates the long-term success of programs, in that they are surviving. Both FS and LAAW moved initially to a shared leadership structure and then the original director retired. Other directors, like Yoshimi Hayashi of LMoA, note that they are constantly considering how to best create longevity and continuity in their programs: To be perfectly honest, I don’t know how long one can do this. Maybe there’s a time when you [stop] because it takes so much friggin’ energy.

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I don’t know how many years you can do it. I don’t know, if you need a fresh face to take over and do it . . . have I created a platform where when we start to hire new faculty in the future, we can give it to them and just say, now LMoA for students is not just doing it with me, but LMoA can be done by any faculty? . . . Semester to semester you could change out instructors. You can do it one semester, I can do it another semester, we can do it that way? For programs that have transitioned to new leadership, there is an accompanying complexity. In our interviews, each of the successors named a desire to maintain the spirit of the original program while facing new institutional challenges and implementing their individual curricular vision. Jeanette Hart-Mann speaks about her own work in LAAW over time: As far as then the transition went, it was difficult too. Bill was starting to talk about it in 2010, and we were talking about how to set it up and lay it out and do it at the same time and then as I was transitioning more into Bill’s position and Ryan Henel was transitioning more into my position. So it was maybe a little crazy at times; you get so many cooks in the kitchen doing multiple things. . . . I can work with order in the chaos, but when you’re orchestrating multiple people and logistics, students and projects, there has to be a certain amount of order. Communicating, getting things done, sometimes could get a little harried, but it all happened, and it was all great. It was really crazy what we were able to do over those years, and it was fantastic. Hayashi asks questions of himself and others who have taken up the work, about how the experience of doing this work itself changes over time whether or not a significant leadership transition has yet occurred or not: I think with Jenn, Amanda, and I, the interesting thing will be how we see it in the future. So again, having done it for sixteen years, what I’m going to look for is when the burnout kicks in, when I’m going to hand it over. There’s a saying right? “Before I studied Zen, a tea bowl was a tea bowl and tea was tea. Once I started studying Zen, a tea bowl was no longer a tea bowl and tea was no longer tea. Once I finished studying Zen, a tea bowl was once again a tea bowl and tea is tea.” I think I’m at the point where a tea bowl is no longer a tea bowl and tea is no longer tea, and I’m wondering if I’m going get back to the place where a tea bowl is a tea bowl and tea is tea but in a different way that is more evolved. Am I going be able to bring back the rawness? Bring that back and still maintain that organization and then be able to hand it off to someone else? I don’t know. The next stage will be very interesting to me.

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Value The final question for interview participants probed the issue of what the directors and students felt ultimately was the true value of their programs. Was that value intrinsic or developed specifically for each of them? What did they see as implications of the work in broader educational contexts? Yoshi Hayashi speaks directly to the contribution the field program experience can make to empowering students: The payoff is, number one, you’re giving them [students] an experience that they will never have again. Everyone is going forget their poly-sci class, but they’re never going forget Land Marks of Art. I get reports of them going off after LMoA on a trip across America by themselves, so you know, the moment I look for is when people are like “Oh, I don’t need you to do this”. In his comments, Yannis Ziogas refers to the affect field programs have on an artist’s sense of personal identity in relation to larger social and environmental spheres: Field programming is important because it allows the understanding of reality in the art process and, more importantly, in art education. Exploring a field is an approach of experiencing the landscape, the environment around us, and also allows the artist to realize the potential of his/her body as a sensor of ideas and images. This esoteric approach can be fulfilled in the more creative way in a field process. The walking/peripatetic process (which is the main venue in my work) allows the artist to contemplate with his own entity and, at the same time, place his activity in a context of the reality (field) around him. For Erika Osborne, the value of field programming stems directly from a community making practice and the way that opportunity shapes the lives of her students whether they continue on as art practitioners or not. She sees an inherent value in the realm of shaping citizens who are confident participating in conversations and taking actions in their world: There are many levels and aspects to the value question. One is in the experience itself. It’s not just an intellectual pursuit. So, when you are taking students out, they are not just learning indirectly about these places. It’s impacting them. They’re in it. They’re feeling it physically. They are dealing with it on multiple levels. As artists, if you are going to make good work about issues of place, you can’t do that unless you engage place on multiple levels. And so one of the values is that the work that comes out of the program is multilayered and much more complicated in its ways of addressing places and environments. Intrinsically, issues of place and

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environment – we live in a time in which these themes are imperative and art can be a powerful tool to address them. And again, to truly address these things you can’t merely engage them intellectually from a textbook, in a classroom because it won’t go deep enough. Additionally, the 24/7 nature of the program allows students to really invest in their practice in a different way. Field programs don’t exist in three- or four-hour blocks. Time is on a continuum out there, and that translates to how students think and process their practice and that really enriches that work they make. Another layer is the community formed in these programs. Students get to go through a shared growth process not only as artists but as human beings as well. That experience is hard to get in a regular studio environment. And that community continues beyond the program. In PA, after spending three weeks together, they form a tight community, and that continues well into the future. I find that to be so important – them caring about the place where they are and them knowing how they can do what they love to do and use it to the benefit of the place they love. John Reid speaks to the power of place-based education and the effect it has on students’ artistic production: The value of it is multifold, I think. Firstly, what the program does, mainly by virtue of choosing its field locations very carefully, is provide a really high-quality sensory experience for artists. So, the ground you walk on is rich in visual detail. You look around, there’s things happening, often of real aesthetic quality in terms of the forms of the landscape – breathtaking views, beautiful details in the vegetation. In urban environments, there is formally fantastic industry and pace of life and so on. So, the field program provides a very rich stimulus, a sensory stimulus for creative production. That serves artists and their creative objectives. And certainly, within an educational context, it complements the curriculum really well . . . So, if you look at the course of the FS program, participating students were very well informed about a particular location during a formative stage of their creative work. And a lot of them have continued. The field experience has become a part of their practice over a long period of time . . . The magic is that it enables artists to produce artwork that is authentic. Its value is that people are making art in response to how the world is today. It provides that opportunity for people to make art from the here and now and from a place. Amanda Stuart articulates the range of demands that field programming makes on participants and the rewards accrued from rising to meet those challenges: Field programming is the wellspring of authentic first-hand enquiry and provides a powerful opportunity for human growth rings. It has the potential

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to create new ways of approaching studio practice beyond art school. By physically displacing its participants, field programming creates the ultimate social leveler that activates the creative process. All participants are equally displaced persons – the challenge is to become more than an observant passenger. Field programming makes strong demands on a range of levels that are at once personal, communal, and universal. It is frequently challenging and requires amongst many other things, deep listening and observational skills, a willingness to trust and be resourceful, an ability to reflect upon a spectrum of issues and perspectives that may be unfamiliar and at times difficult, permission to fail, and a hunger to discuss and test ideas generated in the creation and refinement of visual languages. Field programming requires honesty, generosity, teamwork, flexibility, and sensitivity and, at times, carries the potential to physically, mentally, and emotionally stretch the participant. In return for all this, at its best, it can unite the group (whilst celebrating their individual diversities) and infuse them with a desire to live and create thoughtfully, compassionately, and with meaning. Field programming is an activator that dilates individual and collective humanity. Bottom line. Bill Gilbert attempts to put the education field programming provides in the larger context of social and environmental change: There’s a story about the New Yorker who drives to Maine on vacation and gets lost. He stops at a small mom-and-pop grocery store and asks the oldtimer sitting on the porch directions to his destination. The old time Maineiac replies, “You can’t get there from here”. I think many of us feel that way about the political and environmental situation we’re in right now. The problems are so large and entrenched our individual, or even communal, powers seem unequal to the task ahead. We can’t see a way to “get there from here”. There is certainly no roadmap laying out how, as a species, we are going to establish an entirely new relationship with the planet and our co-inhabitants. I see field programming as providing an opportunity for students to build real, first-hand knowledge about the world they inhabit and at the same time develop the skills – technical, conceptual, and social – to bring that knowledge to bear. Realistically, it’s going to take a long time to turn this ship around. We can’t lose hope. In field programing, the students can work towards building a new relationship with the planet and be joyous and creative while getting it done. In her comments, Jeanette Hart-Mann explores the value for the various stakeholders in the field program experience: When I talk about field programming, I inadvertently assume that people know why it is so valuable. But why is it? And what exactly do I mean

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by value? To begin, the question of “to whom?” should be asked. As we know from environmental justice work, value should first and foremost consider the impact on who it effects, in the broadest sense. For students, it is experiential and hands-on, generative and transformative. As professional practice for emerging artists in the field of Art and Ecology, it provides opportunities for embodied research, intensive experimentation, and public output. It engenders agency because the receiver and activator of this process is the student, who is working, learning, and connecting to the world. Even though it is educational, it is not a simulation. It is dialogic, relational, and real. It changes lives forever. . . . There are probably many other “whos” in this equation, including faculty and guests. But the last “who” I would like to consider, is, I believe, as important as the student. It has many names, all of which don’t quite sum it up: nature, earth, the environment, land, the more than human, and all our relations. LAAW reconnects people to this in the most profound and yet simple way, by putting them in it. This is obviously powerful and valuable for students, but what does it do for the earth? Like all relationships, it is no one-way street. Experiencing an intimate and caring relationship with others leads to an exchange of compassion, empathy, and commitment. In order to care for and protect the environment, we must have compassion. I believe that LAAW creates the opportunity for students to cultivate a meaningful relationship with nature and inevitably care more for it. And finally, though clearly challenging to implement, each of the program participants expressed a commitment to the work, to the dynamic nature of cocreating with others in both wild and inhabited spaces. Individually and as a group, they elevate student agency to the top of the list of goals by supporting artistic freedom balanced by personal responsibility and commitment to community. They continue to provide life-changing experiences for their students while waiting for the cultural tide to shift once again. The question remains, how effective are these efforts? To what degree do these field programs actually open up new avenues of discovery and thereby change the course of students’ lives? Not surprisingly, the students themselves have plenty to say about the value of their field experiences. LMoA 2012 student Eden Evans describes the effect her experience in LMoA had on her practice after leaving MCC. Landmarks of Art showed me that art can be made anywhere. This program was an invite into the mindset that you often have everything you need to create as long as you know how to look for the materials – no white walls necessary . . . This understanding later led me to build out strange studio spaces in the Bay Area when I could not afford studio space elsewhere.

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Julie Anand makes a similar case for the long-term effects of her field experience: I made more work and more important work in relation to processing the program experience than perhaps I ever have since. And that’s a hard thing to admit. I remember a peer in photo, Alison Carey, saying, “You are making so much work for this course.” I answered, “I’m not making work for the course.” It is as if Land Arts opened up a vein in me. I am still holding on to some of the unfinished work generated from this experience, and I have not given up hope of returning to at least one of these ideas even fifteen years later. Cedra Ardec speaks in terms of a shift in her artistic identity: I learned that land-based creative research and peripatetic experiences are what I like best in the world. This love directs my professional and mortal careers now, gives shape to my life. Before my semester in the field, I had thought of myself as an outdoor person, but I’d never lived outdoors. Walking back to my tent one night near Otero Mesa, my headlamp reflected back to me dozens of tiny lights too solid to be dewdrops. I approached one, saw small movement, then the return of my gaze: spiders’ eyes. A curtain drew back: so many beings were around me in the dark, a vastness not even remotely empty. I learned to watch for those populations, as well as larger animals. I became aware of plant species too, as interactions with them seeped into my life one day at a time. It wasn’t my goal on land arts to delve deeply into ecology and geology, but the fascinations grew, and so did my eagerness to engage with them creatively. Wilderness-focused artist’s residencies have allowed me, month by month, to mold my love for solitary places into richer work than I could have imagined before that first field studio experience. Ben Gazi frames the value of PA in terms of preparation for life beyond academia. I have stated many benefits to participating in a course like Place Appalachia, but if I had to narrow it down to one essential value, I’d say it comes down to working outside the traditional institutional confines. I went straight into my MFA from undergrad, and I just finished my first year outside the sheltered walls of art school. No matter how many professors try to warn you, the “un-tethered” feeling after school can be almost paralyzing to your work. Experiences like Place Appalachia, meeting and speaking with “real” people in the “real” world, are what I’ve turned to when trying to contextualize myself and continue my work going forward.

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Aaron Williams cites the long-term unfolding of the field program experience. It took a long time for me to really process that experience [PA]. Years. The work I made immediately after really didn’t address the emotions and information I was processing from the Place: Appalachia journey. Today, however, the bittersweet fatalism of West Virginia – of moving through fogfilled canyons stippled with ancient black trees or staring at a photograph of a bulldozer scraping Gibson family graves over the edge of a hill – hangs heavy on me. I address this feeling and this subject constantly in my work. It took a long time to recognize it, to tease it out, and to act on it. That’s how heavy it was.

Note 1 According to the AAUP, over 50% of faculty appointments in universities are now made up of part-time, contingent faculty working on semester or yearly contracts, and women still make up the majority of contingent teachers, with estimates as high as 61%.

FIGURE 6.1 Leap,

Sam Macfarlane, Bonneville Salt Flats, UT

6 LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST LAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WESTLAND ARTS OF THE AMERICAN WEST

A case study

We now turn to the history of the LAAW program at UNM for one specific example of how a field program comes into being and evolves. As we have sketched out in the previous chapter, each of the other programs has its own parallel story. As we trace the development of the LAAW program from its inception in 1999 to its form in 2016, many of the issues raised by the program directors in the previous interviews section will reappear. This investigation of LAAW allows the reader to revisit each aspect in greater detail tied to the specifics of a particular program, place, and time.

Institutional context We have seen that for all field programs in this study, the economic, cultural, and institutional context comes to bear on the shape and function of the programs. The University of New Mexico as an institutional site presented a specific set of opportunities and challenges in the attempt to develop a field program. As a public university, UNM like the other institutions in our study, has a core mission to educate the students of its home state. Initiatives that honor New Mexico’s culture and environment, therefore, have a basis on which to build their pedagogical case. At the same time, UNM is an under-funded institution in a very poor state. In this challenging economic environment, initiatives that require financial support typically cannot count on receiving institutional backing. In addition, UNM students, by and large, do not come from economically privileged families. Reliance in any significant way on student fees, therefore, would inevitably limit and bias enrollment. Navigating this territory between institutional focus and financial support has been a factor since day one in developing the LAAW fieldbased curriculum. Further, each of the other programs has experienced its own economic challenges. None have the advantage of the support levels available at

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private universities with large endowments. LAAW’s success in attracting outside funding has, therefore, been essential to fulfilling the goals of the program. The Department of Art and Art History at UNM is situated within the College of Fine Arts along with Theater and Dance, Music, and Cinematic Arts. The Department of Art and Art History is structured, like most art departments nationwide, based on the European canon. It supports the discrete areas of Painting and Drawing, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture, Ceramics, Small Metals, and Electronic Arts. The department is best known for its nationally ranked photography program and its printmaking program in association with the Tamarind Institute. My original appointment, in 1987, was as an assistant professor of Ceramics. At that time, Ceramics was not considered to be of any particular importance in the Department of Art and Art History. This worked to both my benefit and detriment in that resources were in short supply, but free of the burden of supporting an august history, I had great latitude to experiment. The Ceramics curriculum I inherited was based in the stoneware pottery traditions of Asia. In this, UNM mimicked programs around the country that started after World War II, many of which followed a model derived from the teaching and writings of Bernard Leach, the work of Japanese potter Soji Hamada, and the philosophy of So¯etsu Yanagi.1 While this is a very strong tradition with deep aesthetic and philosophical roots, it was not clear to me that it was a particularly appropriate focus for a Ceramics program situated in the American southwest. This assessment was based partially in the recognition that the southwestern United States has its own Indigenous ceramics traditions worthy of our attention and partially in the awareness that students from UNM are at a disadvantage competing with students from the nationally prominent ceramics programs in an established hierarchy of schools steeped in this Asian lineage.

Origins In the previous chapter, we touched briefly on the origins of some of the other programs in our cohort. The full story in each case is a complex weaving together of personal pursuits in pedagogy and research with institutional agendas. The point in exploring LAAW in greater detail is to make evident the winding course that eventually leads to a fully articulated field program. The roots of the LAAW program are located equally in my pedagogic interests as a professor of Ceramics and my personal research into a place-based sculpture practice. From the very beginning, the LAAW program was designed to bring together these dual identities of researcher and educator. Upon moving to New Mexico in 1978, I had made a decade-long commitment in my creative practice to working exclusively with materials available in my environmental backyard in Cerrillos, NM, as a strategy for honing my focus on place. This emphasis led me to spend my days exploring the mountains, mesas, arroyos, and river bottoms in the Cerrillos area in search of materials I could

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glean from the landscape for my sculptures. As this practice evolved, I became interested in finding other artists and art traditions based in a long-term connection to place in the southwest. The focus on place-based art practices led me simultaneously to the Indigenous potters and environmental artists of our region. It also strongly influenced my approach to directing the Ceramics program I inherited at UNM. This intersection of research and teaching has been fundamental to the formation of the LAAW program’s identity. The same can be said for the other programs. John Reid’s practice as a photographer and performance artist has shaped both the context and content of his field program. Yannis Ziogas’s investigations of the social and environmental aspects of his new location at Western Macedonia University formed the core for the VMTP program. PA is based in Erika Osborne’s explorations of the possibilities for transferring her interest in contemporary landscape painting from the western environment to Appalachia. And LMoA has been built around Yoshi Hayashi’s site-responsive installation and performance practice. While there can be little question but that faculty research informs our teaching and is an important factor in our remaining relevant in the classroom, in most cases, a faculty member’s identity as a teacher and an artist is bifurcated with students having little access to the research aspect. Field programming pushes back against this dichotomy. As we have seen in the previous interviews, in these field programs students are both witness to and participants in faculty research on a daily basis. In fact, the field programs in many cases function as the faculty studios and faculty work alongside and in collaboration with their students in producing their creative research.

Lately Come Johnnys by Bill Gilbert

FIGURE 6.2 Mary Lewis Garcia, Acoma,

NM

In the first year of our Pueblo Pottery class, Mary showed us how to find on the land at Acoma everything we needed to make, paint, polish, and fire the pots. In the process, Mary was able to share with us her home place and ground us with important stories. One day late in the semester, we were down at Mary’s “pottery house” (an old adobe belonging to Mary’s

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husband, Marvin Garcia), working on painting our pots, when a delegation of the tribal governors knocked on the door. They came inside briefly to announce that they needed to speak with Mary privately. The five large men dressed in white shirts and jackets with turquoise bolo ties and belt buckles made for quite an imposing presence in Mary’s low-ceilinged house. Mary greeted them, said she was busy, and asked what they wanted. Before any of them could reply, she addressed two of the governors individually, reminding them that she knew them from the time they were little boys running around the school yard. She then launched into a speech to the entire group saying, “I know why you are here. And you are not going to intimidate me. I have the right to support my family, and if I choose to teach classes for UNM students, you are not going to stop me”. The leader of the governor’s group responded that they had deep concerns about what she was doing and this was not the end of this matter. They then filed out, and we went back to painting. None of us said a word for a very long time. It turned out it was indeed not the end of the matter. At the beginning of class the next year, Mary informed me that from now on, we would have to get the materials for our pottery from outside of the reservation bounds. When it came time to find potsherds to grind up and mix with our clay as temper, Mary suggested a site that she and her mother, Lucy Lewis (one of the three most famous Pueblo potters with Nampeyo and Maria Martinez), used when they lived in McCarty’s (a small town just north of the reservation). The following Friday, we piled everyone into the van and drove over to the site. It was a nondescript strip of land sporting tuffs of native grass and saltbush just off of NM 124 north of I-40. Mary turned the students loose, and we found copious amounts of potsherds. It had obviously been an active encampment in the past. There was even an ancient fire pit. Mary explained the importance of this site to her people, and we placed just enough sherds in a bucket for our purpose and headed back to the vans. As I was about to climb in, a pickup truck with a UNM sticker on the side pulled up, and the driver asked what we were doing. I explained that we were here with Mary Lewis Garcia, and she had brought us to gather potsherds for our Pueblo Pottery class. The driver became quite agitated and told me in no uncertain terms that we were on a federally designated site and that removing the sherds was a felony offense. I suggested that she walk across the road and talk to Mary because Mary seemed pretty clear that the sherds belonged to Acoma, not the US government. As the woman approached Mary, her attitude completely changed. She greeted Mary warmly, told her of her respect for Mary’s mother, Lucy Lewis, and expressed her belief that Native Americans were a spiritual people with deep connection to the land; however, she really couldn’t be taking potsherds from the site. Mary responded, “You

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lately come Johnnys think everything belongs to you, but it doesn’t. These are the potsherds of my ancestors, and I have every right to use them”. The UNM employee readily agreed, made a hasty retreat to her truck, and drove off. We went back to Mary’s and made plans for grinding sherds and mixing clay the following week. That night (Friday) about 10:30, I received a call from our College of Fine Arts dean, Tom Dotson. Tom had been involved with the initial plans to form the Pueblo Pottery class and was paying Mary’s salary out of a FIPSE grant. He jumped right into it saying, “Bill, I received a call from the president of the university just now, and he is very upset about what has happened today”. Apparently the president received a call from the owner of the property who was “mad as hell”. Dean Dotson instructed me to sort this out and get back to him by Monday. I called Mary the next day to explain what was going on. She asked if I had any broken bisque ware at school. When I said, “Yes, plenty”, she suggested I grind some up and bring it to her in a plastic bag at our next class. In the meantime, she agreed to contact the landowner who also happened to own the Stuckey’s (convenience store, tchotchke shop, and gas station) at the nearby I-40 exit. That Friday, I brought the bag of ground bisque ware with us to Mary’s. The next day, she took the bag over to meet with the owner at Stuckey’s and explained that we had already ground up the sherds from his site and here they were. They got along famously and had a great conversation. He invited her to come back anytime and get anything she needed. And that was the end of that.

Curricular model In discussing the curricular model for LAAW, it is important to begin by acknowledging that it did not spring forth as a fully fledged field program. In fact, there was an extended incubation period with various experiments conducted in field courses under the Ceramics curriculum listings before the launching of the full Land Arts of the American West program at UNM. The interweaving of the two threads of pedagogy and creative research led to an investigation of the possibility for adding a course in Pueblo Pottery to our curriculum in Ceramics at UNM. Native American potters are place-based artists who derive all the materials needed for their process from their local environment. The formal qualities of each Pueblo’s pottery tradition are then a direct expression of the unique characteristics of their home place. For instance, variations in style and aesthetics between the pottery of the northern Pueblo of Santa Clara and Acoma Pueblo can be traced to the type of available clays and paint materials. Acoma has a source of very pure white clay and iron deposits that allow

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potters to make thin-walled white pots and beautiful paints. Santa Clara potters use river bottom clay that is heavily mixed with sand and silt, creating thickwalled pots with deep carvings that then have to be covered with slips of refined clay before polishing.2 My efforts at UNM to develop a place-based pedagogy in Ceramics began with field programs at Acoma Pueblo, NM, and Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX. Through Jerry Brody, UNM professor of Art History, I contacted Mary Lewis Garcia. Mary invited me to her home at Acoma to discuss the idea. She then made a visit to UNM to see our Ceramics studio. She was aghast at the waste in our lab and the disrespect it showed for Mother Earth. She said she could never teach in our studio and proposed we team-teach a course at her house at Acoma Pueblo. With that, our first field course was poised to launch. Fortunately, the costs associated with that class were manageable. Course fees covered the cost of the university van to transport us each Friday from Albuquerque to Acoma and back. We were able to access the necessary materials entirely from the Acoma environment at no cost and College of Fine Arts Dean Thomas Dotson covered Mary’s salary out of an Arts of the Americas grant from the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). Under the leadership of Mary Lewis Garcia, we spent the first half of the semester at Acoma wandering the local environs in search of viable clay sources, potsherds to grind for temper, mineral sources for paint, and cow manure for firing. At each site, Mary would share a story from Acoma’s history. By the time we began to make pots, the interweaving of practice and place had been thoroughly established. Whether or not students decided to go forward specifically with pottery making (not in the culturally specific style of Acoma), this introduction to an art practice sourced entirely in the local environment proved invaluable in their development of a practice based in a sense of place. At least as important as the training in pottery making was the exposure students received to the Native American cultural worldview as presented by Mary in our wanderings through the landscape and our weekly communal lunch. I am deeply indebted to Mary, her husband, Marvin, and her entire family for being willing to open their home to us and share their traditions. This commitment to intercultural collaboration took real courage. Native peoples throughout the Americas have consistently suffered great harm from their interactions with the dominant culture and have benefited far too little from their generosity in sharing their cultural knowledge. Mary’s decision to work with UNM was an act of generosity and trust. The fact that the Pueblo Pottery course convened at Acoma meant physically removing the students from campus, but more important, it involved transporting them to a distinct cultural zone. The Native American Pueblos of New Mexico are sovereign nations. In entering a “reservation”, the perceptual shift is both subtle and profound. In one sense, Acoma Pueblo is merely another exit off

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I-40. In another, it is a different world with a different sense of time and place and a different set of cultural values. Going to Acoma rather than having Mary Garcia come to UNM reinforced Mary as the primary authority – we were literally in her house. The rules and values of her culture were paramount. At Acoma, degrees and institutional appointments didn’t matter. Mary’s stature as an elder in one of the most revered families in all of Pueblo Pottery did. It took a while for our students to absorb this. It took UNM administration longer. Over time, a mutual respect developed.3 Our experience in the Pueblo Pottery class helped clarify my thinking about the difference between field courses and a field program. Students in Pueblo Pottery dedicated their entire Friday to the course. They were transported off campus to a new cultural and environmental situation to learn from an authority sanctioned by a different set of cultural values. And yet, they spent the rest of the week in traditional three-hour-long studio or one-hour seminar classes. They left from Albuquerque and returned home every Friday to a familiar social and environmental context. Their investment in the group identity was largely limited to conversations to and from Acoma and the weekly communal meal. I learned that a single course like Pueblo Pottery was not capable of providing the fundamental dislocation from daily life I was seeking for our students. Moving forward, my definition of a field program included the stipulation that the students did not return home at night. From those first classes with Mary, I began to develop connections with other practitioners with whom we ended up working. Mary introduced me to the work of Juan Quezada and the pottery of Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico. In 1991, I began making journeys to Mata Ortíz to meet Juan and become familiar with the art movement and artists from the village. In my conversations with Juan, he told me about several classes he had run for students from the United States at an archeological site in the Sierra Madre Mountains to the west of Mata Ortíz called La Cueva de la Olla,4 and we began discussing a collaborative summer course. This seemed a perfect opportunity to push forward from a field course to a field program. Before committing to a field program in Mexico, I spent the fall of 1994 in Ecuador working with the Quichua people on a Lila Wallace International grant. My interest was in following the threads of Indigenous pottery / place-based art making further south in the Americas to work with artists far removed from the influence of US culture. Even reaching the Quichua people turned out to be a process. They had just been granted limited sovereignty of their territory, and I was required to work through the Organization of People Indigenous to Pastaza (OPIP) to gain access. Permission secured, I walked across the bridge from Puyo to the village of Canelos and Quichua territory accompanied by a guide from OPIP. After a lengthy search and negotiation, we secured a dugout log to float down the Bobanaza River to the village of Sarayacu. The full story is a tale for another day; however, upon

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returning to the United States, I was faced with a decision about whether to proceed with establishing a field program in Mexico and/or Ecuador. I believe this is a common theme amongst all the authors discussed in this book and why I include it here: once the concept of a field-based program starts moving forward, you are faced with very difficult decisions about what can and should be included and what, no matter how interesting, has to be set aside given the limits of resources and time. At this early stage in the development of my program, it seemed to be an either/or question regarding Mata Ortíz and Quichua pottery, at least in the short term. There were many arguments in favor of the Quichua connection. • The goals set out for our program included increasing the Native American/ Indigenous component of our arts curriculum. • Working with the Quichua artists would provide students with access to a culture largely uninfluenced by American dominant culture aesthetics or commerce. • The physical and cultural distance we would travel to engage with the Quichau artists would provide a significant creative disruption to their lives and education. • The absolute reliance on the local environment for any and all materials associated with the pottery process would provide students with an entirely place-based approach to an art practice. In the end, I chose Mexico. Part of the reason was logistical. At that point, I had no funding beyond the possibility of a small additional allocation from the College of Fine Arts FIPSE grant. The costs associated with transporting students to Ecuador and establishing a base of operations would have been significant. The sustainability of the program was a question. My experience working with Mary Lewis Garcia at Acoma had taught me that in cross-cultural collaborations, a commitment of significant time is at least as important as money. With good reason, it takes years to build mutual trust and respect between representatives of the institutions of dominant culture and members of minority cultures. Without an initial guarantee of five years of funding for the program, it seemed to be a mistake to begin. The second factor in my decision was the issue of reciprocity. Even with a substantial time commitment, there is a tendency for cross-cultural programming to have an anthropological or touristic aspect. This sets up relationships that reinforce rather than deconstruct colonialist histories. To combat that tendency, it is essential that the artists from other cultures be authorized by the university system as experts in their fields and be invited to join the dialogue on campus. (Amanda Stuart speaks eloquently to exactly this point in her interview with Anicca Cox regarding her work with Aboriginal communities in her BE program.)5 This fundamental principle of reciprocity acknowledges that

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both sides have something to offer and something to gain. This was problematic in the case of starting a field program with the Quichua in Ecuador. The costs and logistics associated with bringing artists and their artwork from the jungle in Ecuador to UNM were prohibitive for a program at its inception with no secure funding. So, ultimately, I decided to focus on the place-based traditions of the southwestern United States and north central Mexico through my Pueblo Pottery course with Mary Lewis Garcia and a field program with Juan Quezada in the mountains of Mexico. In my thinking, the cultural and geographical proximity to Albuquerque increased the possibility of a long-term relationship revolving around classes, workshops, and exhibitions in both countries. The fact that the work from Mata Ortíz and Acoma share the Mimbres cultural root and that both communities are located in the Chihuahua Desert eco-zone made for real continuity between the Acoma and Mata Ortíz classes. It also presented the possibility for UNM to develop a unique expertise in the Indigenous pottery traditions of our home region. That said, there were losses for the students in this choice. A field program in the jungle of Ecuador would have provided a profound cultural and geographical dislocation. Our students would have been transposed from the high desert environment and contemporary American urban culture to the jungle of central America and an agrarian Indigenous community. As a creative disruption in their lives and education, a field program in Ecuador would have offered a profoundly life-changing experience. Having made the decision to move forward with the Mata Ortíz project, I began to build the program on two legs. Working with Juan Quezada, I developed a two-week long summer course in Mexico. We traveled into the Sierra Madre above Mata Ortíz to camp at the Cueva de La Olla archeological site and make pots with Juan for a week. We then returned to Mata Ortíz to visit with the other potters in the village and fire our pots in Juan’s backyard. It was in this program that I worked out the initial logistical system for transporting and sustaining students in the field. At the same time, I was working with John Davis, who first introduced me to Mata Ortíz, on developing reciprocity between UNM and Mata Ortíz through an exhibition at the UNM Art Museum. Bringing the artists and their pottery to UNM provided authorization for Mata Ortíz in US academia and the US art market. Outside of the southwest, there had been little attention paid to the ceramics of our region in academic programs. The hegemony of the Asian stoneware/porcelain tradition kept cultures from the southwest firmly out of the mainstream of academic ceramics. However, in the commercial market, Pueblo Pottery has been long valued by the US collectors. The problem for the artists of Mata Ortíz has been that the US art market has not found an appropriate niche for Mata Ortíz as part of Pueblo Pottery. There is no real understanding in the United States of Mestizo pottery from Mexico. As Constance

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Cortez points out in her 2016 essay, the irony is that but for the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, all of what we call Pueblo Pottery would be Mexican.6 As world history has played out, the work by Mestizo artists from a remote region of northern Mexico is not included in the market definition of Pueblo Pottery. By providing the first fine arts museum exhibition for this work, UNM created an alternate possibility of a market niche for Mata Ortíz as contemporary ceramics from Mexico. Presenting the exhibition in the UNM Art Museum rather than the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology contextualized the work from Mata Ortíz as contemporary art, not anthropology. Holding workshops by Mata Ortíz artists at UNM concurrent with the exhibition authorized the Mata Ortíz potters as experts in the field and further tied the field program to the curriculum in Ceramics, the Department of Art and Art History, the College of Fine Arts, and UNM. The net result of these initial efforts was that relationships between UNM and Mata Ortíz were established on the basis of reciprocal respect and generosity. And those relationships have continued and evolved over the ensuing twenty-five years. We offered the Mata Ortíz course as a two-week studio program in the summer. Typically, field programs are seen by their home departments as interesting but nonessential add-ons to the core departmental curriculum. From the very beginning, my intention was to make our field programs an integral part of the education we provided in the Department of Art and Art History at UNM. As long as the field program courses were offered in the summer rather than in spring or fall semesters, they were inevitably marginalized. Partially, this is driven by budgetary realities. Summer courses at UNM are funded year to year on an ad hoc basis. Funding for faculty is not guaranteed, as it is for fall and spring classes. The classes are not part of the core curriculum in each discipline, and students do not count on these courses in constructing their path to graduation. Up to this point, I had been operating on a combination of students’ fees and the allocation from the College of Fine Arts FIPSE grant. Having completed a series of courses with the artists of Mata Ortíz both in Mexico and at UNM and having presented a highly successful exhibition of their work, I was now ready to move to a conception of a semester-long field program. There were both curricular and logistical factors to be addressed in order to make this switch from a summer field program in Mexico to a semester-long program based in New Mexico. To fit in the fall semester, the new program would have to provide a full academic load of four courses (twelve credits). We would need to reconfigure the logistics to maintain the program in the field for extended periods in which we moved from site to site rather than from UNM to one site and back. With these challenges came vital opportunities. I was able to think about a curriculum in the arts free of the constraints of Ceramics per se and work from a bioregional definition of place.

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Our Patron by Bill Gilbert Support from Lannan Foundation was absolutely essential to our being able to implement and sustain the Land Arts of the American West program at UNM. The initial check from Patrick Lannan was as important for the authorization it provided as for the funding it contributed. I was extremely lucky to have the opportunity to even talk with Patrick about my concept for the program. I owe my good fortune to my friends Douglas Humble and Kristin Bonkemeyer. Back in the early 1970s, I was in Paul Soldner’s ceramics studio in Claremont, California, with Kristin and Douglas. We’ve stayed friends over the years, and one night at dinner, I was ranting about the inability of the modernist crowd in the Art Department at UNM to understand Pueblo Pottery as contemporary art of another culture. I suggested the best way to break through this cultural bias would be to run a program that covered Pueblo Pottery and the major earthworks under the unified title of place-based art. We would investigate the Roden Crater Project alongside Mimbres pottery as two forms of bowls, one sculpted out of a volcano and the other out of a lump of clay, both designed to capture the cosmos. Doug mentioned that Patrick Lannan had been talking about a similar idea and maybe he could set up a meeting. Doug contacted Patrick, and we were invited to his house for a cup of tea. I didn’t really know what to expect. Given Lannan Foundation’s history of working with much higher profile artists (and writers), I wasn’t sure that Patrick would be at all interested in my project. I was happy to be invited to his house and for the opportunity to meet Patrick, but I didn’t figure that much would come from one conversation. Anyway, in we go, and with very little preliminary pleasantries, Patrick asks to hear what I have in mind. In about fifteen minutes, I explained my idea for a semester-long field program focused on a cross-cultural view of land-based art practices in our region. I finish up and BOOM, Patrick asks me how much I would need to get a program like that started at UNM. I wasn’t ready for that. Having spent years working in a bureaucracy, I was used to endless committee meetings before a decision was ever made. So, I gave it a moment’s thought and said $10,000 would probably be enough. He pulled out his checkbook, wrote me a check for $15,000, and said, “Here you go. Don’t get attached”. We shook hands, and off I went. With his check in hand, I went to see the dean of the College of Fine Arts, Christopher Mead, and he agreed to help support our new Land Arts of the American

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West program. I’m still amazed that after all the years of dreaming and planning, it came together so quickly. And we did get attached. Over the ensuing seventeen years, Lannan Foundation provided both annual operating funds and an endowed chair in Land Arts of the American West. In that entire time, they never told me what to do. They stuck with us through the inevitable attacks and smear campaigns that are all too prevalent in academic departments. Quite simply, without Patrick and the support of Lannan Foundation LAAW would not have survived.

Funding Identifying a funding stream was the necessary next step in planning for LAAW. Field programs are expensive to run when compared with traditional lecture classes, in particular. They typically require additional funding to operate. As we have seen in the case of the other programs in our cohort, that support can come from within the institution or from outside sources. If from within the home institution, the question of whether it comes through existing funding channels or a new source outside of the existing structure has implications for the program’s sustainability. The question of whether the program attracts new institutional support or represents a reallocation of existing budgets can greatly affect your relationship with departmental colleagues. Attracting outside funding provides greater autonomy, though it comes with its own set of responsibilities. Each of the programs has responded to its particular fiscal situation. The funding graph from our survey makes evident the costs and sources of support for the various programs. LMoA and VMTP operate on small budgets with little support from their home institutions beyond faculty salaries. Erika Osborne has augmented her budget with grants from university-sponsored programs, while John Reid has secured funds for his program from national grants. In LAAW’s case, by aligning with the Arts of the Americas initiative, the opportunity to conduct the initial experiments with the Pueblo Pottery and Mata Ortíz Pottery courses became tied to larger initiatives in the College of Fine Arts aimed at strengthening the diversity of its offerings with an increased focus on the artistic traditions of the Americas. This was an important factor in getting started. My interests being in synch with larger institutional agendas made resources available in an otherwise resource-deprived situation. PA’s alignment with the Adventure West Virginia program has yielded a similar result. The fact that support came directly from the dean of the College of Fine Arts rather than through my home department established a pattern that was reinforced and strengthened over the course of my career of working largely outside of the funding stream in the Department of Art and Art History. This has proven to be both a benefit and detriment to the LAAW program. My record of securing outside funding has given the program a great deal of autonomy in decision making.

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Having independent funding meant that I was not siphoning off precious departmental funds from the other areas. At the same time, the autonomy achieved has been a source of alienation from the traditionally dominant disciplines in the department. The funding the FIPSE grant provided was short term. It was the support of Lannan Foundation that provided LAAW both with credibility and a funding stream that has sustained the program over the past seventeen years.7 Thanks to Patrick Lannan, I had the seed money required to get started. I was very fortunate to have a dean of the College of Fine Arts in Christopher Mead who was willing to support an unproven program at its inception. Without that combination of outside financial support from Lannan Foundation and the internal commitment from the dean of the College of Fine Arts, LAAW would not have gotten started. The primary costs in operating the program have been food and other supplies to maintain the group in the field for roughly seven weeks, transportation, teaching assistantships, and our guest artist, scholar, activist program. Student fees cover the cost of food and cooking supplies. We have received intermittent support for our TAs’ positions from the College of Fine Arts and the Department of Art and Art History. Our annual operating grant from Lannan Foundation has covered transportation, equipment, and the program logistics coordinator position and made possible our visiting artist/scholar/activist series. The flexibility Lannan Foundation has allowed us in applying funds to different aspects of the budget has been instrumental in our ability to patch together a functional budget each year.

This Land Is Your Land by Bill Gilbert For many years, Chaco Canyon has been a staple in our list of sites. As arguably the most extensive (and impressive) example of precontact Indigenous architecture in FIGURE 6.3 Do Not Enter, Chaco Canthe southwestern United States, it yon National Park, NM adds a very important element to our conversation about land art practices in our region. Chaco occupies a curved valley with an intermittent stream. Situated in the high barren desert of the northwestern corner of New Mexico, it is freezing cold in the winter and blazing hot come summer, which makes it all the more interesting as the choice for the center of Native culture. In 2004, when we arrived at the Chaco Canyon pubic campsite, I asked everyone to hang out by the vans while Chris Taylor and I went to the visitor

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center to sign in and pay the camping fees. When we returned to camp, about a half hour later, we saw a ranger talking with one of our students. Our guest scholar, Jerry Brody, had arrived while we were gone, and he informed me that that ranger was citing our student for being “off the trail”. When Chris and I went up to the officer to introduce ourselves and ask what was happening, Ranger Osgood turned to us and said, “Gentlemen, please stand down. I will talk with you when I am finished with the perpetrator”. We were dumbfounded. When I asked what he meant by perpetrator, he repeated that we needed to “stand down” and that “interfering with an officer in the execution of his duties is a violation in and of itself”. At that point, his walkie-talkie started squawking, and he announced that he was needed elsewhere and would return to complete the citation for the “perpetrator”. With Ranger Osgood gone, we were able to find out that our student had been sitting on some rocks about twenty yards from camp, awaiting our return when Osgood spotted him. Osgood arrested him on the spot for being off the trail and was filling out the citation when we arrived. After a while, Ranger Osgood returned, and Chris, Jerry Brody, and I asked to speak with him. We then launched into an interrogation of why he thought it necessary to write a federal citation to a student sitting on a rock. He quoted the law about being “off trail”. We asked if intent didn’t matter. That the law had obviously been written to protect the native architecture and artifacts and our student had merely been sitting on a rock. He said he was not authorized to make those sorts of judgments. Jerry Brody, who had trained rangers at Chaco in the 1950s, then provided a long lecture on the importance of officers of the law in a democracy using discretion. Again, Osgood repeated that we should “stand down”, and he returned to completing the writing of the $100 citation. Once we had returned from our trip, I wrote a letter to the head ranger at Chaco complaining about Ranger Osgood’s handling of the matter and asking for his help in getting the federal citation overturned. Six months later, a new head ranger wrote back saying she had reviewed the matter and would not intervene on our student’s behalf. She also wanted us to know that Ranger Osgood no longer worked at Chaco Canyon. Our student subsequently failed to appear in court and was hauled out of class at UNM by armed federal agents. Since then, we have camped on a private ranch about half an hour south of the park.

Get ’Em Rollin The fundamentals of the teaching philosophy underpinning LAAW are in many ways similar to those expressed by the other program directors. What

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separates LAAW is the fact that it began as a shared program between two full-time faculty members operating as equal partners. In the initial construct of the program, I made the decision that safely maintaining a group of students in the field for an entire semester would require two faculty. I approached John Wenger from the Painting and Drawing faculty at UNM about partnering in the program. John had a highly accomplished personal practice in plein aire painting, a vast knowledge of Native American cultural sites in the southwest, and a long history of directing fall field classes and a summer program. With John on board, the Land Arts of the American West program came into being. For the first run of the program, we chose a set of eco-niches and cultural interventions that would enable students to position their practice in relation to the history of interactions with the land in our region from pre-contact Native American through to contemporary American cultures. The initial concept consisted of a place-based program situated in the Chihuahua Desert, Great Basin, and Colorado Plateau dedicated to providing a multicultural investigation of Land Art practices and extended time in remote locations in which students could work in direct response to site. The goal was to construct an educational experience based in direct personal engagement with the environments and cultures of our region. Our initial list of cultural sites was largely composed of Native American architecture (Chaco Canyon, Moon House, Wupatki, Horseshoe Canyon, and so on) and contemporary Earthworks (Double Negative, Roden Crater, Spiral Jetty, Sun Tunnels, and so on). I saw broadening the definition from Ceramics to Land Arts as a means to incorporating the widest possible set of responses to the land and creating an equivalency between the major cultural groups of our region. We balanced these “investigative sites” with a set of “work sites” providing students with the opportunity to engage in a range of environmental niches including low desert, mesa, alpine, and riparian. Very early on, we learned the sliding scale of constraints placed on our activities in our national commons. We’ve found that it really is not as simple as “This Land Is Your Land”. While National Parks (such as Chaco Canyon and Big Bend) have served as important investigative sites, the severe restrictions on student engagement with the land make them unsuitable as work sites. Over time, LAAW developed a hierarchy of preferred public lands from least to most hospitable with National Parks being the least followed by National Monuments, National Recreation Areas, National Forests, and Bureau of Land Management (BLM). These BLM lands, the remnants of the Homestead Acts,8 the least spectacular and least valuable of our public lands, have become home to LAAW in the field. There, we can roam freely and interact with the land without the looming presence of federal officials. We operate under a self-imposed “no trace” mandate, both in terms of our camp operation and art making out of respect for the land and those who come after.

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Don’t Panic, Jeffrey by Bill Gilbert In 2009, our first stop was a campsite along the San Rafael River in Southeastern Utah. Erika Osborne introduced us to this site in 2005, drawing upon her explorations of Utah while FIGURE 6.4 San Rafael Swell, UT growing up in Salt Lake City. Arriving in the late afternoon from Albuquerque, we leave State Road 10 and head west across the open rolling swell. We’re crossing a barren landscape of raw, exposed earth, the only green being evidence of irrigation. Soon, we begin our descent into canyons running west off the San Rafael Swell edged by walls of sandstone. Along the way, we pass the Buckhorn panel of majestic paintings from the Indigenous Freemont culture ascending the rock face. Eventually, we reach the San Rafael River and set up camp in the shade of several large cottonwoods along its banks. Over dinner that night and breakfast the following morning, the group discusses camp policies and completes a brief walkabout to orient students to the site. Land Arts, then, settles into its daily rhythm – 7:00 a.m. breakfast, a full day to explore and work on site, 7:00 p.m. dinner. The weather is excellent – early fall, clear warm days and cool nights. Perfect for working outdoors. The morning of day three, I notice a gray cloud over the mountains to the west. As the day goes on the cloud grows larger and turns darker. Around 5:00, Jeanette Hart-Mann and I get together to talk things over. We agree that it must be a fire but that it is very difficult to determine how far away. Our camp is way down a spur road from the main dirt road running from Highway 10 to I-70. If the fire got close enough to cross the main road, we would be forced to evacuate due east down a road we have not explored with a questionable outlet to pavement. We are in the desert. There is not really enough plant material to sustain a major fire. But still, Jenn and I both feel uncomfortable with that situation with night coming on. We decide to drive back up the spur road to the main road and continue until we can determine the location of the fire. We meet with the teaching assistants to explain our plan, telling them to keep everyone close to camp until we got back in about an hour. Driving the program passenger van, we head west rejoining the main road and continuing upslope climbing out of the canyon toward Highway 10. Eventually, we gain enough altitude to see all the way to the base of the mountains to the west. From that vantage point, it is

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clear that the fire is on the other side of the range and poses no threat to our camp. Relieved, we drive back toward camp only to arrive to a state of chaos. As we pull into camp, panic reigns. Students are rapidly and haphazardly breaking camp, yanking up tents and piling themselves and a loose assortment of gear into the cargo van in preparation to flee. The first order of business is to restore calm, explain the fire situation, and then rebuild camp. It takes hours before order is re-established. The next day, we review the events from the night before. It becomes clear that one of the students had convinced everyone, including the TAs, that Jenn and I had been cut off and/or killed by the fire and that they needed to flee to I-70 immediately or risk being consumed. In a long session, first with the TAs to discuss leadership in a crisis and then the entire group to discuss decision making in the face of panic, we return to a sense of balance. Jenn and I learn a big lesson. This event is the source of our policy to always keep one faculty member in camp.

Program leadership For a semester-long field program to be viable, it requires a consistent leadership structure. In part, the decisions about leadership have been driven by the need to have more than one responsible party in the field. The issues around leadership and liability have ramped up over the ensuing seventeen years, but even by the standards of 1999, it seemed unreasonable to take ten to fifteen students into the field for weeks at a time with only one faculty member. There are obvious risks involved in maintaining students in the field for extended periods. The LAAW program takes our students to camp in remote locations, which complicates the issue of accessing help in case of emergency. For instance, the first year of the program, we were without cell phone coverage at 90% of our campsites. This meant that to access help in case of injury or other medical emergency, faculty would be solely responsible for physically transporting the student(s) to the nearest medical facility. Having two faculty members provides the flexibility in a crisis for one member to take the student(s) to the nearest clinic/hospital while the other remains in charge of camp. This is even more of an issue for PA given that it includes a backpacking component. They also have two faculty members in the field. The second consideration was the fact that dividing a semester’s worth of courses between two faculty members diffused, at least somewhat, the authority structure. As evidenced in our director interviews, a common motivation in our cohort for creating a field program has been the desire to explore an alternative mode of arts education that replaced the hierarchy of faculty and students with an egalitarian community of artists. This highly idealistic approach faced

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inherent constraints. Faculty fill a leadership role in which they structure the program, determine the itinerary, establish the procedures for camp life, and (in most cases) assess student work. In our cohort, Yannis Ziogas’s model perhaps does the most to deconstruct this faculty leadership role. Students and community members participate as equals. There are no course credits offered and as a result no built-in assessment. Any critique is the product of group discussion amongst participants. John Reid has similarly structured FS to remove the assessment role from his responsibilities in the effort to create a more egalitarian community. LMoA, PA, and LAAW operate in a more traditional academic model. Our intent in LAAW has been to balance the hierarchy in the realm of logistics and academics with the greatest possible equality in the realm of art. Students and faculty work side-by-side on their artwork, day-by-day, under the same conditions. Collaborations are possible amongst faculty and students. Criticism becomes a shared enterprise, and over the course of a semester in the field, a community of artists is formed. For many of our students, this is the single strongest element of the program – the sense of belonging to a community. The ability of faculty to juggle their leadership role with their membership in this community is an important factor in the overall program experience. In many ways, these field programs are experiments in an art-based utopian community.9

Gone Fishing by Bill Gilbert After our first year camping at Horse Tanks, one of John Wenger’s sites east of Lake Powell, I decided to scout for a remote location alongside the lake to better focus on water FIGURE 6.5  Gone Fishing, Blue Notch, issues in the west. This search Lake Powell, UT resulted in our adding Blue Notch to the site rotation in 2002. To reach our campsite, we travel through White Canyon toward Hite before leaving pavement and heading due west toward a red rock headwall. The road up winds back and forth across a steep arroyo hugging the face of the slope and then crests the ridge through a small, blue sandstone notch. We immediately drop off the other side again clinging to the rock face before entering an arroyo that we follow for miles downhill. We are literally driving in the arroyo at times, which makes it quite interesting during a rainstorm. As we bottom out, there is one tight, ninetydegree bend followed by a steep ascent through very loose red dirt. I try to

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maintain momentum through the turn and gun it heading into the slope. The van fishtails, bucks, looses traction, and grabs and clears the ridge. From there, it is relatively open and flat all the way to the lake. By 2004, the lake has shrunk considerably from its high water mark, and we have to drive much further in search of a campsite along the shore. We end up in a narrow depression behind a small knob just east of the lake. The knob provides a slight bit of protection from the gale force winds that scream across Lake Powell from the southwest. Our camp is about 100 yards below the high-water mark in barren territory populated only by the hardiest of invasive species. Gloria Haag was an undergraduate on the program that year. The portfolio she submitted with her application consisted of a single video in which she walks into a room in which there is a single table and chair carrying a Bible and a glass of water. She sits at the table and proceeds to eat the Bible, page by page. At Lake Powell, Gloria comes up to me to discuss her plan to catch a fish for Jesus. She proposes to tie fishing hooks to her bathing suit and swim around until she catches a fish. I check in with her occasionally from the shore throughout the day as she swims around hanging onto a raft she’d made from driftwood. At the end of the day, I greet her as she climbs out of the water with “How’re the fish biting?” She replies, “Nothing so far”. I ask, “What bait are you using?” She replies, “Bait?” We discuss the concept, and I recommend she put some chicken skin from dinner on her hooks tomorrow. The next day, she is back in the water, swimming with her raft, hour after hour. In the late afternoon, I stop by the shore just as she is climbing out of the water. As she emerges, I see her bathing suit pulled way down on one side (just like the old Coppertone ad), and hanging from one of her hooks is a Lake Powell catfish. I ask what she wants to do now, and she says, “Clean it, and eat it”. I ask if she’d ever cleaned a fish, and she says, “No, but my grampy gave me this” and holds up a shiv made out of a sharpened screwdriver duct taped between two small blocks of wood that looks like it would be at home hidden under a mattress in a maximum security facility. I get out my knife and show her how to clean her fish. She does a thorough job and then heads for camp to cook it. First, she tries cooking it over the fire, hanging on a five-foot-long stick, kind of like a giant marshmallow. That doesn’t do much, so she wraps it in aluminum foil and puts it in the coals. It’s getting dark, and the fish is still rubbery as hell, so she blackens it and puts it in a cast-iron fry pan. Just as she is putting the pan on the fire, Gabe Romero comes up with two flat stones in his hands and proceeds to make a hot coal

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sandwich. He heads off toward the lake with sparks trailing off behind him. Chris Taylor and I decide we might want to keep an eye on this and follow the trail of sparks. Gabe takes the hot coals up to an elegant stone fire pit he had built on the top of the knob above camp. It looks like something built by a stone mason that you’d see on an expensive Santa Fe patio. He puts the coals in and starts up a new fire. After it burns down, he has a new set of coals ready. He loads them in between his flat stones and heads for the water. At the edge of the lake, he has stashed a small raft supporting a large washtub. Gabe loads the coals into the washtub and shoves off into the lake. A few minutes later, he reaches the shore of an island out in the bay. He dumps the hot coals from the tub onto a previously stacked pile of wood and soon has a blaze going. He then proceeds to do a shadow dance, his movements projected by the firelight twenty feet high onto the bluffs of the island. The dance complete, the fire slowly dies, and it is now pitch-black. We hear the sound of Gabe diving into the water and then silence. A few minutes later, he emerges from the lake. Kate Crowe hands him a shot of bourbon and a towel, and then here comes Gloria with a plate of blackened catfish. I love my job.

In our initial offering, the LAAW program focused on supporting student creativity by providing unmediated contact with the environments of the southwest. Our belief in the power of the southwestern landscape to inspire artists drew on a long tradition dating back to the early 1900s of artists who were inspired by the landscape to move to northern New Mexico.10 John Wenger shared my doubts about the effectiveness of an academic approach to training young artists. He had spent years developing a field-based pedagogy. His teaching style emphasized self-reliance and self-determination. Together, the program we offered stressed the greatest possible creative freedom matched by a commitment to personal responsibility. John Wenger’s system supported individual autonomy with each of the students being responsible for his or her own transportation and food. As such, it more closely approximates FS and VMTP from our program cohort. My approach was more communal with students sharing a van and a centralized food plan. John’s approach absolutely gave students greater agency. Mine created a greater sense of community. The balance between individual agency and sense of community varies from program to program in our group and is perhaps one of the fundamental drivers of the identity of each program. The students’ experience in the first year benefited immensely from the fact that John and I had never worked together and didn’t really have a plan for exactly how it should go. It certainly wouldn’t make administrators comfortable,

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but the fact that we were making it up each day as we went along gave the students a great sense of participation in shaping the program. As Yoshi Hayashi explains in his interview with Anicca Cox,11 this heightened sense of exploration, of anything is possible, has proven hard to maintain over the years. As the program leaders have become more experienced in directing field programs, the balance of control has shifted in our direction. The awareness that this was taking place has led to our commitment to view the LAAW program as an ongoing experiment and make changes each year in the effort to keep it fresh, to provide room for the unexpected. It also was major factor in my decision that it was time for a change in leadership. Our site choices in the first couple of years were based on Native American art and architecture, the major earthworks and the various eco-niches of the southwest. Students were selected to create the greatest possible interdisciplinarity (within the arts). Courses were designed to provide the greatest possible freedom of choice in completing projects. The emphasis was on providing an experience in which students had uninterrupted time and space in which to pursue their ideas in direct, physical response to environmental and social place. From the beginning, we took into consideration the fact that most of our students did not have extensive experience with field programming or knowledge of the history of the southwest. The itinerary was, therefore, designed to deliver exposure to the widest possible range of eco-niches and cultural interventions in the land. Our program reader provided background information that the students could access before, during, and after the field experience. The results in terms of pure creative expression in the field were outstanding. Thanks to John’s daughter, Tiffany Wenger, LAAW had its inaugural exhibition that December at her Helix Gallery in Santa Fe starting a tradition that we have adhered to ever since of always presenting the work from LAAW at the end of fall semester while the field experience is still fresh in everyone’s minds and bodies. The other programs share this focus on a direct translation from field experience to art production, though each employs its own curricular model. In all cases, the emphasis on art production, not merely experiential learning, reinforces the professional practice aspect of the programs. In reviewing the initial run of our experiment, it became apparent that our place-based pedagogy would benefit from transcending the disciplinary boundaries of visual art. To more fully develop an understanding of place, I began to expand the frame. Chris Taylor from the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas replaced John Wenger, adding the perspective of an architect working in the context of a design program. Over the next few years, Chris and I settled on a curriculum built around a set of conceptual lenses the students could use in their investigations supported by an extensive program reader exploring each of the chosen topics from multiple disciplinary perspectives.12 Given the geographic distance between UNM and UT, we decided upon holding shared seminars in the field with students leading discussions based in the assigned readings. Guests joined us to guide the investigation of

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specific sites, and at the close of the field portion of the program students returned to their respective campuses to prepare for our annual exhibitions held at the John Sommers Gallery at UNM and the Creative Arts Lab at UT. LAAW started to look not just at architectural and artistic marks in the land but the full range of human interventions from the large gestures of the US military and federal infrastructure to the subtle traces left in a desert landscape that tends to preserve all marks great and small. Chris established a relationship with the Center for Land Use Interpretation and our thinking in this evolution from “Land Art” to “Land Use” was strongly influenced by Matt Coolidge through our annual workshops at CLUI’s unit in Wendover, UT.13 As our time spent each year at sites such as Wendover Air Force Base, Lake Powell, and Bingham Mine increased and the days logged on our nation’s interstate highway system accumulated, another fundamental issue arose. In our pursuit of an arid-lands pedagogy centered in the investigations of land use in the west, we had created a bifurcated model of “investigative” and “work” sites. Our approach to the investigative sites was essentially touristic, our time at work sites a more actively engaged dialogue.

Change/progression/evolution In 2007, our partnership with the University of Texas ended, and Chris Taylor moved to Texas Tech University. At UNM, we went through a process of redefinition. Over the ensuing years, our approach to place-based curriculum has changed. Working first with Erika Osborne and then Catherine Page Harris, Jeanette Hart-Mann, and Ryan Henel, LAAW has moved from the touristic, grand survey to one of engagement and commitment by building relationships with a limited number of sites and communities. No longer skimming the surface of the west, we have absorbed the implications of the Anthropocene and changed our focus to environmental and social ethics by committing to building sustainable relationships with specific sites and communities. Again, this move resonates with the definition/evolution of the other programs. VMTP has been committed to a particular geographic location and social community from its outset. Under John Reid’s direction, FS added to its original focus on artistic interpretation of the environment of New South Wales with a commitment to ecological projects with communities of South Australia. As the program has transitioned with Reid’s retirement, Amanda Stuart has shifted focus again to build ongoing relationships with Aboriginal communities. And Erika Osborne has developed deep relationships with the activist movement fighting mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. In all cases, engagement with the physical environment of each home region remains a core component. The shift has been to balance that engagement with one focused on the social aspect of place. By limiting the number of locations visited and returning year after year to the same sites, LAAW has been able to build layers of experience that can be shared

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with each new set of students.14 In our new system, LAAW has begun to break down the investigative/worksite dialectic, in part by involving the students in collaborative projects in our chosen sites. Essentially, we have evolved into a program of all work sites, some in remote environmental locations, others in human settlements. We now design our journeys around particular themes that seem pertinent to our students in developing an understanding of their home place (bioregion). Our arid lands pedagogy is structured around a set of conceptual nodes supported by our selection of sites, texts, community partners, and visiting artists, scholars, and activists. In this new project-based methodology, LAAW operates as an arts collective in collaboration with a wide range of community members, artists, and scholars. We complete site and community specific works addressing topics of local, regional, and global concern.

Hole to China CLUI’s Wendover Unit is an example of a site that we have returned to year after year. With Matt Coolidge as our host and guide, we have toured the US Air Force Base, Montego Bay Casino, Intrepid Industries, the Bingham Mine, and Bonneville Salt Flats. Matt refers to this territory as America’s sacrifice zone available for FIGURE 6.6 Hole to China, CLUI, Wenuse and misuse by government and dover, UT industry alike. Launching our new approach, in 2009, we invited Lucy Raven to join us in Wendover and direct a collaborative project on site. Lucy had recently completed a photo animation based on the links in the copper business between the United States and China entitled China Town. With Lucy, we toured the Bingham mine in Utah and Roberston mine in Nevada before undertaking a project articulating the linkage between Ruth, Nevada; Wendover, Utah; and copper smelters in China. Our project with Lucy Raven helped clarify a new position for LAAW on the relationship between artwork, site, and audience and propelled us forward to a new definition of an art practice. Inherent to site-specific or site-responsive work is the idea that the primary presentation of the dialogue between art and land takes place on site. The land is not merely a pedestal for the art. The artwork and the land are two parts of a unified whole. The audience for most of the works generated by LAAW artists has been the site itself, the fellow LAAW participants, and whatever creatures might fly, walk, or crawl by. For presentation to the audience back in the urban center, LAAW works had to be translated through documentation via painting, drawing, video, sound recording, and so on and presented in art galleries much as were the seminal land artworks from the 1970s by Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, etc. The Hole to China project raised the

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possibility of presenting our works on site to a non-art-designated audience. The encounter visitors had at the Robertson Mine overlook outside Ruth, Nevada, and at CLUI Unit #1 in Wendover, Utah, with our Hole to China signage and pamphlets was fun- FIGURE 6.7 Bingham Mine, Salt Lake City, UT damentally different than the one experienced by the audience at our annual exhibition at the John Sommers Gallery on UNM Campus. There was none of the predisposition associated with going to a dedicated art space or event. There was nothing to announce our work as art at all. Instead, people who encountered the work were presented with an alternative set of signage, providing an alternative interpretation of the site to the one provided by the US Forest Service. With the Raven collaboration, LAAW entered a new path towards arts activism and social practice in which artist, artwork, community, and audience all began to comingle. With this fundamental shift in place, LAAW has gone on to complete a series of projects in which community members are co-creators of the artworks and the community is both the venue for presentation and the audience. In trying to flesh out the central drivers of environmental and social issues in our bio-region, we have so far explored the following interrelated themes: Foodshed, Utopian Architecture, United States/Mexico Border, Rio Grande Watershed, and Environmental and Social Justice. The themes are interrelated building blocks that layer together to develop an ever more informed knowledge of place. In each case, LAAW has undertaken collaborative projects with community residents and presented the completed works on site, in designated art spaces (galleries), or both.

Foodshed With Catherine Page Harris and Jeanette Hart-Mann With the advance of climate change has come an increased awareness of the potential impacts on the world’s food sources. In our bioregional focus on the investigations of place, LAAW decided to add an emphasis on the Albuquerque Foodshed. While our specific interests may be on our bio-region, the future of our food supply and the health of rural communities is a global issue. FS has developed a similar emphasis centered on the agricultural communities of South Australia. In 2010, Catherine Harris and Jeanette Hart-Mann organized and facilitated the Foodshed theme. This was the first project in our new methodology in which we organized our entire journey around one conceptual subject. Food and where it comes from seemed an excellent place to start in constructing a sense of place. In exchange for the previous site-specific process, we now combined the investigative, artistic production and presentation aspects in a collaborative public

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project in the field. Exploring the Foodshed in this way, LAAW wove together communities and eco-niches of Northern New Mexico to experience bioregional agricultural production, distribution networks, markets, and the culture of food. LAAW visited farmers markets in big cities and small towns, harvested vegetables, foraged for wild edibles, met with an organic wheat farmer and miller, camped out on a grass-fed beef ranch, and then visited one of the biggest feedlots in the west. Camping in Diné fields near Shiprock, NM, students helped roast corn for chicos. We were welcomed by the family with open arms and a huge meal. In the evening, we helped to load the outdoor oven with green corn by the wheelbarrow load. Water was dumped in on top, and the huge oven sealed with soil and bags. In the morning, we unloaded the steamed and roasted corn and helped shuck and place it on racks to dry. Here, labor and community gave us hope for an integration of tradition FIGURE 6.8 Chicos, Hog Waller Farm, into modernity. Dinétah, NM This experiment with existing solely on the local food was tough on the students. They struggled with having their comfort foods taken away. However, they persevered and through the process established a new relationship with the land that extended into ethics. One of the strongest lessons was the scale of western landscape required to provide just the twelve members of LAAWs with enough food to live on.

Utopian architecture After an extended period in which the concept was dismissed by activists as being escapist, there has been a recent up surge of interest in utopian experiments in both rural and urban contexts. As global politics has polarized to extremes, the value of utopias as “a beautiful edge (by beautiful we mean something that excites all of our senses), an edge between fiction and reality, between the conceptual and the concrete, between an imagined reality and the construction of it”15 has been reaffirmed. In the history of Euro-American culture in this country, the West has served as the wilds, the land of new beginnings, the place for dreamers. It is, therefore, not surprising that contemporary utopian architectural projects from Arcosanti to Roden Crater to A-Z West have found a home in the deserts of the west. Our interest in utopias stems in part from the fact that the LAAW program itself is an experiment in a utopian arts community. Our relationship

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with CLUI has allowed LAAW to investigate this part of our shared cultural history. Over the years, we have come to see Steve Badgett and Matt Lynch’s (Simparch) ongoing experiment with sustainability on FIGURE 6.9  Clean Livin’, Wendover Air the Wendover Air Force Base entiForce Base, UT tled Clean Livin’ as such a project. Designed as a completely off-grid live/work space, Clean Livin’ serves as a laboratory in small-scale sustainability. Our collaboration with Simparch presents LAAW with an opportunity to make a contribution by building water catchment, storage, purification, and delivery systems and installing a new planting bed for the Clean Livin’ project. Each new group of students gains from and adds to the work of previous groups. It is Simparch’s project. They were generous enough to let us participate.

United States–Mexico border As a public university situated in one of the front-line states in the national debate on illegal immigration, UNM has a unique opportunity and an obligation to educate its students about this divisive issue. The dramatic escalations of xenophobic rhetoric and the implementation of increasingly restrictive FIGURE 6.10 US-Mexico Border Monuborder policies under the current presiment, Animas Valley, NM dency has brought this issue to center stage in the cultural dialogue of our home region. LAAW began its exploration of the physical US–Mexico borderline in a partnership with photographer David Taylor and the United States Border Patrol. LAAW established camps along the border near Animas, NM, and Douglas, AZ, to use as our base. The students were able to hike immigrant and drug smuggler trails with US Border Patrol agents, visit a US Border Patrol night operation camp, and observe the US Border Patrol in an immigrant apprehension operation outside of Douglas, AZ. In spending time with the Border Patrol agents, hearing FIGURE 6.11 Walking the Border, Animas Valley, NM

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their experiences in the endless cat-and-mouse game of attempting to police the border, learning their often-complex personal histories, and witnessing the resources being expended to enforce the boundary, our students gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the issues. They bring this understanding to their artworks completed on site and presented in gallery exhibitions.

Buena Vista The border is more than a division between governments. It is a social place with communities on both sides. Starting in 2009, LAAW added another layer to our exploration, moving from a focus on the border as a line in the sand to one of a lived community through a partnership with the Roberto Salas, director of the Centro Artístico Y Cultural, and Armando Carlos, president of the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association in El Paso. Starting in 2009, each year, we worked with Roberto, Armando, and the Buena Vista community members to complete a project of their choosing. Our collaborations include a 200-foot-long mural facing Highway 285, signage resisting TXDOT’s plan to annex part of the village for an Interstate 10 expansion, a bus stop to provide for shelter from the sun for the community’s elderly, and a master plan for the creation of a neighborhood park at Cement Pond. Again, this approach to community projects is not unique to the LAAW program. For example, FS has undertaken a series of projects in collaboration with public agencies, national grant organizations, and community groups. VMTP conducts annual community-based projects from its base in Florina, Greece. These projects provide students with invaluable experience in how to operate as artists in the public sphere. In 2009, LAAW arrived in Buena Vista midday from our campsite at Otero Mesa. Roberto lives part-time in his family house in the northwest corner of Buena Vista, and he owns a lot and building a block south that FIGURE 6.12  Road to Nowhere, Barrio was to serve as our base. The first Buena Vista, El Paso, TX order of business was to fix the hotwater heater, so the students could take showers. This became an annual ritual that served to remind us of our return to the social context. Each year, we would arrive to find the hot water heater broken, and each year, we would fix it to keep the students happy. Day one, we met with Roberto to discuss the plan for our stay. Roberto suggested that we do a large mural on a concrete retaining wall at the west edge of Buena Vista facing the freeway. He felt a highly visible project like this would bring out the community members and lend support to a sense of community pride. Armando Carlos, president of the Buena Vista Neighborhood Association (BVNA), stopped by to contribute his thoughts on the project and discuss the logistics. Roberto then led a design charrette with the students. Drawings were created,

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taped to the wall, drawn over, combined, and replaced with other drawings until a consensus emerged. Community members contributed their thoughts, and Armando came back to review the plan and give his approval. In the end, Cedra Wood’s sketches formed the core of the image, and she took charge of transposing the sketches into a final drawing of the proposed mural. The next day, we got started on the site. Using large pieces of blue chalk, the students transferred the drawing onto the cement retaining wall while Roberto and I went in search of marble. Over the course of the next few days, we visited cabinet shops around El Paso asking for their left-over marble slabs. All of the conversations were conducted in Spanish, and the shop owners were very generous in their support for Buena Vista. We would load up Roberto’s truck, drive back to Buena Vista, and dump the marble in the street. Water came from the home of eighty-year-old Lupe Landin on the hill above our worksite. Some of the students would break the slabs into pieces for our mosaic, some mixed cement mortar, and some stuck the chunks to the wall, and the mural progressed. We were fortunate to have Tomas Watson, a student from a family of tile layers, who demonstrated techniques. The first day, people from the neighborhood drove by to ask what we were doing. The next day, a couple of the local boys joined in. Armando Carlos worked with us all week. People stopped by with bottles of water and fruit. The third day, a city inspector drove by to tell us to get the marble pile out of the middle of the street. Chava’s corner store, the Buena Vista Grocery, became a favorite hangout for the students. We’d all go up there to get out of the heat and have a cold drink and eat lunch. People from the neighborhood and delivery guys passed in and out, exchanging local news. It felt very much like a community hub. In four days, to everyone’s amazement, we had the 200-by-6foot mural stuck to the wall and grouted. This was quite an accomplishment for a group that had never built anything together except for the LAAW base camp. When we returned to disconnect our hose one last time, FIGURE 6.13 Mural, Barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX Senora Landin asked if we could drive her down her driveway to the bottom of the hill so that she could see the mural. Later, as the exhausted students returned to our camp, an elderly gentleman in a maroon Monte Carlo pulled into the driveway and climbed slowly out of his car. He was dressed in a purple shirt, bandana, black pants secured with a silver belt buckle, and black cowboy boots. He walked over and handed us a cake his wife had made in thanks for our efforts and drove off. Later, another neighbor came by with two bottles of tequila. He told us the good one was the one with no label. Carlos and Roberto’s friends came

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with their guitars, neighbors dropped by, and the party rolled on. The next morning, we stopped by Chava’s on our way out of town to say goodbye. He had breakfast burritos ready for everyone as a goodbye present. We returned to Buena Vista every fall. Roberto would begin each visit with a tour of the neighborhood. FIGURE 6.14  Buena Vista Grocery, El One of the stops on the tour would Paso, TX be “Cement Lake”. Built by Portland Cement Company originally as a holding pond for their factory, Cement Lake was a fixture in the life of the Buena Vista Community. Though technically private property, young community members grew up fishing, swimming, and courting along its banks. Word was out that the current owner, Pemex Corporation, was winding down its operations at that site and was open to a sale or transfer of the property to the City of El Paso or state of Texas. LAAW, CAYC, and BVNA decided to work together in the effort to secure Cement Lake for the neighborhood as a public open space. The students prepared a PowerPoint presentation for Roberto to use in public meetings, we scheduled appointments with city officials, and Catherine Harris directed the development of a master plan for the Buena Vista with Cement Lake as an integral component. In 2012, we decided to make Cement Lake the focus of our stay. We asked Santa Fe–based social practice artist Chrissie Orr to join us to help lead the project. We divided the students into groups with one doing an environmental assessment of the wetlands surrounding Cement Lake, another interviewing community members about their experiences at Cement Lake, and a third pursuing the legal and political issues surrounding the FIGURE 6.15 Cement Lake, Barrio Buena potential transfer. This process made Vista, El Paso, TX visible for the students the complex mix of components involved in working in the public sector while allowing them to concentrate on an area of personal interest. Once completed, we submitted the master plan to the City of El Paso and presented the project at the Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe as part of our annual LAAW exhibition. We then arranged to bring the work back to Buena Vista for an opening at the CAYC. When we got there, the Centro was a work in progress. Roberto had a guy working on getting it ready, but he wasn’t finished. The opening was the next day, so Ryan Henel took charge, and we got to work hauling trash out, finishing the new sheetrock, and taping and painting. The next morning, we began installing the show. On the sidewalls, we hung pictures of

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community members next to headphones with recordings of their Cement Lake stories. Across the back wall, we mounted a satellite photo of the area surrounding Cement Lake on which community members could work out their designs for the proposed park. In an interior room, we installed jars with Cement Lake water samples and projected a video documenting the community members and their homes. At the opening, community members signed their photographs mounted on the walls (and later took them home). Others tried out their ideas for designs for the Cement Lake Park. Roberto hired a band and provided food for everyone, and the fiesta ran long into the night.

Juan Mata Ortíz Any investigation of border issues is incomplete if it is conducted entirely on one side of the dividing line. With that in mind, LAAW returned to its early roots adding a journey into Mexico to work with the artists of Juan Mata Ortíz, Mexico. Crossing the border, we experience a fundamental loss of agency, the imposition of government power in the process of gaining a visa and passing through the government and military check points in Mexico. The anxiety and discomfort we experience is in no way equal to what people from FIGURE 6.16  Cuidado el Tren, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX Mexico and Central and South America experience entering our country, but it does change your perspective. Border towns are edgy. The tension is palpable. We normally cross through Palomas, a town devastated by the drug wars. And then, permits secured, in a few brief miles, we are on into the high desert of Chihuahua. Our destination is Juan Mata Ortíz, a small town of 2,000 people in which we are far safer than in our hometown of Albuquerque. Mata Ortíz is a village transformed by art. Pottery making is by far the biggest source of income in the village. Of the 2,000 inhabitants, nearly 500 are involved in the pottery process. Artists are the town’s elite. It makes a very interesting model for the students to compare with their identity as artists in the US. We stay with the Gallegos family, either in their daughter Miriam’s house in town or in the “cabin” Hector Gallegos built for his wife, Graciela Martínez, alongside the family fields down by the Palangas River. Hector and Graciela lead us step by step through their artistic process from digging and processing

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clays and paint materials in the local mountains to forming, painting, and firing pottery. Everything needed is gathered within the territory of the communal lands of the ejido. We share meals with children, grandchildren, and neighbors. Interspersed in this week-long workshop are trips to attend the local rodeo, search out Mimbres and Casas Grandes ruins, and visits to many of the artists’ homes in town. Our students leave Mata Ortíz with an expanded view of Mexico, disabused of the idea that all Mexican people want to move to the United States. They carry with them a model for artistic practice that is integrated into family, community, and place. They experience the border as we return to the United States with a new, more holistic perspective. The last stage of our investigation to date has been to connect the issues related to the border between MexFIGURE 6.17  Hector Gallegos, Juan ico and the United States to those at Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, other national borders across the globe. MX Our shared concerns over borders and immigration provided an opportunity for LAAW and VMTP to collaborate. In Greece, our colleagues in VMTP work along their border with Albania and Macedonia. In our interview, Yannis Ziogas speaks to the lingering trauma in this area resulting from a history of conflicts and economic hardship. To better articulate the connection globally between border communities, in 2012 and 2013, LAAW and VMTP participated in joint projects. In 2012, we exchanged materials abandoned along our respective borders as people prepared to cross the dividing lines. In 2013, VMTP and LAAW coordinated a video exchange of simultaneous actions at the two border sites.

Rio Grande watershed If there is one core factor in forming a sense of place in the desert, it would be water (or the absence thereof). Our students are based at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque just uphill from the Rio Grande channel. A larger and a larger percentage of the water we drink is siphoned out of the river as our other source, the aquifer under Albuquerque, continues to be depleted. A journey focused on the Rio Grande, therefore, seems appropriate to our students’ engagement in building a sense of place. The fact that the river supports a significant percentage of New Mexico’s agriculture connects this investigation to our Foodshed focus. That it becomes the border between the United States and

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Mexico at El Paso adds yet another layer and connects this investigation to our previous border explorations. Most students are familiar with the wide, muddy, slow-moving river that nearly disappears in the summer as it flows through Albuquerque. Few have ever seen it in its pristine form at its beginning in the mountains of southern Colorado. So we start there and follow it south, stopping along the way to FIGURE 6.18  Headwaters, Rio Grande, meet with farmers using the ancient Creede, CO acequía system to water their fields; dam managers in charge of holding and releasing water for the NM farmers to the south; technicians at the Albuquerque waste treatment plant supervising what becomes the fifth-largest tributary along the Rio Grande; the director of the Valley de Oro Wildlife Refuge, who manages the only urban wildlife refuge in the FIGURE 6.19  Rio Grande Diversion, El US; the US Border Patrol in El Paso; Paso, TX (Cement Arroyo) and the manager of a holistic rangemanagement-based cattle ranch outside of Marfa, Texas, before camping along the banks of the river in the wild canyon country south of Presidio, Texas. In the process, students are exposed to the variety of roles the Rio Grande plays in the ecosystem of the southwest. They gain first-hand experience with how water defines all aspects of life in desert regions.

Leadership transition Starting in 2013, we began to institute changes in the curriculum to better support this new approach. I also initiated the process of transferring the leadership of the LAAW program. Leadership transitions in academic programs are a complicated matter. In the standard model, when a faculty member retires, or moves on, his or her position returns to the university and then flows back to the college and department for reallocation through a national search. There are very good reasons for this planned disjunction between outgoing and incoming faculty positions. It guarantees the introduction of fresh ideas and new directions and acts as a guard against stagnation. This model, however, is problematic for programs directed by a single faculty member. In such cases, the

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program closes or enters a state of limbo when the faculty leaves. FS ended with John Reid’s retirement. PA remained as a course listing but hasn’t been offered since Osborne’s departure. It is then difficult for an incoming faculty member (such as Amanda Stuart at ANU) to maintain continuity or restart the former program. Funding, in particular, becomes an issue when the departing program director has personally established and developed the relationships with the sources of support. For better or worse, I set a plan in motion to ensure that LAAW would continue, change, and grow beyond my tenure. The key to this transition was acquiring a new grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support graduate and faculty research in the context of a new Land Arts Mobile Research Center (LAMRC). The LAMRC was designed to serve as the research arm of the LAAW program with a particular emphasis on supporting graduate and faculty publications and exhibitions. The first LAMRC initiative was to develop a post-MFA research program similar to the post-docs awarded in other disciplines as a means to assist graduate students in making the transition from an academic program to the professional sphere. The Andrew W. Mellon grant has been used to support graduate international research in Australia, China, Cuba, Holland, and Peru and post-graduate research projects addressing water infrastructure in Albuquerque, NM; Community Gardens in Brooklyn, NY; Ceramic technologies in China; invasive species in Australia; and the global waste stream in the South Pacific. The five-year commitment from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation also provided me with the leverage to negotiate a split in my position between the ongoing Lannan Endowed Chair and professor of Art and Ecology position and a new assistant professor of Art and Ecology and field director of the LAAW program appointment. In my experience over the years at UNM, I found that the roles of field program director and Lannan Endowed Chair did not mesh easily. In particular, the demands related to planning for and leading the program in the field took time away from research, publication, and program promotion initiatives. I thought it highly unrealistic that UNM could attract a senior-level faculty member with the qualifications to be the endowed chair who would be willing to take over an existing program that required spending months each year in the field with students. In my conception, UNM and LAAW would be better positioned if a senior faculty member could lead the research/publication initiative, acquire funding, and run institutional interference while a junior faculty took charge of the actual field program. This plan required UNM to create a new assistant professor faculty position at a time when faculty positions were being cut university wide. With support from Provost Chaouki Abdallah and College of Fine Arts Dean Kim Pinder, the Department of Art and Art History was authorized to conduct national searches for the two positions that resulted in Subhankar Banerjee becoming the new Lannan Endowed chair and Jeanette Hart-Mann receiving a tenure-track appointment as the field director of LAAW.

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Since 2014, LAAW has evolved under Jeanette Hart-Mann’s direction. She has brought her personal vision to the program and further increased the focus on environmental and social justice issues. Here, she speaks to that vision as she worked to build a curricular structure to support it: Jeanette Hart-Mann: Environmental and Social Justice has been one of the primary topics of Field Investigations since I became director of the LAAW program. As an important framework in my own research, I felt that LAAW needed to more fully take up this path in order to expose students to major historic and contemporary issues within the bioregion, while bridging the divide between environmental and human concerns. Especially relevant to this experience is acknowledging, respecting, and learning directly from Indigenous communities who have called the American southwest home for millennia and whose land-based practices are core to inspiring paradigm-shifting conversations and actions around environmental justice, climate change, and the remediation of human-created disasters. For several hundred years, New Mexico has been ground zero for the brutal colonization of native peoples and the land. The Four Corners region is a current hotspot. In 2015, I reached out to Diné (Navajo) activists and community leaders to guide LAAW investigations into Indigenous territory around the Four Corners to gain a better understanding of the impact of uranium, coal, oil, and gas extraction on people and the environment. For three days, we traveled in a packed passenger van with activist Anna Rondon over 1,200 miles across the Navajo Nation to see uranium superfund sites, Monument Valley, FIGURE 6.20 Compressor, Dinéah, NM Canyon de Chelly, and meet up with other activists who are fighting coal on Black Mesa and fracking in Eastern Navajo Agency. Documentation became key to the process as we were swallowed up by the frenzy of this experience from sunup to sundown. With permission from our guests and guide, students used sketchbooks, audio recorders, photography, and video to record everything. Along with this grand tour of disaster sites, we were blessed to be base-camping at Dr. Larry Emerson’s farm at Tse Daa K’aan, where he facilitates traditional Diné teachings and is a medicine man. Originally, he had only granted us permission to camp on his land, but after meeting the students and hearing about our plans, he insisted that we must engage in Diné ceremony in order to be prepared for our travels and better understand the monsters we were visiting. Larry led us daily in

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Sunrise Ceremony and group discussion, which impacted the group significantly. There was no escaping the fact that this experience was emotional and challenging for everyone. During this process, it was not only important to bear witness to the atrocities at hand but also give students the opportunity to experience this in parallel with a better understanding of Diné language, philosophy, and world views. Our intentions were to learn and experience as much as we could and then, with our partners’ blessings, amplify what we experienced through collaborative public exhibitions and engagements. In 2015, this led to two public outputs in Albuquerque – one, as part of the annual LAAW exhibition in the student gallery on campus and the other in a public gallery where students and faculty worked together as professional artists along with Diné collaborators Dr. Larry Emerson, Malcolm Benally, and Running With Arrows. We have now completed the third year in our collaboration with Diné partners, and this project focus on environmental and social justice is now a mainstay in our yearly programming. In this commitment to a more project-based model engaged with community partners, LAAW has entered into a specific mode of a contemporary art practice. In these site-based projects, Land Arts operates as a temporary collective, providing students with an introduction to a collaborative approach. Contemporary students are comfortable working in groups whose members represent diverse cultural backgrounds, genders, and age groups. They respond positively to the openness of an interdisciplinary dialogue and a collaborative process. The standard university mode of art education continues to emphasize individual (I) development. This new collaborative aspect of our pedagogy helps prepare students to move outside of the modernist, solo artist model by teaching them the skills necessary to successfully work in group (we) contexts. In LAAW (and the other programs in this study), students begin to acquire the skills they will need to work alongside other professionals in the public and private sphere after graduation.

Art and Ecology The final piece in the LAAW story relates to the position of the field program in the larger departmental curriculum. As the scope of our Land Arts program expanded, it became clear that a one-semester program alone could not successfully cover the full curriculum necessary to support a comprehensive, place-based, arid lands pedagogy. A single semester in the field was not sufficient for students to fully develop a new practice. (FS made similar decision in extending to a fullyear program.) The next step at UNM was to integrate the LAAW program into a structural entity within our home in the Art and Art History Department. My colleague Basia Irland shared my desire to form a new area in the department to serve as the home for an interdisciplinary curriculum. We drafted a proposal, and in 2008 Art and Art History Department faculty voted to add Art

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and Ecology as a new area. The new Art and Ecology curriculum defines art as a culturally engaged practice and artists as professionals capable of making significant contributions across a broad array of social and cultural contexts. It asks what skills are necessary for the next generation of college of fine arts graduates to fully participate in the broader cultural dialogue and creates a curriculum and context for their delivery. The LAAW program contributes the primary, but not only, field component of this larger Art and Ecology curriculum and serves as an ongoing experiment in which innovative curricular initiatives can be tested to prepare a transferable model to other institutions and contexts. With the addition of faculty members Catherine Harris, Jeanette Hart-Mann, Szu Han Ho, Andrea Polli, and Molly Sturges (2010–2013), Art and Ecology has established partnerships with Landscape Architecture, Biology, Computer Science, History, and Museum Studies. The development of an Art and Ecology area curriculum has created a larger pedagogic structure to house our work in LAAW. With LAAW faculty Jeanette Hart-Mann and Subhankar Banerjee working in cooperation with Professors Catherine Harris, Andrea Polli, and Szu Han Ho, Art and Ecology is now well positioned to deliver an integrated arid lands pedagogy and thereby prepare our students to be successful agents of change.

Notes 1 Leach, Bernard, A Potter’s Book, London, Farber and Garber, 1945, Yanagi, So¯etsu, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty, Tokyo: Kodansha International Ltd., 1972. 2 Personal communication with Mary Lewis Garcia at Acoma Pueblo. 3 The Pueblo Pottery course Mary Lewis Garcia and I started in 1990 continues to this day. After Mary retired because of health issues, the Department of Art and Art History created a new tenure track position for Pueblo Pottery in Ceramics and hired Clarence Cruz from Ohkay Owingeh. Clarence runs the course as a hybrid with some sessions held at UNM and others at his Pueblo, demonstrating that field programming is not in opposition to traditional courses, but a complement. 4 Cueva de la Olla is an archeological site in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico, above the contemporary pottery village of Juan Mata Ortíz. It is named for a large adobe granary in the shape of a large pot. 5 “Especially with Indigenous communities that have been so majorly impacted, there have been a lot of white people that have come down and said, ‘oh look this is what we’re gonna do’ and then they disappear and they never turn up and I just don’t want to turn into one of those. So, we invite artists back to the university so there’s a reciprocal arrangement, if they are able to come to ANU. I’m sure, this happens with members of Indigenous communities where it sounds great on paper but a lot of these people don’t have enough petrol to put in their car (assuming they even have a car), that kind of thing. So, an avenue of conversation that we’ve had with our head of school, is about paying these people for their time, but there’s no funds for that. What we have managed to do is get money for busses, money for petrol, plus money for inhouse accommodations in the university should they be able to come up. And also, arrange, if there are artists interested in visiting workshops, we arrange for them to have access to facilities and equipment.” Interview with Anicca Cox, 94. 6 Cortez, Constance, “Placing” and “Dis-placing” The Art of Mata Ortíz in Mata Ortíz 1995–2015, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2016, pp. 33–34.

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7 “Lannan Foundation is a family foundation dedicated to cultural freedom, diversity and creativity through projects which support exceptional contemporary artists and writers, as well as inspired Native activists in rural indigenous communities. The Foundation recognizes the profound and often unquantifiable value of the creative process and is willing to take risks and make substantial investments in ambitious and experimental thinking. Understanding that globalization threatens all cultures and ecosystems, the Foundation is particularly interested in projects that encourage freedom of inquiry, imagination, and expression. The Foundation supports this mission by making grants to nonprofit organizations in the areas of contemporary visual art, literature, indigenous communities, and cultural freedom.” www.lannan.org/about/history/ 8 “The Homestead Acts were several United States federal laws that gave an applicant ownership of land, typically called a ‘homestead’, at little or no cost. In all, more than 270 million acres of public land, or nearly 10% of the total area of the US, was given away free to 1.6 million homesteaders; most of the homesteads were west of the Mississippi River . . . The first of the acts, the Homestead Act of 1862, opened up millions of acres. Any adult who had never taken up arms against the US government could apply. Women and immigrants who had applied for citizenship were eligible. The 1866 Act explicitly included and ‘encouraged’ blacks to participate.” Wikipedia.   The mission of the BLM is “to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.” Originally BLM holdings were described as “land nobody wanted” because homesteaders had passed them by. Wikipedia. 9 How and why one group comes together easily to form a tight, mutually supportive identity while others fragment is an ongoing mystery. It is not as simple as a particular itinerary, the gender balance in the group, or the presence of a couple of charismatic individuals. Previous association can help, although it has been a factor at times in the “us versus them” type segmentation. Merging the two cultures during the UNM/ UT partnership was definitely a hurdle. For sure, having faculty merge with the group rather than stand apart is an important factor. Changing from an all-male to a onemale-one-female leadership structure helped, until it didn’t. This question of how to design an “all in” group is key to the success of the program and very hard to formalize. 10 Santa Fe Arts Colony and Taos Art Colony. 11 “The evolution of the LMoA program has gone from the openness, no learning outcomes, “hey, let’s just go figure it out” to [a] much more, organized, way of teaching. So, I think the organization and the liability issues are the big change. Maybe that’s it, it gets to such a point that you no longer, there’s no semblance of what you had before, what you originally started off and maybe that’s it, where a lot of the operators that have stopped teaching, that’s the intersection. Like, oh, now what I’m doing is so different it no longer captures the spirit anymore, it changes. You try to say that you’re keeping it new. You try to say that there’s always new places, but I don’t think the rawness is ever going come back. Basically, the change is from chaos to organization or maybe chaos to organized chaos.” Interview with Anicca Cox, p. 83. 12 Appendix: LAAW 2009 Reader. 13 http://clui.org/section/clui-wendover 14 John Reid has taken this approach a step further in FS by returning two or three times to the same location/community in a given year. 15 Labofii, Geographies of Hope, in A Guide Book to Alternative Nows, ed. Amber Hickey, Long Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2012, p. 244; in Demos, T.J., Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016, p 130.

FIGURE 7.1 Hands

in Clay, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX

7 CONCLUSION

CONCLUSIONCONCLUSION

This work originally was conceived as a manual for field programming, a “howto” for those interested in developing and implementing place-based, regionally focused, relationally grounded, interdisciplinary programs for art practice. It quickly became clear, in our discussions with the five program directors and between ourselves as collaborators, that there is more to be said about this work than just the nuts and bolts – though this too is important. This book, therefore, includes texts dedicated to demonstrating how programming like this can be implemented, as well as a collection of primary documents and materials providing readers with detailed information regarding the basic building blocks of this practice. We have also investigated the history, practice, evolution, and experience of this work holistically, through analysis and survey work and through narratives of practice, exploring some of the dynamic tensions and important affordances this kind of work provides. This project, from its beginnings as a series of conversations in shared travels and at collaborative exhibitions, through time in the field working together and meetings in various coffee shops in the small towns of Northern New Mexico, was conceived with the goal of sharing the work we view as important at a time we believe it is becoming increasingly relevant to the world. As in any arena of study and practice, field programming within the discipline of fine arts continues to evolve over time in response to changes in local, national, and global conditions. The work of this volume is responsive to the current moments of art, culture, environment, education, economics, and politics by grounding itself in relationship building – with communities, with students, with visiting artists, with institutions, and across faculty and disciplines. In the previous pages, we have explored the process through which directors of field programs on three continents have discovered the value of their work through innovative design, collaboration, field-based pedagogy, and creativity.

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We have demonstrated that a fundamental value of these field programs resides in their commitment to experimentation and change. We have learned that all the programs covered here stem from a decision that rather than join an existing, codified arts curriculum, they would explore alternative models that take art education out into the wide open spaces of the world of direct experience in order to invent and re-invent the tasks that make meaning for artists. And we have seen that institutional constraints provide both challenge and opportunity as program directors have developed, built, and transitioned their programmatic work. We believe this text, in totality, builds the case for a revision of arts education to better prepare students for life in contemporary culture. It argues that the MFA degree is in need of a restructuring based in expanding the context of the educational experience beyond the physical confines of the university to embrace the world at large. The central contribution of this project resides in its contention that field programming can make a meaningful contribution to this restructuring. As evidenced in our discussions, field programming intersects and engages a broader array of options for art making and student engagement than traditionally is offered in a studio only art practice. It simultaneously expands the studio to include the widest possible array of environments and communities, redefines content through the experience of the specifics of place, and conflates the roles of artist and audience. While the programs included here respond to the specifics of their institutional, social, and environmental place in different ways, our study documents a pattern of shared interests and experiences. All of the programs began with a fundamental commitment to reconnect contemporary art students with their home environment. Each in its own way supports student agency by providing the opportunity to spend uninterrupted time in direct, physical, unmediated connection with the planet. Over time, the programs have evolved, establishing a balance between this direct, personal dialogue with the environment and an engagement with the issues related to human habitation. The unique characteristics of each bio-region drive decision making regarding what issues to address. However, the similarity in the methodologies developed by the five programs reflects the fact that though the specific manifestations may be local, the issues we face are global. For instance, we have seen that LMoA, FS, and LAAW all explore the possibilities for field programs based in the geographies of the world’s deserts. FS, PA, and LAAW engage with the rural communities through investigations of agricultural practices and water issues. VMTP, LMoA, and LAAW explore the effects of large-scale military and industrial interventions on the land and communities. VMTP and LAAW address the issues related to operating in national borderlands. FS and LAAW have committed to long-term engagements with Indigenous communities. FS, PA, and LAAW investigate the impact of extraction industries on environments and communities. This list of shared interests continues to expand and deepen as programs transition to new leadership.

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It is evident too that these programs succeed in providing an educational experience that goes beyond abstract theory to focus upon direct engagement, build bridges for students to diverse communities, and familiarize them with transdisciplinary and transcultural vocabularies. They mostly operate in the context of less than optimal support and yet provide their students the education they need to succeed in contemporary global society. Whatever their backgrounds, whether students come to these programs from entitled or marginalized communities, it is the collective intent of this cohort that they leave empowered. This text builds the case for field programming as a significant contributor to the continued relevancy of tertiary arts education. At present, this argument bucks the dominant trend in higher education to turn universities and colleges into job training programs that serve corporate interests. It is a difficult time to be advocating for radical pedagogies that challenge this capitalistic model of education. But pendulums swing both ways; times change. We believe this period of the hegemony of monetary values will return in a humanist direction. We advocate for the idea that universities must reassert their position in society and lead the way, not through a retrenchment in the ivory tower model, but by adapting and changing to expand the inquiry and conversation beyond the cultural boundaries of the Euro-American canon and the physical territory of the institutional campus. Long-term problems, such as climate change, resist our cultural propensity to seek quick technological fixes. Instead, we are faced with undertaking fundamental changes in our relationships to each other and the planet as a whole. Education will be an essential part of the process. When our institutions of higher learning are ready, field programs have much to offer.

8 MANUAL

MANUALMANUAL

Nuts and bolts of field programming

This chapter is dedicated to providing the basic, how-to information necessary to operate a field program within the college or university context. The intention is to make available the more than seventy years of experience with field programming embodied in our cohort to anyone interested in implementing their own program by providing a window into what is involved in preparing to take students into the field. The following pages present information from the original program directors as well as the new leaders of the LAAW and FS programs. We cover the basic building blocks required of all programs, beginning with course syllabi, to demonstrate how the field experience can be framed in terms of academic courses. We include sample reading lists to illustrate how the directors frame the content of the field experience within larger cultural concerns. This is followed by sample forms directors have developed over the years to address the bureaucratic requirements of their home institutions and program equipment lists for both group camp operations and personal needs. Next comes a listing of the guest scholars, artists, activists, and community members who have joined the programs in the field to demonstrate the range of contacts provided to the students. A record of program publications and exhibitions is included to document the contributions the programs have made to the field. And finally, a list of community partners is presented to document the various programs’ engagements with the communities of their home regions.

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Syllabi Land Arts of the American West 2012 Program Syllabus Professors Bill Gilbert & Jeanette Hart-Mann (syllabus format and course titles by Bill Gilbert & Chris Taylor)

Introduction Land Arts of the American West is an academic studio arts program based on experiential, hands-on exploration in interdisciplinary place-based research and practice. Rooted in the notion of place, students travel throughout the Southwestern US and Northern Mexico, investigating place in all its manifestations: through ecologies, histories, infrastructures, and cultures. Most important, students experience these sites through real-time commitment and assimilation: camping, eating, living, breathing, and being in place, while also investigating place through active research and production as artists. Research and production can be multi-faceted and arrive through different processes. Two models we propose as active production systems are • Student/s self-directed research and practice • Collective inquiry and engagement Student self-directed research and production is a common model found throughout academic studio arts. The student notes content and processes that he or she is interested in exploring, collects empirical information, analyzes it, and produces work in response. During Land Arts, this model is particularly useful at individual work sites, where students have the time and space to work in a highly independent and self-directed manner. This is also true of student-directed collaborative processes, where multiple students choose to work together on common projects at individual work sites or throughout the semester. Practicing in the field and in place can be highly rewarding, as empirical information is the primary source of collected data via the experience of being at a site in the field. An itinerary will be distributed to all students, so these sites can be better known through research into the history, ecology, topography, land use, statistics, and so on. This information can give students great insight into projects that they

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want to explore, while preparing them for logistics they need to undertake prior to leaving in the fall. The second proposed model, collective inquiry and engagement, is based on projects led by visiting artists at collaborative work sites. These collaborations can be structured in several different ways, but the emphasis on collective inquiry and engagement is to shift artistic research and practice from a solitary, individualized process to a negotiated group territory – from design to creation to implementation. This model is highly dynamic and extremely productive in pushing the boundaries of known processes and conceptual positions while encouraging collective experimentation, learning, and dialogue. Collaborative work sites and projects are undertaken with the goal of completing the collective project within the project timeline and leaving a permanent contribution in the form of a collective work “in site”. Therefore, as students help build and add to pre-existing artistic engagements, each student, through the agency of collectivization, contributes to a long-term project. Both of these models may be used to fulfill required assignments within the syllabus as long as they are documented and presented as finished projects at the end of the Fall 2012 semester evaluation or the project is re-contextualized/rerealized for the Fall 2012 Final Presentation. The presentation of these finished works can be issued through either collaboration among students or through an individualized student approach. We recommend that students imagine a mode of production for themselves before we go into the field. A chosen mode might change or become obsolete during the course of the journey as experimentation is conducted, but it helps to have some process in mind as you prepare through research and reading for the sites and the journeys during the summer.

Course listings AS 461.040 / 529B.040 – ARTIFACTS: production, use, apprehension When knowledge and feeling are oriented toward something real, actually perceived, the thing, like a reflector, returns the light it has received from it. As a result of this continual interaction, meaning is continually enriched at the same time as the object soaks up affective qualities. The object thus obtains its own particular depth and richness. . . . At each moment perception overflows it and sustains it, and its density and depth come from its being confused with the perceived object. Each quality is so deeply incorporated in the object that it is impossible to distinguish what is felt and what is perceived. – Jean-Paul Satre in Wisdom Sits in Places, Keith Basso, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, p. 108

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Ar·ti·fact 1 any object made by human beings, esp. with a view to subsequent use 2 a handmade object, as a tool, or the remains of one, as a shard of pottery, characteristic of an earlier time or cultural stage, esp. such an object found at an archeological excavation 3 any mass-produced, usually inexpensive object reflecting contemporary society or popular culture: artifacts of the pop rock generation 4 a substance or structure not naturally present in the matter being observed but formed by artificial means, as during preparation of a microscope slide 5 a spurious observation or result arising from preparatory or investigative procedures 6 any feature that is not naturally present but is a product of an extrinsic agent, method, or the like: statistical artifacts that make the inflation rate seem greater than it is

Also, artefact Origin: 1815–25; var. of artifact < L phrase arte factum (something) made with skill. See art, fact. – https://www.dictionary.com/browse/artifact?s=t This course will investigate our relation to artifacts through an examination of production, use, and apprehension. We will look at the nature and definition of artifacts, the way they are made, the role they play in our daily lives, and the meaning they acquire through that use.

Instructors Bill Gilbert and Jeanette Hart-Mann E-mail: [email protected] E-mail [email protected] Office: UNM – FAC 2013, 277–3933

Structure We will situate our work within a continuous 6,000-year-long tradition of landbased art and building. Analysis of sites visited will provide a basis for discussion and invention. Issues of spatial and material vocabulary, construction systems, and inhabitation will serve as a foundation for an investigation through making. Students will be asked to construct, detail, and document a series of artifacts on site.

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Assignments • Two finished works addressing the use, production, and/or apprehension of artifacts in the context of our program AS 462.041 / 529C.041 – MAPPING: body, landscape, memory To explore the unknown and the familiar, distant and near, and to record, in detail with the eyes of a child, any beauty of the flesh or otherwise, horror, irony, traces of utopia or Hell. Select your team with care, but when in doubt, take on new crew and give them a chance. But avoid at all costs fluctuations of sincerity with your best people. – Dan Eldon in The Journey Is the Destination: the journals of Dan Eldon, Kathy Eldon, editor, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997, p9. This course will investigate the question of mapping within the landscape. The specific nature of the way the American West has been mapped, marked, and divided will serve as an introduction and a point of departure for the creation of a set of documents. The goal of these documents will be the creation and testing of methods of seeing, measuring, and recording. The terrain to be covered will include Work – both visited and constructed site-based interventions Travel – the act of moving through the landscape Group – the evolution of our social unit Self – the body and its relation to social and environmental place

Instructors Bill Gilbert and Jeanette Hart-Mann E-mail: [email protected] E-mail [email protected] Office: UNM – FAC 2013, 277–3933

Structure This course will pursue a broad path of investigation that will range from ongoing semester-long activities to distinct acts set within specific site-based conditions. The ongoing activities will consist of a journal, sketchbook, and one self-directed map.

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Assignments • Two finished mapping projects addressing the experience in the field from a geographical, sociological, ecological, and/or experiential perspective AS 463.042 / 529D.042 – PLACE: land, civilization, persona Albert Camus may have said it best. “Sense of place,” he wrote, “is not just something that people know and feel, it is something people do.” And that realization brings the whole idea rather firmly down to earth, which is plainly, I think, where a sense of place belongs. – Keith Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996, p 143. In this course, we will address the process of making space into place through occupation and intervention with the land. We consider place as a continuum across time and cultures and find potential in situating questions between disciplines and definitions. We seek to discover and understand the record of life in the land. We will investigate, analytically and generatively, the presence of habitation and questions of place that extend beyond notions of utility (shelter from the elements and performance of services) and begin to engage the more subtle relations of our existence in a particular landscape.

Instructors Bill Gilbert and Jeanette Hart-Mann E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Office: UNM – FAC 2013, 277–3933

Structure This course forms the central core of the Land Arts program. Our goal is to come to an understanding of how we develop a sense of place in our particular geographic location here in the American Southwest and then learn how that can be communicated to others.

Assignments One designated place project, seminar contributions, a journal entry from each site, archive contribution, and documentation of work of others AS 489.040 / 589.040 – SPACE: expanse, thresholds, limits Delueze’s own image for a concept is not a brick, but a “toolbox.” He calls his kind of philosophy “pragmatics” because its goal is the invention of concepts that

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do not add up to a system of belief or an architecture of propositions that you either enter or you don’t, but instead pack a potential in the way a crowbar in a willing hand envelops an energy of prying. – Brian Massumi, “Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy,” in A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. This course will investigate our relation to space through an examination of edges, limits, and thresholds. We will look at the conception/definition of space in the landscape of the southwest, the way space is defined, marked, and measured in the process of defining place, and the meaning that place acquires through its use. Emphasis will be placed on the dialogue between the human body and the particular qualities of space in the southwest – how that space contains the body.

Instructors Bill Gilbert and Jeanette Hart-Mann E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] Office: UNM – FAC 2013 277–3933

Structure We will situate our work within a continuous lineage of cultural traditions that is thousands of years old. Our focus will be on the changing definitions of space as we move from the urban center out into the desert environment and back. Particular attention will be given to the thresholds and liminal zone between definitions.

Assignments Two finished works addressing the definitions applied to the spaces we pass through on our journeys and/or the liminal zones / thresholds between spaces

Semester Requirements Students will be required to submit a final portfolio. This must include • CD/DVD containing the following • Images Documentation of works completed in the field and studio, images of works in final presentation, your documentation of the work of

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another student, images taken in the field, and completed video and audio works Each student will identify a partner and document his or her work throughout the semester. Images must be submitted as jpeg files with correct archive nomenclature (archive nomenclature will be explained at the fall seminar). Images shot in raw format must be entered as jpegs. We cannot save raw formatted files. Jpegs must be at least 10 mb. Completed Video Projects must be submitted as DV NTSC file. • Text List of DVD/CD contents Journal entries with archive nomenclature Other text generated in field or studio Text must be submitted as doc files Students will also be required to fulfill course assignments for each of the four courses. These are described in detail under each course listing. The program will do a series of collaborative projects in the field. If these projects are followed through to the final presentation, the student/s completing these projects can present these as fulfilling required course assignments.

Evaluation All faculty will participate in evaluating student performance based on the following criteria. Students will receive a written evaluation at the end of the semester. • Finished work submitted for the Land Arts exhibition • Contribution to the successful operation of the program in the field • Camp logistics including, cooking, cleaning, vehicle loading/unloading, camp set up and take-down, shopping, technology maintenance, AND – 7:00 a.m./7:00 p.m. check in, while in the field • Participation in seminars • Uploading files to hard drive with the correct archive nomenclature and in the correct folders • Contribution to collaborative projects • DVD/CD documentation/portfolio

Fees $200 refundable program deposit Course fees – $804 12-credit tuition cost

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PLACE: APPALACHIA Syllabus 2010 Erika Osborne / Tracy Stuckey Art Studio 493I/593I 3 credits May 17–30 Course Fee: $375.00. This fee pays for food, camping fees, equipment and gear, general supplies (toilet paper, ice, etc.), van rentals, guest expertise, etc.

Description: PLACE: APPALACHIA is a strenuous field-based workshop taking place in various zones in West Virginia. The focus of the course will be to study and discuss the notion of Place as it pertains to the Appalachian region. We will do this by looking closely at water, coal, agriculture and recreational adventure as a means to explore the larger environmental and cultural issues that form and shape the area. Through exposure to sites and with the expertise presented by various guests, we will examine what it means to be influenced by a geography and explore how that influences our artwork. We will engage these ideas through critical dialogue and physical experience during this fourteen-day course. Students will be required to produce work that engages each of the four sites we visit, in addition to other art-making interests already being pursued. This program is not discipline specific and encourages the participation of artists from all backgrounds. It is a course designed to foster community and promote a cross-pollination of ideas and material choices between participants. We will be living and making art out-of-doors for the duration of this class. Camping, backpacking, and water travel are essential components. You must be willing and prepared to engage in such activities. You must also be willing to adapt your art-making practice to this nomadic lifestyle. The magic of the course lies in this challenge!

Topics: Although concepts regarding Appalachia are numerous, we will be focusing on four major ideas . . . • Water • Coal • Sustainable Agriculture • Wilderness

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We will have guests join us on various portions of the journey to further elaborate on these subjects.

Work Requirements: This course is an outdoor “studio” course. As such, work is to be completed, for the most part, in the field. Because we will only have two and a half days at each site, it is important to hit the ground running and focus your energies on responding to each environment. Students are required to produce a minimum of four finished pieces, one of which will be a collaborative permaculture intervention at Vu Ja Vineyards. This number is in no way a limiting, with the time allotted for work, the potential for students to produce more than this is real. In the field, each student is responsible for his or her day and is expected to maximize work time. Because of the 24/7 nature of this course, the studio hours are considered “open” day and night. We ask that you check in at 7:30 a.m. for breakfast and 7:00 p.m. for dinner – that is all. The rest of the time is yours to create. Instructors will meet with students prior to leaving to discuss materials and ideas pertinent to each student to prepare him or her for the field. We will base these conversations on skill level, artistic intent, and concepts already being pursued. An individualized materials list will be created during this time. We will have an inverter in the van for charging cameras, laptops, and video cameras if you chose to bring these items. Once in the field, the instructors will meet with each student during the last afternoon at each site to discuss his or her work and assign a grade for the particular project. Robert Smithson’s, “Site” and “Non-site” dialectic will be discussed as basis for translation from the field to the studio/gallery.

This course has a “no trace” policy!!! In regard to both living and working in the field, we will leave sites as they were found, or better. This is a way of minimizing our impact on the land.

Reading component Students will be required to complete a series of readings provided by the professors. These will be given to the student prior to leaving for the field course. These readings will provide insight and background for campfire discussions and presentations in the field.

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Camping As mentioned, this class is a strenuous course, both physically and mentally. We will be spending the entire two weeks camping in zones of various remoteness in West Virginia. Students will be exposed to elements that range from intense heat to extreme cold and severe rain. You should be prepared for such weather. Students should be capable of making art in these potentially harsh conditions. In addition, having experience camping or living out-of-doors is necessary to participate in this class.

Group Function Students will be placed in cooking teams. These teams are required to prepare planned meals for the group on a rotation schedule (2–3 times over the course of two weeks). Tracy and Erika will prepare breakfasts. Lunch food is supplied; however, the preparation of lunches is the responsibility of the student.

Grading Students will be graded on the work they create (a minimum of four finished pieces). They will also be graded on their engagement with guest scholars and instructors in regard to their ideas. In addition, students will be graded on how well they function as a member of the outdoor studio community. Group dynamics are essential to making this program a success.

ADA In accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, WVU is obligated to accommodate those students with disabilities. If you have need for assistance, please talk to the instructors so we can arrange for the necessary accommodations.

To contact us Erika Osborne Office #2506 Office phone: 293–4841 ext 3145 Office Hours: Tues/Thurs noon–1:00 p.m. – or arranged E-mail: [email protected]

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Reading lists PLACE: APPALACHIA Reading List 2010 Andrews, Malcom, Landscape and Western Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Basso, Keith, Wisdom Sits in Places, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Beardsley, John, Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape, New York: Abbeville Press, 1989. Berry, Wendall, The Art of the Common Place: The Agrarian Essays of Wendall Berry, Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2002. Berry, Wendall, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Burns, Shirley Stewart, Bringing Down the Mountains: The Impact of Mountaintop Removal on Southern West Virginia Communities, Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2007. Chronic, Halka, Roadside Geology (series by state), Missoula: Mountain Press, 2003. Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New York: HarperCollins Press, 1974. Eldon, Kathy, editor, The Journey Is the Destination: The Journals of Dan Eldon, San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997. Harmon, Katharine, You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Holmgren, David, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Hepburn, Victoria: Holgren Design Services, 2002). Kingsolver, Barbara, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, New York: HarperCollins Press, 2007. Krupp, E.C., Skywatchers, Shamans, and Kings, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1997. Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac, New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Lopez, Barry, Crossing Open Ground, New York: Scribner’s, 1988. McPhee, John, The Control of Nature, New York: The Noonday Press, 1989. Mitchel, W.J.T., editor, Landscape and Power, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Mollison, Bill, Introduction to Permaculture, Tasmania: Tagiri Publications, 1991, 1997. Pollan, Michael, In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto, London: Penguin Books, 2008. Pollan, Michael, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, London: Penguin Books, 2006. Reece, Erik, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness, New York: Penguin Books, 2006. Roberts, Elizabeth, editor, Earth Prayers from Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems and Invocations for Honoring the Earth, New York: HarperCollins Press, 1991. Shnayerson, Michael, Big Coal, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Snyder, Gary, Earth Household, New York: New Directions, 1969. Snyder, Gary, Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation; distributed by City Lights Books, 1965. Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York: Penguin Books, 2000. Space, Sue, Ecovention: Current Technologies to Transform Ecologies, Cincinnati: The Contemporary Art Center, Greenmuseum, Ecoartspace, 2002. Stegner, Wallace, The Artist as Environmental Advocate, Berkeley: Bancroft Library, 1983. Thoreau, Henry David, Walden, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949. Trumble, Stephen, editor, Words from the Land, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995.

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Visual March to Prespes Reading List Alexias, George, Sociology of the Body, Athens: Pedio, 2011. Bouriaud Nicolas, Esthétique relationnelle, Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002. Dewey, John, Art as Experience, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984. LAND/ART Introduction by Bill Gilbert and Kathleen Shields, Essays by Lucy Lippard, William L. Fox, Nancy Marie Mithlo and MaLin Wilson Powell, Santa Fe: Radius Books, 2010. Marstine, Janet, Critical Practice: Artists, Museums, Ethics (Museum Meanings), New York: Routledge, 2017. Nicholson, Geoff, The Lost Art of Walking, New York: Riverhead Books, 2008. Kastner, Jeffrey, and Wallis Brian, Land and Environmental Art, New York: Phaidon Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Harold, The Anxious Object: Art Today and its Audience, New York: Horizon, 1965. Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York: Penguin, 2001.

WEBSITES/BLOGS http://visualmarch.eetf.uowm.gr/ http://vm-2013.blogspot.gr/ http://landarts.unm.edu/ http://blakegib.blogspot.com/ http://art.ccarts.wvu.edu/environment/art_and_environment http://placeappalachia.wvu.edu/ http://schoolofcriticalengagement.org/made_in_china/index.html http://schoolofcriticalengagement.org/about.html http://filetram.com/rapidshare/taz-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-hierarchypoetic-terrorism-hakim-bey-pdf-zip-278452296

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Land Arts of the American West Reading List 2009 ARTIFACTS: production, use, apprehension Appadurai, Arjun, The Social Life of Things, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Fox, William, “Land Mark Making,” in Gilbert, Bill and Taylor, Chris, Land Arts of the American West, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007. Gruen, John, “Michael Heizer: ‘You Might Say I’m in the Construction Business,’ ” Art News, Vol. 76, Dec. 1977. Irland, Basia, Water Library, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

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Kastner, Jeffrey, Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Press, 2010. Lippard, Lucy, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change, Boulder: Boulder Museum of Contemporary Arts, 2007. Masco, Joseph, “Desert Modernism,” Cabinet Issue 13 (Spring 2004). Muller Gregoire, “Michael Heizer,” Arts Magazine Vol. 44, Dec. 1969–Jan. 1970. Rowell, Steve, Hydromancy by SIMPARCH (El Paso: Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, 2007). Spaid, Sue, Ecovention: Current Art to Transform Ecologies, Cincinnati: Ecoartspace, 2002. Weschler, Lawrence, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, Berkeley: University Of California Press, 2008.

MAPPING: body, landscape, memory Casey, Edward, Earth-Mapping: Artists Reshaping Landscape, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Harrison, Helen Mayer and Newton, “Public Culture and Sustainable Practices: Peninsula Europe from an Ecodiversity Perspective, Posing Questions to Complexity Scientists,” Structure and Dynamics: eJournal of Anthropological and Related Sciences Vol. 2, Issue 3, 2008. Article 3. Lin, Tan, “Following the Money,” Art in America Vol. 91, Issue 11, Nov. 2003. Silberman, Howard, World Views: Maps & Art: September 11, 1999–Jan. 2, 2000, Minneapolis: Weisman Art Museum,1999. Turnbull, David, Maps Are Territories: Science is an Atlas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

PLACE: land, civilization, persona Basso Keith, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Jackson, J.B., “A Sense of Place a Sense of Time,” Design Quarterly Issue 164, pp. 24–27; The MIT Press, 1995. Leopold, Aldo, “Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Ecology and Conservation,” North Dakota Quarterly Vol. 78, Issue 4 (Fall 2011). Lopez, Barry, Crossing Open Ground, New York: Scribner’s, 1988. Mann, Charles, C., “1491,” The Atlantic Monthly, Mar. 2002. Reisner, Marc, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, New York: Viking, 1986. Shepard, Paul, “Wildness and Wilderness: The Nature of Our Nature,” The Permaculture Activist, Feb. 2004, p. #51. Tuan, Yi Fu, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes and Values, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1974. William, Terry Tempest, Red, New York: Pantheon Books, 2001.

SPACE: expanse, thresholds, limits Careri, Francesco, Walkscapes, Barcelona: Gili Press, 2002. Deleuze, Giles, and Guattari, Félix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

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Fox, William, Playa Works: The Myth of the Big Empty, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2002. Fox, William, The Void, The Grid and The Sign: Traversing the Great Basin, Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2005. Jacks, Ben, “Walking and Reading in Landscape,” Landscape Journal Vol. 26, 2007 Kloppenburg, Jack, Jr., “Coming into the Foodshed,” Agriculture and Human Values Vol. 13, Issue 3 (Summer 1996), pp. 33–42. Solnit, Rebecca, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, New York: Viking, 2000. Stegner, Wallace, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, New York: Random House, 1992.

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Administrative forms Land Arts of the American West Program Contract The Land Arts of the American West program is designed to provide students with an intensive, place-based field and studio experience. The program is part of the Arts Learning Laboratory in the College of Fine Arts and provides a unique experience of art making and thinking about art that also requires a unique commitment to ensure success in the course. We recognize that intensive and immersive programs present fundamentally different experiences from standard classroom courses for faculty, staff, and students. These programs have inherent challenges in terms of living conditions, social interactions, and work production that far exceed those of standard studio courses. While it is impossible to identify all of these challenges in advance, we can establish a contract between students, faculty, staff, and administration that guides how we will navigate these challenges individually and as a group. It is our intention as Land Arts of the American West faculty to provide an inspiring, rigorous, and applied educational experience for all participating students. We support and encourage maximum possible artistic freedom and expect students to match that commitment with an equal commitment on their part to personal responsibility for their artistic practice, social interactions, and personal health and well-being. It is the fundamental responsibility of the faculty to provide the students with a safe and effective work and living environment in the field. Faculty will communicate with the group regarding their plans for logistical operations, course curricula, scheduling, and students’ responsibilities in seminars on campus and in the field as the experience unfolds. In all cases, final decisions remain the responsibility of the program faculty. Students are expected to respect those decisions. It is the responsibility of each student to develop his or her own practice, accept living and project assignments given by faculty and staff, become a productive member of the Land Arts of the American West community, and maintain open communication with faculty and each other. Specifically Land Arts program students are responsible for the following: 1 Students will be assigned cook days in pairs. Students are responsible for the timely preparation of food and proper maintenance of the kitchen area and equipment on their appointed days. In addition, students will be responsible for purchasing the food for their assigned days within the allotted budget using program funds.

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2 All students will be present at 7:00 a.m. for breakfast and 7:00 p.m. for dinner each day while in the field. 3 All students will help with packing and unpacking program vans and setting up and dismantling program equipment, including the cook tent and kitchen. 4 All students will participate in seminars and critiques in the field and on campus and lead discussions as assigned by Land Arts faculty. 5 Each student will contribute images and journal entries to the Land Arts Archive and Land Arts blog. 6 Each student will submit finished work to the annual Land Arts program exhibition at the assigned date. 7 All students agree to work collaboratively with Land Arts members on projects in the field. 8 All students will be expected to complete course work assignments by specified deadlines. 9 UNM policy forbids underage drinking and the possession or use of illegal drugs. It is the responsibility of the Department and College administrations to ensure that faculty, staff, and students’ rights are equally respected. Should problems arise, students agree to first discuss any concerns regarding physical and emotional safety with Land Arts faculty and staff. Any unresolved problems should be directed to Regina Carlow, the Associate Dean for Student Affairs, who will provide oversight for student concerns and will also serve as liaison between students and the CFA Dean’s office. It is the responsibility of CFA administration to recognize the inherent risks involved with field-based programs and be supportive of Land Arts faculty and the Land Arts of the American West Program. Both parties agree to address any and all problems that arise as a respectful and professional dialogue between faculty and administration that begins from a position of trust that faculty are doing their best to ensure the physical and emotional safety of each and every student. ________________

Land Arts of the American West Teaching Positions Kitchen Camp Coordinator This coordinator position is responsible for organizing and maintaining the kitchen and overall camp environment when in the field.

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These duties include the following: • • • • • •

Menu planning and coordinating the purchases of food and supplies Organizing cook teams and creating cook schedules Orienting students with kitchen and camp protocols Maintaining an organized camp and kitchen Keeping an inventory of all kitchen and camp supplies Coordinating the set up and take-down of camp as well as overseeing the packing of the vehicles

Tech-Archive Coordinator This position is responsible for organizing and maintaining the Land Arts Archive, Field Blog, and technological equipment. These duties include the following: • Keeping an inventory and maintaining all media technology and equipment (cameras, computers, tripod, solar panels, inverters, etc.) • Orienting students to the procedures of uploading content to the archive (using archive software, proper formatting, nomenclature, and maintenance) • Organizing and gathering blog post materials from students, uploading content online • Technical problem-solving (computer, software, equipment) • Assisting in the development of print materials/media for projects and exhibitions • Set up and maintenance of solar panel and battery • Reserve driver of Land Arts vehicles ________________

Land Arts of the American West Assumption of Risk and Informed Consent Form I, the undersigned Participant, desire to attend a field trip in Land Arts of the American West (LAAW), with Professor Hart-Mann and Henel to be held on August 22, August 25 – September 8, September 15 – September 28, and October 13–25. The field trip will go to SITE Santa Fe, Valle de Oro, Albuquerque, Rio Grande Headwaters, Colorado, Chaco Canyon, El Vado Lake, Turkey Creek, Gila, Elephant Butte, Bosque del Apache, El Paso, Indio Mountain Research

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Station, and Marfa. In consideration for being permitted to participate in the Field Trip, I hereby agree to and represent the following: 1

I acknowledge that the physical activities to be undertaken on the Field Trip include: Participating in the Land Arts of the American West Program (LAAW) includes travel with the LAAW program to the above-mentioned sites, which are both remote and urban, shopping for your cook day, camping at remote primitive public sites, developed public sites, and on private property, working with other students and faculty to set up/tear down base camp and deal with daily camp logistics, managing your personal travel and camping needs, working on independent projects and course assignments at these sites, working collaboratively on the Valle de Oro project, taking group walking tours of urban and remote investigative sites, and exploring urban and remote work sites independently and/or with a partner.

2

I acknowledge that there are risks and dangers associated with field trips and that all risk cannot be prevented. The risks and hazards of this Field Trip, which can result in injury to me, death, and property damage include, but may not be limited to, Risks include travel accidents, camping accidents, hiking accidents, accidents while out working at any of these sites, accidents while shopping or at any location while we are in transit, and other risks that may or may not be foreseeable.

3

Knowing the risks and hazards described above, I voluntarily accept them and agree that any claim that I may have now or in the future against UNM, its officers, employees, or agents, whether in contract or tort, arising out of my participation in the Field Trip, wherever such claim arises, shall be governed by the law of the State of New Mexico, including the New Mexico Tort Claims Act, Section 41–4–1 et seq., NMSA 1978, as amended. I understand that the New Mexico Tort Claims Act imposes limits and restrictions upon civil lawsuits against UNM and its employees. 4 I acknowledge that UNM does not provide medical insurance for field trip participants. I agree to be financially responsible for any medical bills incurred as a result of any medical services that I receive. The University of New Mexico offers a group accident insurance policy for field trip participants. I acknowledge that if I do not have insurance, I must purchase this insurance coverage through the UNM Risk Management Office in Albuquerque and that I need to contact that office at 277–9790 to do so.

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5 I represent that I am physically able, with or without accommodation, to participate in the Field Trip and am able to use necessary equipment and/or supplies. If I need accommodations for a disability for the Field Trip, I understand that I must contact (fill in name of office providing services for students with disabilities at UNMG). 6 Should I require emergency medical treatment as a result of accident or illness arising during the Field Trip, I consent to such treatment. I understand that the instructors on the Field Trip may not have up-to-date emergency medical training and that in an emergency, the instructors will use their best efforts to protect my well-being and safety. I will notify the professor leading the trip in advance in writing if I have a medical condition about which emergency personnel should be informed. 7 I hereby provide the following emergency contact information (Optional): Name of emergency contact and phone: ________________ Health insurance company and policy number: ______________________ Severe allergies or other medical condition: _______________________ 8

I understand that the UNM Student Code of Conduct applies to me during the Field Trip. I understand that UNM has the right to enforce the Student Code of Conduct and that sanctions may be imposed for violations, up to and including dismissal from the Field Trip and expulsion from UNM. I have carefully read this form before signing it. No representations, statements, or inducements, oral or written, apart from the foregoing written statement, have been made. The laws of the State of New Mexico shall govern this agreement, and New Mexico shall be the forum for any lawsuits filed under or incident to this form or to the Field Trip. _______________________ Signature of Participant _______________________ Printed Name ______________________ Date ______________________ Signature of parent or guardian (if Participant is under 18 years of age) ________________

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PLACE: APPALACHIA Participant Application For Please complete the following application, deliver or mail to . . . Attn: Erika Osborne/Place: Appalachia Division of Art and Design College of Creative Arts West Virginia University PO Box 6111 Morgantown, WV 26506–6111 Name: _________________________________________ Address: _______________________________________ ________________________________________________ Day Time Phone Number: ________________________ E-mail: _________________________________________ Phone Number:  _________________________________ Cell Phone Number:  _____________________________

Status: Guest status is available to students wishing to take this program as non-degree students.

Your current status: ____ Currently enrolled at West Virginia University IF WVU student are you ____ Undergraduate BFA – list year in program_______________ ____ Undergraduate BA – list year in program_____________________ ____  Undergraduate Other – list degree seeking and year in program________________________________________________ ____ Graduate MFA ____ Graduate MA ____ Graduate Other – list degree seeking________________________ _____ Currently enrolled at another Institution List institution, degree seeking and year in program _________________ ______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________

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____ Other (please explain)__________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________ ____ Check here if you are applying for Guest status at WVU Emergency Contact Information – two contacts are required: Name: ____________________________

Name: ______________________________

Phone Number: ____________________

Phone Number: ______________________

Address: __________________________

Address: ____________________________

Relationship: ______________________

Relationship: ________________________

Food Preference: ___Vegetarian

___Vegetarian w/fish

___ Meat

Any food allergies or special dietary needs? ___________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ Any special health conditions? (Note, certain health conditions may require a note from your doctor stating you are able to participate in the program)___________________________ ______________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Insurance Information: (Note that all participants need to provide proof of medical insurance. A copy of your insurance card should be brought on the trip.) Provider: _________________________ Primary policy holder:___________________ Policy number: ______________ Camping and outdoor experience and interests: (Note that this course involves camping in all conditions, backpacking, and canoeing)

PERSONAL STATEMENT: (Please include information about your artistic experience and background, why you are interested in taking the course, and what you hope to get out of it – IN

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ADDITION TO THIS PERSONAL STATEMENT, PLEASE INCLUDE WITH THIS APPLICATION A CD WITH 5 EXAMPLES OF YOUR ARTISTIC WORK IN JPEG FORMAT. Are you applying for a Place: Appalachia scholarship? Yes _____ No_____ ($1,000.00 worth of scholarship funds are available for the 2012 summer course) If applying for a scholarship, please briefly describe your financial need. APPLICANTS SIGNATURE: verifying that all information included in this application is correct to the best of my knowledge. Signature:Date: ________________

PLACE: APPALACHIA Acknowledgment of Risk and Assumption of Responsibility I understand that, during my participation on Place: Appalachia, I will be exposed to above-normal risks. Although the Place: Appalachia program has taken precautions to provide proper organization, supervision, instruction, and equipment for each trip, it is impossible for the Place: Appalachia program to guarantee absolute safety. I acknowledge that all risks cannot be eliminated without destroying the purpose and character of the trip or seminar. Also, I understand that I share the responsibility for safety on the trip, and I assume that responsibility. I agree to comply with the instructions and directions of the Place: Appalachia faculty members during the trip. The following describes some but not all of the risks. Place: Appalachia takes place out-of-doors, where participants are subject to environmental and other risks. Activities include hiking and backpacking, camping, canoeing, and outdoor art making. • Certain sections of the course take place in remote places, far from medical facilities. Communication and transportation are difficult and sometimes evacuations and medical care can be significantly delayed. • Equipment may fail or malfunction, despite reasonable maintenance and use.

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• Meals are prepared on gas stoves or fires. Some water requires disinfection before use. Camping risks and hazards include burns, cuts, diarrhea and flulike illness, and falling timber. • Travel is by vehicle, canoe, on foot, and by other means over rugged, unpredictable off-trail terrain, including downed timber, rivers, rapids, river crossings, mountain passes, steep slopes, and slippery rocks. Risks include collision, falling, capsizing, drowning, and others usually associated with such travel. • Environmental risks and hazards include rapidly moving, deep, or cold water; insects, snakes, and predators, including large animals; falling and rolling rock; and lightning, flash floods, and unpredictable forces of nature, including weather, which may change to extreme conditions without notice. Possible injuries and illnesses include hypothermia, frostbite, sunburn, heatstroke, dehydration, and other mild or serious conditions. I am aware that Place: Appalachia activities include risks of my injury or death. I understand the description above of these risks is not complete and that other unknown or unanticipated risks may result in property loss, injury, or death. I agree to assume responsibility for the inherent risks identified herein and those inherent risks not specifically identified. My participation in this activity is purely voluntary, no one is forcing me to participate, and I elect to participate in spite of and with knowledge of the inherent risks. I have no physical or psychological problems that would prohibit my participation in the trip. I further understand that West Virginia University will not provide medical or other insurance coverage for this trip. If I must evacuate for any reason, I understand I am personally responsible for all medical/evacuation fees and that I will not receive a refund of the trip fee. (Participants must provide a copy of their medical insurance card prior to participation). Participant Name (please print) Participant Signature Trip and Date I (we) acknowledge that there can be no guarantee of absolute safety against risks and unforeseen accident, as detailed above, and that West Virginia University will not provide medical or other insurance coverage for this trip, and consent to the participation of the above-named individual with the Place: Appalachia program. Parent/Guardian Name (please print) If participant is under 18 years of age Parent/Guardian Signature ________________

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PLACE: APPALACHIA Taking Care of Yourself Water – It is important that you carry with you one to two quarts of water at all times. It’s easy to get dehydrated when outdoors all day. It is very important that you DO NOT drink water from rivers, streams, groundwater, etc. Only drink water from camp or designated pumps. Food – You will find that you burn more calories working outside during this class than you normally do, so be sure to eat plenty. On hikes or long walks, make sure to bring some snacks (trail mix, fruit, energy bars, etc.) Critters – One of West Virginia’s greatest resources is its wildlife. However, some can be harmful. We will be in zones with snakes, ticks, mosquitos, bears, etc. Always be aware of your environment. Shake shoes out before you put them on. Don’t leave out food or other supplies that animals might be interested in. We will go into more detail on bear etiquette when we reach our campsites. The elements – Be prepared for extreme environments. Dress accordingly – think in layers. Be sure to always wear sun block, sunglasses, or a good hat while outside. Always be prepared for what weather might come. Getting lost – Always, always, always tell several people where you are going and when you are expecting to return. If you plan on wandering far from camp, it is best to go with a partner, take whistles, use a map and compass, and be aware of natural landmarks for navigation. Make sure that you have a first-aid kit and space blanket and plenty of water and food. If you are not comfortable going far from camp, that’s fine. If you want get more accustomed to exploring the areas, go a little further from camp each day in order to familiarize yourself with the environment in steps. We will be near rivers at certain points of the journey. If you wish to swim, assess the water, it may be moving too fast and strongly to swim in. If the water seems safe, let several people know you are swimming and where you plan to go. If possible, swim with a friend. Breakfast will be served at 7:30 a.m. and dinner at 6:30 p.m. If you are not present at these times, we will assume that you are lost and begin to organize a search. If you do get lost – Remain calm. Build a shelter, and stay where you are!

Camping Basics Setting up your tent – Do not set your tent up so far from camp it will be difficult to find it after dark. Do not set your tent up near, or in, ditches, waterways, or edges. Always set your tent up at least 200 feet from any water source. The Outdoor Restroom – In wilderness areas, going to the bathroom requires a little more attention. Upon arriving at each site, we will designate specific bathroom areas. Always dig a hole four to six inches deep – no more, no less. After

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you have finished, properly cover the hole and always burn your toilet paper. It is nice to place a rock over the area to let others know not to dig in the same spot. Meals – Erika and Trace will have breakfast ready at 7:30 a.m. every morning. It is the cook team’s responsibility to have dinner ready at 6:30 p.m.; therefore, cook teams should begin dinner preparations about one to two hours before the meal. Breakfast and dinner will be held as a group. This is a time to relax and enjoy everyone’s company, share ideas, and discuss readings. Cook teams are required to purchase the food necessary for their meals. We will be stopping between sites to restock supplies. Students are responsible for making their own lunches. Emergency Call Number Erika Osborne’s cell phone – 505–350–8407 Tracy Stuckey’s cell phone – 505–975–4971 WVU Art and Design Office – 304–293–2376

Manual  181

Budgets Land Arts of the American West Annual Budget 2013 Land Arts of the American West

Grants

Lannan Foundation a. Transportation b. Visiting artists c. Community projects d. Exhibition/Publication e. technology/equipment f. Teaching assistantships

$50K

Lannan Endowed Chair a. Field logistics coordinator

$12k

Mellon Foundation a. LAAW Field program director b. International research program c. Post-MFA research award

$50k

Expenditures $8k $10k $10k $5k $5K $12K $50K $12K $12K

TOTAL

$30k $5k $15k $50K $112K

________________

Field Studies Annual Budget 2003 Lachlan River Valley Field Study Program (Grenfell, Forbes, Cowra) 2003 Survey for Lachlan Field Study Presentation to Henry Lawson Festival Art $55.00 Committee Regional Maps $37.00 River Maps $69.65 Hire Car (27.2 .03–3.3.03) $487.55 Food $102.00 Accommodation (2 x nights) $167.00

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Lachlan Field Study Field Trips 1, 2, and 3 Trip 1 Hire Bus Excess Mileage/Cleaning Function Food Trip 2 Food Accommodation Sundry Field Expenses Trip 3 RAT Aviation (Two one-hour flights) Food Function Sundry Field Expenses TOTAL Field Research Expenses Field/ANU Exhibitions Production assistance for 21 artists Painters Photographers Glass artists Ceramists Textiles Sculpture Text/Image Exhibition venue modification Poster/catalogue (A4 x 2) Invitation Exhibition Curation/Install/Uninstall TOTAL Exhibition Expenses GRAND TOTAL

$450.70 $359.45 $79.57 $27.75 $174.79 $83.00 $25.00 $462.00 $14.10 $48.56 $25.58 $2,668.70

$2,500.00 4 6 2 3 1 2 3 $350.00 $1,500.00 $150.00 $2,500.00 $7,000.00 $9,668.70

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Program equipment lists Land Arts of the American West Personal Camping Equipment List • Water containers: back/day pack size (1–2 quart) • Personal hygiene articles to include: toothbrush, lip balm, soap, shampoo, hand cleaner, lotion, insect repellant, sun block, towels (hand/large) • Camp knife (pocket) • Day pack for hikes (to transport food, water, and course materials) • Backpack – an optional replacement for a duffle bag for those interested in overnight campouts • Small tarp for gear protection in camp • Warm sleeping bag (It is typical to be exposed to nighttime temperatures from the high 80s to the low 20s.) • A Thermarest sleeping pad or something comparable • Headlamp (recommended) or flashlight with extra bulb + batteries • Personal emergency kit (to be kept with you at all times outside of camp) including foil space blanket, whistle, COMPASS, maps, adhesive bandages, sterile gauze pads, adhesive tape, antiseptic, water purification tablets, matches (strike anywhere) or lighter, chemical glow stick, pencil and paper • Low-profile, well-constructed small tent with rain fly (coordinate with crew mates to share where possible). Expect strong winds. Buy quality over size. • Camp clothing – think LAYERS for warmth and protection from the elements) • Work clothing (one pair of pants and long-sleeve shirt for messy work, work gloves) • Adverse weather gear: (cold, hot, rain) rain gear / outer shell, thermal layers, warm gloves, heavy socks, knit hat, sun hat, shorts, sunglasses, loose-fitting long-sleeve shirt and pants (to protect from the sun) • Hiking shoes/boots: broken in, good support, waterproof a plus • Special dietary or medical needs (alert program director to any prescriptions, allergies, or special needs) • Digital Cameras • Music, books • Binoculars or other personal resources (optional) • Personal studio materials and tools (list to be provided), journal, drawing implements, video tapes, laptop, camera • Alarm clock • Watch to be to breakfast and dinner on time (recommended)

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Land Arts of the American West Kitchen and Camp Equipment List Item(s)

Quantity Should Have

Dutch oven (with 1 lid tongs)

3

Cast-iron fry pans

3

10-quart tin pot (with lids)

2

12-quart tin pot (with lid)

1

Small pots

3

Griddles

2

Colander

2

Steel bowls

5

Small strainer

1

Metal camp kettles (with lids)

3

Hot-water Coleman thermos

3

Pressure cooker

1

Hot liquid mugs

12

Cold liquid cups

17

Plates

25

Bowls

25

Butter knives

20

Spoons

20

Forks

20

Cutting boards

6

Chopping knives

4

Serrated knives

4

Paring knives

2

Knife sharpener

1

Spatulas

3

Ladles

3

Manual  185

Item(s)

Quantity Should Have

Slotted spoon

2

Large serving spoons (not slotted)

2

Wooden spoons

3 small

Grill tongs

2

Grill spatula

1

Grill fork

1

Cheese grater

1

Cheese slicer

1

Vegetable peeler

1

Potato smasher

1

Garlic press

1

Whisk

1

Braising brush

1

Can openers

2

Oven mittens

4

Measuring spoon

1

2 cup liquid measuring cup

1

Dry measuring cup set

1

3-cup Tupperware containers

5

1 gallon (16 cup / 128 oz.) Tupperware containers

3

Miscellaneous storage Tupperware

3–4

Ziplock sandwich bags

3 boxes

Ziplock quart bags

3 boxes

Ziplock gallon bags

3 boxes

Aluminum foil rolls

2

Plastic wrap rolls

2

Chip clips

4

Silver 10-gallon Tupperware tubs

8

Silver 18-gallon Tupperware tubs

10

Wash tray Tupperware bins

4

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Item(s)

Quantity Should Have

Metal dish racks

3

Scubbies

10

Large sponges

5

Large dish soap

1

Anti-bacterial hand cleaner

2–4

Gallon Clorox

1

Box SOS pads

1

GoJo

1

Distilled white vinegar Rubber gloves Windex

1–2 qt. bottle 2 1 bottle

Dust pan and brush

1

Paper towel rolls

24

Toilet paper Tampons 10 foot by 20 foot tarp

1 roll per day 1 box 4

Miscellaneous tarps

2–4

Large kitchen tent poles

28

Small kitchen tent poles

12

Corner connectors Eyebolts for connectors “T” connectors

at least 16 10 at least 8

Bungies with balls on end

100

Coolers

10

7-gallon water jugs

12–15

Black rubber Bungies to attach water jugs to tent structure

20

Lanterns

5

Plastic (heavy duty) camp tables

4

Camp chairs

18–20

Manual  187

Item(s) Large garbage cans 39-gallon garbage bags – heavy-duty outdoor kind

Quantity Should Have 2 2–3 boxes

Grill grates for BBQ

2

Lighter fluid

6

Matches (strike anywhere)

2 boxes

Coleman camp lighters

6

Propane canisters

9

Match-Lite Charcoal large bags

4

Ax Pickhead ax / hoe

1–2 2

Shovels

2–3

Wrench

1

Grommet kit

1

Tie wire rolls

1

Flashlight (D-cells)

2

AA batteries: 24 rechargeable

24

Duct tape (gray, green, yellow, red, orange, pink)

1 roll of each

Permanent markers

4

First-aid kit

1

Trauma scissors

1

Stethoscope

1

Thermometer

2

Epi pen

1

Gloves

1

Mask

1

Sam splint

1

Syringe

1

Hot / cold packs

5

Solar panel

1

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Item(s)

Quantity Should Have

Marine battery (inverter battery charger)

1

Charge controller and cables

1

Mac laptop (white)

2

MacBook Pro 13” Silver

2

Dell PC laptop

1

SONY A58 SLT

1

Audio recorder

3

Directional mic

1

Panasonic video DV camera

1

Canon video camera

1

Panasonic digital camera 10MP

1

(Canon) digital camera

1

GPS unit

1

Inverters

3

SD card

7–10

SD card readers

2

External hard drives (ORANGE)

2

GoPro Silver (plus extended battery)

1

Manuals Electronic home repair kit Black electrical tape

for devices 1 1 roll

Bundling straps

2 packs

Ring terminals

2 boxes

Mouse

1

Analog multimeter

1

Tripod

2

Rechargable battery charger

2

Panasonic video camera battery

2

Canon video camera battery

2

Panasonic still camera battery

2

Manual  189

Item(s)

Quantity Should Have

Panasonic still camera battery charger

1

Power strip

1

Mac laptop (white) power cord

2

MacBook Pro power supplies

2

Dell laptop power cord

1

Audio recorder cable

3

Tiny gray Panasonic mic

1

Panasonic video camera USB cable

1

Panasonic video camera power adapter

1

Canon video camera USB cable

1

Canon video camera power adapter

1

Firewire 800 9-pin to 4-pin cable

1

Firewire (gray/orange)

1

USB cable (gray, unknown ends)

1

AC power adapter (white)

1

“±” black and red cables

3 each

Audio cord (red, yellow, white)

2

Audio cord (black, red; both ends)

1

Video cord (red, blue, green)

1

190 Manual

Field locations Field Studies Field Locations 1996 Semester 1 / Wilderness Blue Waterholes / Kosciuszko National Park, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Monga State Forest, NSW

1997 Semester 1 / Rural Murrumbidgee on the Hay Plains, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural The Cultivated Landscape, Griffith, NSW Murray Darling Basin

1998 Semester 1 / Rural and Wilderness Khancoban and the Upper Murray River, NSW/Vic Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural Tanja on the Far South Coast, NSW Semester 2 / Rural Lake George, NSW

1999 Semester 1 / Rural and Wilderness Imaging the Snowy 50 Years On, NSW/Vic Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Urban Inner Sydney, NSW Semester 2 / Rural Guluga, Tilba, NSW Semester 2 / Rural

Manual  191

Snowy Mountains Scheme 50th Anniversary, Cabramurra, NSW Murray Darling Basin

2000 Semester 1 / Wilderness and Rural The Shoalhaven, Shoalhaven River, NSW Semester 2 / Wilderness Jervis Bay National and Marine Parks, NSW Semester 2 / Wilderness Namadgi National Park, ACT

2001 Semester 1 / Wilderness Monga in Concert, Monga National Park, NSW Semester 1 / Urban Observatory, ANU Canberra ACT Semester 2 / Rural Salt – Murray River Valley, NSW/Vic Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Water – Macquarie Marshes, NSW Murray Darling Basin

2002 Semester 1 / Wilderness Aragunnu, Mimosa Rocks National Park, NSW Semester 1 / Rural Land$cape: Gold and Water 1, Cowra, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural Land$cape: Gold and Water 2, Cowra, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Contested Forests: Monga • Badga • Mogo

2003 Semester 1 / Rural Lachlan River Valley, Grenfell, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural (coastal) Imaging the Coast at Kiolia, NSW

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Semester 2 / Rural Body Ecology, Lake George, NSW Semester 2 / Cosmic Cosmic Ecology, Lake George, NSW

2004 Semester 1 / Rural Gunnedah, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Backpacking the Budawang Range, NSW

2005 Semester 1 / Rural Wentworth, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Desert Country: Mungo and Kinchega National Parks, NSW Murray Darling Basin

2006 Semester 1 / Rural Shepparton, Vic Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Wilderness Lake Mungo, NSW Murray Darling Basin

2007 Semester 1 / Rural Scottsdale, NSW Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural St. George, Qld Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Urban Cockatoo Island, NSW

2008 Semester 1 / Rural Tumut, NSW

Manual  193

Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Rural Riverland, SA Murray Darling Basin Semester 2 / Urban Kimbricki. Sydney, NSW

2009 Semester 1 / Rural Benalla, Vic Murray Darling Basin

2010 Semester 1 / Suburban The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney, NSW

2011 Semester 1 / Rural (Coastal) The Eden Project. Eden, NSW Semester 2 / Suburban Constructed Wetlands of the ACT. Canberra, ACT

2012 Semester 1 / Rural Water, Water, Shepparton, Vic Semester 2 / Suburban The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney II, NSW

2013 Semester 1 / Rural (Coastal) South East Coast Adaptation Field Study, Far South Coast, NSW Semester 2 / Suburban The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney II, NSW

2014 Semester 1 / Suburban Crace, ACT ________________

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PLACE: APPALACHIA Field Locations 2010–2013 (West Virginia) • Smoke Hole Canyon, South Branch of the Potomac River • Canoe trip along a 20-mile stretch of the river • Time at Jess Judy Campground • • • • •

Kayford Mountain – Larry Gibson’s property Coal River Valley – Coal River Mountain Watch Property Vu Ja Vineyard and Farm, Spencer Old Otter Holler Farm, Pence Springs Seneca Creek Backcountry • Backpacking along Seneca Creek _______________

Land Arts of the American West Field Locations 2000 Wild Rivers, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Cedar Mesa, Utah Horse Tanks, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Horseshoe Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Bisti Badlands, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Double Negative, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Overton, Nevada Lake Mead, National Recreation Area, Nevada Mount Withington, Cibola National Forest, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas Three Rivers, National Recreation Area, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Bosque del Apache, National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico

Manual  195

2002 El Vado Lake, State Park, New Mexico Nogales Cliff Dwelling, Native American Cultural Site, Llaves, New Mexico Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Goblin Valley, State Park, Utah Little Wild Horse Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Blue Notch, National Recreation Area, Lake Powell, Utah Bisti Badlands, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Double Negative, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Overton, Nevada Lake Mead, National Recreation Area, Nevada Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Eagle Sanctuary, Zuni Pueblo, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico Bosque del Apache, National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico Tenabo, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas

2003 El Vado Lake, State Park, New Mexico Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Hoover Dam, Lake Mead, National Recreation Area, Nevada Double Negative, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Overton, Nevada Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Blue Notch, National Recreation Area, Lake Powell, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah

196 Manual

Big Bend, National Park, Texas Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Adobe Alliance, Presidio, Texas Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico

2004 Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Sunset Crater National Monument, Arizona Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Point Sublime, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Sun Tunnels, Lucin, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Blue Notch, National Recreation Area, Lake Powell, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas

2005 Anaya Springs, Cerrillos, New Mexico Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Point Sublime, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Sun Tunnels, Lucin, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah

Manual  197

Blue Notch, National Recreation Area, Lake Powell, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico Sawtooth Mountains, Cibola National Forest, New Mexico Black Cat Farm, Apache Creek, New Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico

2006 Anaya Spring, Cerrillos, New Mexico Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Point Sublime, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Bingham Canyon Mine, Salt Lake City, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Sun Tunnels, Lucin, Utah San Rafael Swell, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico Sawtooth Mountains, Cibola National Forest, New Mexico Black Cat Farm, Apache Creek, New Mexico Turkey Springs, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Deming, New Mexico Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico

198 Manual

2007 Sunset Crater, National Monument, Arizona Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Point Sublime, Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Salt Flat Farms, Wendover, Utah Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah East Farms, West Point, Utah San Rafael Swell, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Moon House, Bureau of Land Management, Native American Cultural Site, Utah Anaya Springs, Cerrillos, New Mexico Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico

2009 Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah Joe’s Valley, Manti-La Sal National Forest, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Sunset Crater National Monument, AZ Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico The Very Large Array, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, New Mexico Turkey Springs, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, Texas

2010 Nob Hill farmer’s market, Albuquerque, New Mexico Calliope Collaborative Farm, Anton Chico, New Mexico

Manual  199

Farmers Market, Las Vegas, New Mexico Hobo Ranch, Las Vegas, New Mexico Industrial feedlots, auction site, Dahlhart, Texas Kiowa Grasslands, New Mexico Farmers Market, Taos Pueblo, New Mexico Northern Wheat Cooperative, Gallegos Farm, Costilla, New Mexico San Rafael Swell, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah City Complex, Garden Valley, Nevada Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico Animas Valley, Coronado Cibola National Forest, New Mexico Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, Texas

2011 San Rafael Swell, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Spiral Jetty, Promontory Point, Great Salt Lake, Utah Sun Tunnels, Lucin, Utah Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Clean Livin’, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Arcosanti, Cordes Junction, Arizona Biosphere II, Oracle, Arizona Armijo Canyon, El Malpais, National Monument, New Mexico US/Mexico Border, Animas Valley, Coronado Cibola National Forest, New Mexico Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, Mexico Paquimé, Native American Cultural Site, Chihuahua, Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, Texas

2012 Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, Arizona Wupatki, National Monument, Native American Cultural Site, Arizona Tipover Canyon, Kaibab National Forest, Arizona Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, Utah Muley Point, Bureau of Land Management, Cedar Mesa, Utah

200 Manual

Citadel, Native American Cultural Site, Cedar Mesa, Utah Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, Texas Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico

2013 Rio Grande Headwaters, Creede, Colorado El Valle, New Mexico El Vado Lake State Park, New Mexico The Fodder Project, Anton Chico, New Mexico Pojoaque Pueblo, New Mexico Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Armijo Canyon, El Malpais, National Monument, New Mexico The Lightning Field, Dia Art Foundation, Quemado, New Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, Texas Otero Mesa, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas

2014 Valle de Oro, National Wildlife Refuge, Albuquerque, New Mexico Rio Grande Headwaters, Creede, Colorado Chaco Canyon, National Park, Native American Cultural Site, New Mexico El Vado Lake, State Park, New Mexico Turkey Creek, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Elephant Butte Lake, State Park, New Mexico Valle de Oro, National Wildlife Refuge, Albuquerque, New Mexico Center for Environmental Research and Management, University of Texas, El Paso, Texas Big Bend State Park, Texas Dixon Water Foundation, Marfa, Texas

2015 San Rafael Swell, Bureau of Land Management, Utah Horseshoe Canyon, National Park, Utah Glen Canyon Dam, Bureau of Reclamation, Page, Arizona Cebolla Canyon, Bureau of Land Management, New Mexico

Manual  201

El Vado Lake, State Park, New Mexico Hog Waller Farm, Dinétah, New Mexico Valle Vidal, Carson National Forest, New Mexico Gila River Collaborative Project, Gila Wilderness, New Mexico Big Bend State Park, Texas White Sands, National Monument, New Mexico _______________

Visual March to Prespes Field Locations Bitola, FYROM Florina, Western Macedonia, Greece Drosopigi, Western Macedonia, Greece Kaimaktsalan Mountain, Western Macedonia, Greece Kristalopigi, Western Macedonia, Greece Mosxoxori, Western Macedonia, Greece Prespes, National Park of Prespes, Western Macedonia, Greece Ptolemais, Western Macedonia, Greece Rakickam, Southern Albania Resen, FYROM Shyec, Southern Albania Thessaloniki, Greece

202 Manual

Visiting artist, scholar, activist Visual March to Prespes Visiting Artist/Scholar/Activist Maria Aggeli (art critic) Lena Athanasopoulou (photographer) Theresa Chong (painter) Yorgos Drosos (multimedia artist) Ingo Duennebier (photographer) Mark Durden (art theorist) Elena Efeoglou (photographer) Dimitra Ermeidou (photographer) Vassilis Fioravantes (art theorist) Marai Georgoussi (art theorist) Leonidas Gelos (painter) Penny Geka (painter) Akis Goumas (jewelry artist) Ioanna Gremouti (sculptor jewelry artist) Maria Grigoriou (weaving artist) Nina Felshin (art critic) Thomas Hesvold (painter) Christos Ioannidis (photographer) Filippos Kalamaras (sculptor) Fotini Kariotaki (installation artist) Panos Kokkinias (photographer) Peny Korre (installation artist) Sofia Kiriakou (painter) Stathis Lagoudakis (sculptor) Pavlow Lefas (architect) Nora Lefa (architect-digital artist) Thodoris Lotis (sound artist) Yorgos Makkas (photographer) Nikos Markou (photographer) Russel Roberts (art theorist) Despina Pantazopoulou (jewelry artist) Yannis Papadopoulos (weaving artist) Irini Papakonstantinou (art theorist) Maria Papalexiou (painter) Nikos Patsavos (architect) Nikos Panayotopoulos (photographer) Pinelopi Petsini (photographer, art theorist)

Manual  203

Iakovos Rigos (architect) Kiki Stoumbou (installation artist) Danis Stilidis (architect) Yorgos Taxiarhopoulos (artist) Stella Syllaiou (museologist, art theorist) Lina Theodorou (multimedia artist) Yiorgis Yerolimbos (photographer) _______________

Field Studies Visiting Artist/Scholar/Activist Scholars Dr. Malcolm Pettigrove, Academic methods, ANU Dr. Kathleen Quinlan, Academic methods, ANU Val Plumwood, Philosopher, ANU Dr. Jane Roberts, river ecologist, Dr. Brendan, landscape ecologist, ANU Philippa Kelly, writer, editor Dr. Graham Howe, Historian Bart Meehan, ANUgreen: Urban ecology Dr. Richard Baker, landscape ecologist Ken Johnson, landscape ecologist Professor Candace Slater, cultural landscapes, Berkley University Djon Mundine OAM, writer (Indigenous culture) Dr. Guy Fitzharding, landscape ecologist, University of Western Sydney Dr. George Main, environmental historian, National Museum of Australia, photographer Dr. Sarah Ryan, ecologist, CSIRO, photographer Dr. Sarah Beavis, geologist, ANU Dr. Joy McCann, social and environmental historian, ANU, photographer Dr. Brendan Mackey, landscape ecologist, ANU, performance art Dr. David Curtis, researcher and policy adviser Dr. Jeanette Hope, anthropologist Dick Atkin, documentary writer Dr. Keith Ward, river ecologist, Goulburn Broken Catchment Authority Simon Casanelia, river health, Goulburn Broken Catchment Authority Dr. Stephanie Lavau, social and cultural aspects of the environment Ella Anselmi, Indigenous knowledge, land rights Carolyn Young, PhD candidate, ANU Dr. Deborah Crisp, musicologist, ANU

204 Manual

Viveka Turnbul Hocking, PhD candidate, ANU, designer Dr. Grant Whiteman, ecologist, the Australian Landscape Trust Professor Tony Capon, planetary health, University of Sydney David Mason, urban agriculture policy, University of Western Sydney / NSW government Dr. Jane Dixon, food sociologist, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU Ferne Edwards, National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU Dr. Sarah James, sociologist, University of Western Sydney Susan Thompson, City Futures Research Centre, University of NSW Ossie Cruze, Indigenous elder, Monaroo Bobberrer Gudu Aboriginal Cultural Centre Dr. Ian Knowd, tourism studies, School of Social Sciences, University of Western Sydney Dr. Richard Black, architecture, RMIT University Barbara Norman, urban and regional planning, University of Canberra Bob Webb, sustainability and climate change, ANU Helen Berry, health and climate change researcher, University of Canberra Andrew Mackenzie, landscape architecture, University of Canberra

Activists Andrew Wong Mindra Esgurra David Carpenter Clive Johnson Peter Beale Ellen Draper Susan Wilson Annabel Walsh Jill French Petah Atkinson Owen Whitaker Lauren Van Dyke Robert Lacy Jenelle Becker Louise Halsey Ray Thomas Chris Thorn John Maguire Michael Mobbs Bill Shields Prue Acton

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Neville Atkinson Rod McLennan Rebecca Palmer-Brodie Libby Hepburn

Visiting artists David Reid, photographer (video documentary) Yuri Wiedenhofer, ceramicist, NSW Madeleine Meyer, ceramicist, NSW Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, dance (choreographer) Dr. Mark O’Connor, poet Reinhart Buettner, visual artist (performance and installation) Leanne Bear, composer/musician (violin) Jennifer Lawrence, visual artist (textiles) Dan Maginnity, visual artist (sculptor) Dr. Marty Huehner, visual artist (ceramicist) John Chappell, geologist, visual artist (sculptor) Meta Rothery, visual artist (painter) William Becket and Ms. Rebecca Dowling, visual artists (ceramics) Trish Freeman, visual artist (painter) Dr. Joy McCann, visual artist (photographer) Kristie Rea, visual artist (glass artist) Harry Lang, poet Dr. Zussiana Slobeslay Dan Scollay, creative writer Marg Whyte, visual artist (medium not recorded) Steve Hederics, visual artist (medium not recorded) Ann Hederics, visual (medium not recorded) Suzanne James, visual artist (medium not recorded) Tor Fromyhr, musician/conductor (violin) Meg Buchanan, visual artist (painter) Charles Cooper, visual artist (painter) Ian Bettinson, visual artist (painter) Margit Brünner, visual artist (painter) Marshall Weber, visual artist (print/book maker, Brooklyn, NY) John Laing, visual artist (photography) Rhonda Laing, visual artist (wood) Christine James, drawer, printmaker, creative writer Janet DeBoos, visual artist (ceramicist) Dorothy Clews, visual artist (textiles) Dana Gluze, visual artist (photographer) Doug Spowart, visual artist (photographer, artist books)

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Victoria Cooper, visual artist (photographer, artist books) Dean Sewell, visual artist (photographer) Nick Hollo, visual artist (painter) John Mills, electronic musician Ewan Foster, musician composer Sue McDonald, visual artist (drawer) Janet French, visual artist (sculptor) Duncan Watt, visual artist (ceramicist) Studio Racket: Paul Mosig and Rachel Peachey, visual artists Alexandra de Blas, journalist, broadcaster Vida Sumner, visual artist (painter) Jane Wilcox, creative writer Dooley Lovegrove, visual artist (wood) Pauline Balderstone, visual artist (textile printer) Charles Tambiah, visual artist (photographer) Clint and Liz Frankel, visual artists (glass) Tim Baulderstone, visual artist (sculptor) Yvette Fran, visual artist (drawer) Gary Duncan, visual artist (painter) Kathleen Whelan, visual artist (sculptor) Tim Rowston, visual artist (photographer) Tony Dible, visual artist (photographer) David Suckling, visual artist (sculptor) Bill Gilbert, visual artist (performance artist/sculptor) Yoshimi Hayashi, visual artist (ceramicist) Blake Gibson, visual artist (painter) Cedra Wood, visual artist (painter) Joseph Mougel, visual artist (sculptor) Rachel Sweeney, dancer Thattchai Hongphaeng, visual artist (sculptor) K. B. Jones, visual artist (painter)

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Exhibitions and publications Visual March to Prespes Exhibitions and Publications Exhibitions Landscapes of Memories/Fields of Vision, curator Syrago Tsiara, Thessaloniki: Center of Contemporary Art, State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012. Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015.

Editions Yannis, Daikopoulos, and Ziogas Yannis (editors), Nature/Limits/Materials, Volume of the Proceedings of the Seminar Nature/Limits/Materials (Florina: Center of Environmental Education of Meliti, and Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia, 2011). Yannis, Ziogas (editor), Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape (Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015). Yannis, Ziogas, The Diary of a PD 407 (Athens: Egokeros, 2011). Yannis, Ziogas (editor), Visual March to Prespes 2007 (Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008). Yannis, Ziogas, and Nanis Nikos (editors), Recycling Artistically, Center of Environmental Education of Meliti, and Department of Fine and Applied Arts (Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2013). Yannis, Ziogas, Panayotopoulos Nikos, and Petsini Penelopi (editors), Global Landscapes/ Παγκόσμια Τοπία, Collective Volume for the Visual March to Prespes (Athens: Egokeros, 2009). Yannis, Ziogas, and Syllaiou Sylaiou (editors), Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, Conference Proceedings of the Homonymous Event (8–9 Jan 2015) Organized During the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, State Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, 2017.

Bibliography/electronic references Aggeliki, Avgitidou, [Body]:[Space], in Visual March to Prespes 2007, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 18, 2008. Alexandra, Antoniadou, First Painting Workshop, Yannis Ziogas: We Explore Nature and History, News of Art, Vol. 200, Oct. 2011. Andreas, Andreou, Prespes and the Marches Towards it, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, A Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 11, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015.

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Athanasopoulou, Lena, Conversation on the Visual March, KAPUT, Mar. 2011, Vol. 2, www.kaput.gr/02/con tents% 2002.htm Bill, Gilbert, Pedagogy of the Landscape: Land Arts of the American West, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 25–31, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Dimitra, Ermidou, Waiting, Revelation, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 6, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Fotini, Kariotaki, The Antidote of the Lake, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 22–23, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Fotini, Kariotaki, The Mountain and its Side Effects, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 9, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Giorgos, Taxiarhopoulos, Lake and Stone: Circles of Activities and Vertical Dreams, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 29, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Giorgos, Taxiarhopoulos, The Virtues of the Mountain: Burdens and Horizons, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 14–15, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Iakovos, Rigos, The Continuous Monument in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 35–46, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Ifigenia, Vamvakidou, Ziogas Yannis, and Sapountzis Lazaros, Visual March το Prespes: Art and Local History, 1st International Conference of Semiotics and Visual Communication 25–27 Nov., Lemesos: Technological University of Cyprus, 2011. Ingo, Dunnebier, Concerning the Lake and the Videoprojection in Koula, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 25, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Ingo, Dunnebier, Concerning the Mount Ain, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 11, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Katerina, Anastasiou, and Yannis Ziogas, “Shows us the Way to Prespes,” Epohi, July 20th 2011. Katerina, Koskina, Introductory Note, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, A Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 8, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Kostas, Marinos, Visual Dialogues with . . . Nomadic Philosophy, Macedonia, Aug. 8th 2010. Maria, Aggeli, Framework, Conception, Thoughts, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 5, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Maria, Aggeli, The Experience, the Future, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 17, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Maria, Aggeli, From Visual to . . ., Highlights, Vol. 36, Sep.–Oct. 2008, pp. 40–42. Maria, Aggeli, You Are Invited to Our Workshop Ideas About My Place, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 30, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Maria, Tsantsanoglou, A Process in the Materials of Nature and the Borders of Art, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 9, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Nikos, Panayotopoulos, About Borders: About a Program of Interdisciplinary and Activities, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 27, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Nikos, Panayotopoulos, WRITING BACK: Towards the Realization of New Artistic Activities, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 12, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Nikos, Panayotopoulos, and Petsini Pinelopi, Theory, Criticism and Artistic Activities, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 19–23, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Nina, Felshin, Political Topographies-Visual March to Prespes 2011 (translation Yannis Ziogas), Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of

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Experiencing the Landscape, 107–112, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Panayotis, Delis, Conceptualizations of Space and Place in the Framework of the Educational Processes of the School of Fine Arts of Florina, graduate dissertation, Department of Anthropology and History, University of Aegean, 33–48, Mytiline, 2015. Pinelopi, Petsini, A Periphery with Geographic, and not Only, Distance, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 13 (Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008). Pinelopi, Petsini, For a Broader Context, for a New Dictionary in Art, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 28 Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Pinelopi, Petsini, Ziogas Yannis, and Panayotopoulos Nikos, Introduction Note of the Editors, Global Landscapes/Παγκόσμια Τοπία, Collective Volume for the Visual March to Prespes, 9–12 (Athens: Egokeros, 2009). Sofia, Kiriakou, A Boat with Pelicans, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 24, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Sofia, Kiriakou, A Forest Full of Fireflies, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 10, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Sofia, Kiriakou, I am the Place Where I Find Myself: Collecting Material for a Visual Guide of Wandering-Survival in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 71–80, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Stella, Syllaiou, Landscape: Histories, Political Representations in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 7–16, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Stella, Syllaiou, Gelos Leonidas, and Ziogas Yannis, Exploring Ways Less Travelled: EyeTracking in Art, Re-New Festival 2013 Conference proceedings, 48–56, Copenhagen, 2013 Syrago, Tsiara, – Landscapes of Memories/Fields of Vision (catalog of the homonymous exhibition) (Thessaloniki: Center of Contemporary Art, State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2012). Theodoros, Hadjipantelis, Introduction Note, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 7, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Theodoris, Lotis, The Soundscapes of Prespes, in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 45–58, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Yannis, Daikopoulos, Visual March to Prespes as an Example of Transforming Education, in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 59–70, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Yannis, Daikopoulos, and Ziogas Yannis (editors), Introduction Notes in the Volume of the Proceedings of the Seminar Nature/Limits/Materials, Center of Environmental Education of Meliti, and Department of Fine and Applied Arts, 5, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2011. Yannis, Ziogas, The Area of Florina as a Space of Contemporary Archaeology, in the Transcripts of the Conference Western Macedonia from its Annexation to the Greek State to Now, University of Western Macedonia, 220–245, Epikentro, Thessaloniki, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, Between Prespes, Ptolemais, Mosxoxori, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 137–153, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, Collectors of Incidents, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 12, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Yannis, Ziogas, EXIT CITIES/BORDER CITIES, International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference (July 9–11, New York: St Francis College, 2012).

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Yannis, Ziogas, The Feeling of Art and Experience (. . . when we discover Pessoa or 22.246 pieces of paper), Global Landscapes/Παγκόσμια Τοπία, Collective Volume for the Visual March to Prespes, 24–47, Athens: Egokeros, 2009. Yannis, Ziogas, The Field of Prespes or the Originality of the Field II in Landscape: Histories, Political Representations, 17–36, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2017. Yannis, Ziogas, The Field of Prespes or the Originalitè of the Landscape, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 13–17, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, OΔOFG Sports, in Visual March to Prespes 2007, 21, Florina: University of Western Macedonia, 2008. Yannis, Ziogas, The Visual Gestures of the March: The Work as an Incident, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 33–35, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, The Work of Stamos as a Process of Transforming an International Code (Field Painting) in a Code of Interpreting Nature and Light: Pedagogical Applications. (Doctoral Dissertation, supervisor professor Vassilis Fioravantes), Pedagogical Department, University of the Aegean, Rhodes, 2013. Yannis, Ziogas, The Works of Visual March 2008–09, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 43–59, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, The Works of Visual March 2010, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 69–83, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, The Works of Visual March 2011, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 87–101, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015 Yannis, Ziogas, The Works of Visual March 2012: Walking in the Borders of Contemplation, Catalog of the Exhibition Visual March to Prespes 2007–14, a Process of Experiencing the Landscape, 115–127, Thessaloniki: State Museum of Contemporary Art, 2015. Yannis, Ziogas, Risk and danger 6 incidents of a nomadic process, The Paradigm of Visual March to Prespes, eds., Steven Rand, Heather Felty, New York: Apexart in the Volume Life Between Borders: The Nomadic Life of Curators and Artists), New York: Apexart, 2013.

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Land Arts of the American West Exhibitions and Publications 1995 Exhibitions: • The Potters of Mata Ortíz/Los Ceramistas de Mata Ortíz: transforming a tradition, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM

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Publications: • “Mata Ortíz: Traditions and Innovations”, Ceramics Monthly, December, pp. 51–56. • “Juan Quezada: Mexican Potter”, The Studio Potter, December, vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 51–59. • “The Potters of Mata Ortiz/Las Ceramistas de Mata Ortíz: transforming a tradition”, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM.

1996 Publications: • “Quichua Pottery: Cultural Identity and the Market”, Journal of Occupational Science: Australia, Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 72–75.

1998 Exhibitions: • Juan Quezada, Haggerty Art Center, University of Dallas, National Council of Educators in the Ceramic Arts Conference, Dallas, TX

Publications: • “Juan Quezada: The Casas Grandes Revival”, National Council of Educators in the Ceramic Arts Journal, Vol. 19, 1998, pp. 35–38.

1999 Exhibitions: • The Potters of Mata Ortíz: Five Barrios, Seven Families/ Los Ceramistas de Mata Ortíz: Cinco Barrios, Siete Familias, Southwest Craft Center, San Antonio, TX, Riverside Museum, Riverside, CA

Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, “The Potters of Mata Ortíz: Five Barrios, Seven Families/ Los Ceramistas de Mata Ortíz: Cinco Barrios, Siete Familias”, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM & Exhibits USA, Kansas City, MO. • Gilbert, Bill, “Earth, Pigment and Fire: The Ceramics of Mata Ortíz”, Franz Mayer Museum Press, Mexico City, Mexico.

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2000 Exhibitions: • LAAW, Helix Gallery, Santa Fe NM • Crossing Boundaries, Transcending Categories: Contemporary Art From Mata Ortíz, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM • The Potters of Mata Ortiz: Five Barrios, Seven Families/ Los Ceramistas de Mata Ortíz: Cinco Barrios, Siete Familias, J. Wayne Stark University Center Galleries, College Station, TX, Perspective Gallery, Blacksburg, VA, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, ND, Lakeview Museum of Arts & Sciences, Peoria, IL, Clark County Heritage Museum, Henderson, NV, The Canton Museum of Art, Canton, OH

Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, “Mata Ortíz Now”, Video, Albuquerque Community Foundation grant. • Gilbert, Bill, “Crossing Boundaries/Transcending Categories: Contemporary Art From Mata Ortíz, Mexico”, Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM.

2002 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, TX • Vanishing Borders, NM Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe

2003 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, TX

Publications: • Gilbert, Bill and Taylor, Chris, “Land Arts of the American West” catalog, Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation grant.

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2004 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, TX • LAAW, Magnifico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, Plan B, Austin, TX

Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, “Public Art & The American West”, MASS, Journal of the School of Architecture and Planning, University of New Mexico, VXIII, pgs 6–11.

2005 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • Living the Art, Mira Costa College, Oceanside, CA

Publications: • Fox, William, “Land Arts of the American West”, Sculpture Magazine, October, p. 80.

2006 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, Creative Research Laboratory, Austin, TX • Green, 516 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM • Drift, Bronx River Art Center, Bronx, NY • Landminds, Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM • CAMP: Art and Sustainability, Hyde Memorial State Park, Santa Fe, NM

Publications: • Zane Fischer, “Returning to the Land: the art of Bill Gilbert”, Santa Fean, April, pp. 50–51.

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2007 Exhibitions: • LAAW, AC2, Albuquerque, NM

Publications: • Taylor, Chris, Projecting Artlies in the Void, Artlies, Spring 2007.

2009 Exhibitions: • Dispersal/Return, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW Mural Project, Barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX • Hole to China, collaborative project with Lucy Raven, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT • Second Site, 516 Gallery, Albuquerque, NM • Mapping a Green Future, Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM

Publications: • Taylor Chris and Gilbert, Bill, Land Arts of the American West, Austin: University of Texas Press. • Kamerick, Megan, “LAND/ART lifts Albuquerque to a new tier in art world”, New Mexico Business Weekly, July 31, p. 6. • Armitage, Diane, “Land/Art New Mexico: A collaboration exploring landbased art”, THE Magazine, August, p. 61. • Mayfield, Dan, “Indoor spaces join the rush to outdoors”, Albuquerque Journal, July 26, p. F3. • King, Sarah, “The Earth Sublime”, Art in America, June. • Fairfield, Douglas, “LAND/ART ho!”, The New Mexican, June 26. • Fischer, Zane, “Finally Landing”, Santa Fe Reporter, May 6. • Jusinski, Charlotte, “Our Neighbor to the South”, Santa Fe Reporter, March 25, p. 25. • Sardy, Marin, “Down to Earth”, Art Ltd, September.

2010 Exhibitions: • LAAW, SCA, Albuquerque, NM

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Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, Shields, Kathleen, and Sbarge, Suzanne, Land/Art, Radius Books, Santa Fe, NM. • Sanchez, Casey, “Axis of Easels”, Pasatiempo, New Mexican, July2–8, pp. 56–57. • Craggs, Mathew, “Map Quest: Bill Gilbert”, Reno News & Review, June 17, www.newsreview.com/reno/content?oid=1441261.

2011 Exhibitions: • Expressions of Intent, SoA Foyer Gallery, Australia National University, Canberra, AU • Mallee [maeli:], Australian National University Gallery, Canberra, NSW, Australia • Far Enough, Bega Valley Regional Gallery, NSW, Australia • LAAW, SCA, Albuquerque, NM

Publications: • Lanier, Chris, “Bill Gilbert: Physiocartographies”, http://sncart.blogspot. com/2011/09/bill-gilbert-physiocartographies.html

2012 Exhibitions: • StraightLine, Miami Performance International Festival, CCE Miami, Miami, FL • Transformative Surfaces, ISEA, University Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM • Invisible Cities Festival – A cosmography, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki, Greece • Connecting Liminal Nowhere: Land Arts of the American West 2012, CCA, Santa Fe, NM • Ephemerality in the Public landscape, with Buster Simpson, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • Fox Trot, with Joel Glanzberg, Valle del Oro, Albuquerque, NM

Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, “Arid Lands Pedagogy: Art in the American west”, Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology, Vol no. 1.

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• Gilbert, Bill, “Modeling Collaborative Practices”, in Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, NY, Punctum Books. • Reub, Teri & Phan, Larry, “No Places with Names: a critical acoustic archaeology”, Institute of Native American Art, Santa Fe, NM

2013 Exhibitions: • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • LAAW, El Centro Artistico Y Cultural barrio Buena Vista, El Paso, TX

Publications: • Lippard, Lucy, Undermining: a wild ride through land use, politics and art in the changing west, NY: The New Press, 2013, pgs 17, 92.

2014 Exhibitions: • Watershed Bounding, Open Space Visitor Center, Albuquerque, NM • Boundless Horizons, Clara Hatton Gallery, Colorado State University, Ft. Collins, CO • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

Publications: • Colores: Bill Gilbert, KNME, television, Albuquerque, NM, KAET television, Phoenix, AZ, KLRN television, San Antonio, TX, MPT television, Maryland, DL, RMPBS television, Denver, WXXI television, Rochester, NY.

2015 Exhibitions: • The Land Mark Show, Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe, NM • Portrait in Place, Big Red Gallery Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY • LAAW, John Sommers Gallery, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM • Walking the Solar System with John Reid, Civic Plaza, Albuquerque, NM

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Publications: • Gilbert, Bill, “Pedagogy of Place”, in Visual March to Prespa 2007–14, A Process of Experiencing the Landscape, State Museum of Fine Arts, Thessaloniki, Greece. • Gilbert, Bill, “Terrestrial/Celestial Navigations”, High Desert Journal, Issue 20. • Land Arts of the American West-Gila River Collaboration, # Daretoimagine: A US Department of Arts and Culture National Action campaign.

2016 Exhibitions: • Portrait in Place, Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM • Portrait in Place, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT • Stories Out/In Place, CFA Downtown, Albuquerque, NM • Mata Ortíz 1995–2015, University of New Mexico Art Museum, Albuquerque, NM _______________

Field Studies Exhibitions and Publications 1996 Field Study Program: Blue Waterholes/Kosciuszko National Park, NSW Exhibition • Landmarks III Field Study Exhibition Kosciuszko National Park. August 1996. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT 1997 Field Study Program: Monga State Forest, NSW (1996) Exhibitions • Monga: An Exhibition of Field Work in Monga State Forest. August 18–29, 1997. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT • Monga. 1997. Gallery Attenburg, Braidwood NSW Publication • Monga: A Folio of Images and Text. A5 24 pages.

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Field Study Program: Murrumbidgee on the Hay Plains, NSW Exhibitions • Landmarks V Murrumbidgee on the Hay Plains. August 1997. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT • Landmarks V Murrumbidgee on the Hay Plains. December 1997. Vacant main street shop, Hay NSW Field Study Program: The Cultivated Landscape. Griffith, NSW Exhibitions • The Cultivated Landscape. Images from Griffith. November 1997. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT • The Cultivated Landscape. Images from Griffith. November/December 1997. Griffith Regional Gallery, Griffith NSW 1998 Field Study Program: Khancoban and the Upper Murray River NSW/Vic Exhibition • Landmarks VII: Khancoban, Eucumbene, Upper Murray Rivers. October 1998. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT Field Study Program: Tanja on the Far South Coast, NSW Exhibitions • Tanja on the Far South Coast, NSW. September 1998. Bega Valley Regional Gallery, Bega NSW • Tanja on the Far South Coast, NSW. November 1998. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT Field Study Program: Lake George Exhibitions • Dreaming Weereewa. 1998. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT • Suddenly the Lake. Weereewa: Lake George Canberra Artists’ responses to the lake. 1998 Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra ACT [Artwork from the Field Study, “Lake George”, was a component of this exhibition. Curated by Philippa Kelly] • Dreaming Weereewa. 1998. Bungendore Gallery, Bungendore NSW Catalogue • Suddenly the Lake. Weereewa: Lake George Canberra Artists’ responses to the lake. A4 6 pages

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1999 Field Study Programs: Khancoban and the Upper Murray River NSW/Vic (1998) and Imaging the Snowy 50 Years On, NSW/Vic Exhibition • 50 Years Now. Field Studies in the Snowy Mountains. 9–24 October 1999. Cabramurra Town Centre, Cabramurra NSW Publication • 50 Years Now. Field Studies in the Snowy Mountains. A4 6 pages 2000 Field Study Program: Observatory. ANU Canberra ACT Exhibition • Observatory. 6–9 April 2000. Screen Sound Australia, Canberra ACT Field Study Program: Gulaga, Tilba, NSW (1999) Exhibition • Guluga 8. 14–16 April 2000. School of Arts Hall, Central Tilba NSW Field Study Program: The Green House Project 1 Exhibition • A Thousand Colours. Visual Art for a Green ANU. Canberra School of Art Showcase Exhibition. 24 August – 9 September 2000. ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra ACT Publication • A Thousand Colours. Visual Art for a Green ANU. A4 6 pages Field Study Program: Contested Forests: Monga • Badja • Mogo Exhibition • Contested Forests. 11–15 November 2002. Corridor exhibition, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT Field Study Program: Inner Sydney, NSW (1999) Exhibitions • mmMMEETTRROo. 5–9 June 2000. Photospace, ANU School of Art, Canberra ACT • mmMMEETTRROo. 13–25 June 2000. Marrickville Warehouse, Sydney NSW

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2001 Field Study Program: Namadgi National Park, ACT (2000) Exhibition • Landmarks: An Exhibition of Visual Art, 18 March – 29 April 2001. Visitors Centre, Namadgi National Park ACT Field Study Program: The Green House Project 2 Publication • Slow Ground. Artist book. Limited edition 20. Edited by John Reid. 6 loose leaves + 15 folded leaves in perspex presentation box: colour + embossed illustrations; 22.0 x 21.0 cm Field Study Program: Monga in Concert. Monga National Park, NSW Exhibition/Concert • Colours of Monga. 31 May 2001. University House, ANU. National Environment Education Council and members of the ANU. • Music recorded and broadcast on The Science Show, ABC Radio National, 9 and 11 June 2001 Field Study Program: Salt – Murray River Valley NSW/Vic Exhibition • Salt. November 2001. Murray Darling Basin Catchment Committee Conference, Murray-Darling Basin Commission offices, Canberra ACT • Salt. 2001. Natural Resource Communications Conference, National Museum of Australia, Canberra ACT 2002 Field Study Programs: Salt – Murray River Valley NSW/Vic and Water – Macquarie Marshes NSW (2001) Exhibitions • Salt/Water. 8–18 April 2002. MDBC Centenary Celebrations: 1902 Corowa Conference, Selected venues, Sanger Street, Corowa NSW • Salt/Water. 7 September – 3 November 2002. Dubbo Regional Gallery, Dubbo NSW • Salt/Water. 5–6 October 2002. Quambone Community Hall in conjunction with NSW National Parks and Wild Life Macquarie Marshes Discovery program Catalogue • Salt/Water. A4 4 pages

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Publication • Uncharted Waters. Edited by Daniel Connell, published by the Murray-Darling Basin Commission. 24.5 x 32.5 cm, 140 pages. Publication features the artwork of 15 artists from the above programs. 2003 Field Study Program: Aragunnu, Mimosa Rocks National Park, NSW (2002) Exhibition • Mimosa: An Exhibition of Visual Art. 19 April – 8 May 2003. Spiral Gallery, Bega NSW Field Study Programs: Salt – Murray River Valley NSW/Vic (2001) and Water – Macquarie Marshes NSW (2001) Exhibitions • Uncharted Waters. The Exhibition. Visual Art from Fieldwork in the Murray-Darling Basin. 16–27 April 2003, ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra ACT • Uncharted Waters. The Exhibition. Visual Art from Fieldwork in the Murray-Darling Basin. Murrumbidgee Landcare Forum. 8–9 August 2003, The Connection, Tumut NSW Field Study Program: Land$cape: Gold and Water. Cowra, NSW (2002) Exhibitions • Land$cape: Gold & Water (1). 25 January – 2 March 2003. Cowra Art Gallery, Cowra NSW • Land$cape: Gold & Water (2). 2–13 April 2003. ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra ACT Field Study Programs: Land$cape: Gold and Water. Cowra, NSW (2002) and Lachlan River Valley. Grenfell, NSW Exhibitions • The Lachlan: Blue Gold. Art at Roberta’s, 5–9 June 2003. Vacant main street shop, Grenfell NSW • Land$cape: Gold & Water (3). September 2003. Orange Regional Gallery, Orange NSW Publication/Catalogues • The Lachlan: Blue Gold. Edited by Mandy Martin and Sarah Ryan. A4 16 pages. • Land$cape: Gold & Water. Edited by Mandy Martin. 23.5 x 25.0 cm, 56 pages.

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2004 Field Study Program: Imaging the Coast at Kioloa (2003) Exhibition • Kioloa, 6–13 March 2004, ANU Kioloa Field Station, Kioloa, NSW Field Study Program: Gunnedah Exhibition • Common Ground, 13–17 October 2004, Gunnedah, NSW • Common Ground, November 2004. ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT Catalogue • Common Ground. A5, 20 pages Field Study Programs: Selected Exhibition • Field Study Survey. Murray-Darling Basin Commission Young People’s River Health Conference, 15–17 August 2004, Narrabri NSW 2005 Field Study Program: Backpacking the Budawang Range (2004) Exhibition • Budawang 12–18 September 2005, ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT Field Study Program: Desert Country: Mungo and Kinchega National Parks Exhibition • Desert Country. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 26 September – 2 October 2005, ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT Catalogue • Desert Country. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A6, 8 pages Field Study Programs: Wentworth and Desert Country: Mungo and Kinchega National Parks Exhibitions • Wet River Dry Lake, 12–16 October 2005, Wentworth, NSW • Wet River Dry Lake, 19–21 October 2005, Mildura, Vic Catalogue • Wet River Dry Lake. A5, 56 pages

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2006 Field Study Programs: Wentworth and Desert Country: Mungo and Kinchega National Parks (2005) Exhibition • Mungo Place – Willandra Time. 3 August – 17 September 2006, Murray Darling Palimpsest, Mildura Arts Centre, Mildura, Vic Field Study Program: Shepparton, Vic Exhibition • Shepp. The Earth. An Address about Water. 20 October – 19 November 2006, Shepparton Art Gallery, Shepparton, Vic Catalogue • Shepp. The Earth. An Address about Water. A5, 44 pages 2007 Field Study Program: Scottsdale, NSW Exhibition • Scottsdale. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 24 July – 4 August 2007. ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT Catalogue • Scottsdale. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 36 pages Field Study Program: St. George, Qld Exhibition • Balonne. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 23–28 November 2007. Old Webster’s Building, St. George, Qld Catalogue • Balonne. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 32 pages 2008 Field Study Program: Cockatoo Island, NSW (2007) Exhibition • EcoForum. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 2008 EcoForum Conference. 27–29 February 2008. The Pavilion, Conrad Jupiters, Gold Coast, Qld Catalogue • EcoForum. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 24 pages

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Field Study Program: Tumut, NSW Exhibition • Tumut. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 6–9 August 2008. Ex-State Bank Building and Tumut Art Society Gallery, Tumut, NSW Catalogue • Tumut. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 28 pages 2009 Field Study Program: Riverland, SA (2008) Exhibition • Riverland. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 11–27 March 2009. The McCormick Centre for the Environment and Murray Avenue vacant shop, Renmark, SA Catalogue • Riverland. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 36 pages Field Study Program: Kimbriki, Sydney, NSW (2008) Exhibition • Kimbriki. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 28–30 April 2009. Australian Technology Park, NSW Catalogue • Kimbriki. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 48 pages Field Study Program: Benalla, Vic Exhibition • Engaging Visions. A Benalla Field Study. 10–31 October 2009. Benalla Art Gallery Catalogue • Benalla. A5, 40 pages 2010 Field Study Programs: St George, Qld (2007) / Tumut, NSW (2008) / Riverland, SA (2009) and Benalla, Vic (2009) Exhibition • Engaging Visions. Your Place in Fine Art. 5–28 August 2010. ANU School of Art Gallery, Canberra, ACT

Manual  225

Publication and Catalogue • Engaging Visions: Engaging Artists with the Community about the Environment. Edited by John Reid, Rod Lamberts, Carolyn Young, and Charles Tambiah. Published by the ANU. A4, 148 pages Field Study Program: The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney, NSW Exhibitions • 2010 Fenner Conference Exhibition: The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney. 22–26 June 2010. ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT, in conjunction with the Australian Academy of Science 2010 Fenner Conference • The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 19 August – 1 September 2010. See Street Gallery, Meadowbank College of TAFE, Meadowbank, Sydney, NSW • The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 27 November 2010 – 3 February 2011. Sassafras Creek Gallery, Kurrajong, NSW, and Purple Noon Art, Sculpture and Framing Gallery, Freemans Reach, NSW Catalogues • The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 60 pages • The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney. An Exhibition of Visual Art. Edition 2 A5, 60 pages 2011 Field Study Program: The Eden Project. Eden, NSW Exhibitions • Far Enough. Aesthetic Response to the Far South Coast, NSW. 30 September – 5 November 2011. Bega Valley Regional Gallery, NSW Catalogue • Far Enough. Aesthetic Response to the Far South Coast, NSW. A5, 60 pages 2012 Field Study Program: Water, Water. Shepparton, Vic Exhibitions • Water, Water. Aesthetic Responses to the Goulburn Broken Catchment. An Exhibition of Visual Art and Architecture. 6 September – 14 October 2012 • Visual Art: Eastbank Foyer Gallery, Shepparton Art Museum • Architecture: Shopfront/Butter Factory Precinct Shepparton, Vic

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Catalogues • Water, Water. Aesthetic Responses to the Goulburn Broken Catchment. An Exhibition of Visual Art and Architecture. A5, Edition 1, 60 pages • Water, Water. Aesthetic Responses to the Goulburn Broken Catchment. An Exhibition of Visual Art and Architecture. A5, Edition 2, 76 pages • Projects for Riverconnect. School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. A5, 20 pages 2013 Field Study Program: The Contested Landscapes of Western Sydney II, NSW (2012) Exhibitions • Biting the Carpet: Food security and the Lay of the Land. 5–15 February 2013. ANU School of Art Foyer Gallery, Canberra, ACT [In conjunction with the XIX International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology 2013] • Biting the Carpet: Food Security and the Lay of the Land. Selected Works. 10–11 October 2013. 2013 Fenner Conference, Shine Dome, Canberra, ACT Field Study Program: South East Coast Adaptation (SECA) Field Study Exhibitions • Now & When. Contemplating Climates on the South East Coast. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 1–5 November 2013. Sapphire Coast Marine Discover Centre and vacant main street shop, Eden, NSW Catalogue • Now & When. Contemplating Climates on the South East Coast. A5, 68 pages 2014 Field Study Program: Crace, ACT Exhibition • Crace – Walk the Line. An Exhibition of Visual Art. 20–30 November 2014. Various venues, Crace, ACT Catalogue • Crace – Walk the Line. An Exhibition of Visual Art. A5, 64 pages

Manual  227

Community partners Visual March to Prespes Community Partners • 2009 • Lignite Mines of Achlada, Florina • 2010 • Municipality of Prespes • Lignite Mines of Achlada, Florina • 2011 • Regional Unit of Florina • Lignite Mines of Achlada, Florina • 2012 • • • •

Regional Unit of Florina Municipality of Florina Municipality of Ptolemais Society for the Protection of Prespes

• 2013 • • • •

Regional Unit of Florina Municipality of Florina Management Agency of Prespes National Park Society for the Protection of Prespes

• 2014 • • • • •

Municipality of Prespes State Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Region of Western Macedonia Management Agency of Prespes National Park Society for the Protection of Prespes

• 2015 • Municipality of Prespes • Regional Unit of Florina • Management Agency of Prespes National Park

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• 2016 • Regional Unit of Florina • Municipality of Prespes • Management Agency of Prespes National Park • 2017 • Regional Unit of Florina • Municipality of Prespes • Management Agency of Prespes National Park _______________

Land Arts of the American West Community Partners 1990 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1991 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1992 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1993 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1994 • • • • •

Eliza Cutcher, The Solomon Cutcher Fund, San Francisco, CA Fundación Jatari, San Francisco, CA Fundación Paul Rivet, Cuenca, Ecuador Lila Wallace Foundation, New York, NY Organization of People Indigenous to Pastaza, Puyo, Ecuador

Manual  229

1995 • Abigail Gualinga, Leona Inmundo, Organization of People Indigenous to Pastaza, Saryacu, Ecuador • Eliza Cutcher, The Solomon Cutcher Fund, San Francisco, CA • Fundación Jatari, San Francisco, CA • Lila Wallace Foundation, New York, NY • The Childrens Workshop, Cerrillos, NM • The South Broadway Cultural Center, Albuquerque, NM • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM • Turquoise Trail Elementary, Santa Fe, NM

1996 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1997 • Mary Lewis Garcia & Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM

1998 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo, NM • Juan Quezada, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chuhuahua, MX

1999 • Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo • Juan Quezada, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chuhuahua, MX

2000 • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, Flagstaff, AZ Albuquerque Community Foundation, Albuquerque, NM KNME TV, Albuquerque, NM

2002 • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, Flagstaff, AZ Marianne Stockebrand, Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX

230 Manual

2003 • • • • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, Albuquerque, NM Mary Lewis Garcia and Marvin Garcia, Acoma Pueblo Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, Flagstaff, AZ Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Adobe Alliance, Presidio, TX

2004 • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Nancy Thompson & Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, Flagstaff, AZ Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Hector Gallegos and Graciela Martinez, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT

2005 • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Joel Glanzberg, Regenesis, Santa Fe, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Hector Gallegos and Graciela Martinez, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX

2006 • • • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Joel Glanzberg, Regenesis, Santa Fe, NM John Stokes, The Tracking Project, Albuquerque, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Chamber of Commerce, Deming, NM Hector Gallegos and Graciela Martinez, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX Bev Magennis, Black Cat Farm, Apache Creek, NM

2007 • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM John Stokes, The Tracking Project, Albuquerque, NM Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, Flagstaff, AZ Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT

Manual  231

• Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, Utah, UT • Salt Flat Farms, Wendover, UT • Jeremy East, East Farms, West Point, UT

2009 • • • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Roden Crater Project, Skystone Foundation, AZ Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX Lucy Raven, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV University of Texas Press, Austin, TX

2010 • • • • • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Nob Hill farmer’s market, Albuquerque, NM Calliope Collaborative Farm, Anton Chico, NM Farmers Market, Las Vegas, NM Hobo Ranch, Las Vegas, NM Farmers Market, Taos Pueblo, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Michael Govan, LACMA, City Complex, Garden Valley, NV Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX • William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV

2011 • • • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX Arcosanti, Cordes Junction, AZ Biosphere II, Oracle, AZ US Border Patrol, EL Paso, TX Hector Gallegos and Graciela Martinez, Juan Mata Ortíz, Chihuahua, MX

232 Manual

• Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX • Nancy Thompson and Tom McGrath, Skystone Foundation, AZ • William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV

2012 • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Matt Coolidge, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Wendover, UT Steve Badgett, SIMPARCH, Wendover, UT Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX • William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV • Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY • Charlie Bettigole, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT

2013 • Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation • Adrian Ogelsby, Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, Albuquerque, NM • Roberto Salas and Armando Carlos, Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX • Steve Harris, Rio Grande Restoration, Embudo, NM • The Fodder Project, Anton Chico, NM • Centro Artistico y Cultural, Buena Vista Neighborhood Association, El Paso, TX • Chinati Foundation, Marfa, TX • Judd Foundation, Marfa, TX • William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV • Museum of Art, Reno, NV • Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY • Charlie Bettigole, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT

2014 • Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM • Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, New York, NY • Jennifer Owen-White, Valle de Oro, National Wildlife Refuge, Albuquerque, NM

Manual  233

• Joel Glanzberg, Regenesis, Santa Fe, NM • William Hargrove, Center for Environmental Research and Management, University of Texas, El Paso, TX • Dixon Water Foundation, Marfa, TX • William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV • Ucross Foundation, Clearmont, WY • Charlie Bettigole, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT

2015 • • • • • •

Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Hog Waller Farm, Dinétah, NM Gila River Collaborative Project, Gila Wilderness, NM William Fox, A + E Center, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV Charlie Bettigole, Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, New Haven, CT _______________

Field Studies Community Partners 1996 • Centre Educational Development and Academic Methods, ANU, Canberra, ACT • NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Braidwood, NSW • Friends of the Mongarlowe River, Braidwood, NSW • Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU, Canberra, ACT

1997 • Tubbo Station, Four Arrows Group, Darlington Point, NSW • Hay Visitors Information Centre, Hay, NSW

1998 • NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Narooma, NSW • Bega Valley Regional Gallery, Bega, NSW • Alan Watt Pottery, Tanja, NSW

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1999 • NSW National Parks and Wildlife, Service, Narooma, NSW • Cabramurra Town Centre, Cabramurra, NSW • Snowy Mountains Authority, Cooma, NSW

2000 • • • •

anuGREEN, ANU Screen Sound Australia, Canberra, ACT School of Arts, Central Tilba, NSW Marrickville Warehouse, Sydney, NSW

2001 • • • • • • •

ACT Parks and Conservation Service, Canberra, ACT Visitors Centre, Namadgi National Park, ACT University House, ANU, Canberra, ACT National Environment Education Council, Canberra, ACT ABC Radio National, Canberra, ACT anuGREEN, ANU, Canberra, ACT Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU, Canberra, ACT

2002 • Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT • NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Macquarie Marshes Discovery Program, Coonamble, NSW • Dubbo Regional Gallery, Dubbo, NSW

2003 • • • • •

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Forbes, NSW Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT Newcrest Mining Ltd, Orange, NSW Thring Pastoral Company, Mandurama, NSW Henry Lawson Festival Art Committee, Gunnedah, NSW

2004 • • • •

Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT Gunnedah Shire Council, Gunnedah, NSW Red Chief Aboriginal Land Council, Gunnedah, NSW NSW Department of Instructure, Planning, and Natural Resources, Gunnedah, NSW

Manual  235

• • • •

Gunnedah Aero Club, Gunnedah, NSW Two Rivers Festival, Gunnedah, NSW Gunnedah Creative Arts Gallery and Civic Cinema, Gunnedah, NSW Greening Australia, Armidale, NSW

2005 • • • •

Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT PS Ruby Management Committee, Wentworth, NSW NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Mildura, NSW Sunrasia Sports Aircraft Club Incorporated, Wentworth, NSW

2006 • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Committee, Shepparton, Vic Greater Shepparton City Council, Shepparton, Vic Shepparton Art Gallery, Shepparton, Vic CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country, Shepparton, Vic Impress Publicity, Shepparton, Vic Goulburn Valley Aero Club, Goulburn Valley, Vic PSC Ardmona, Shepparton, Vic Galways Restaurant, Shepparton, Vic SheppARTon Festival, Shepparton, Vic Bush Heritage Australia, Melbourne, Vic National Museum of Australia, Canberra, ACT Balonne Shire Council, St George, Qld

2007 • • • • • • • • • •

National Museum of Australia, Canberra, ACT Bush Heritage Australia, Melbourne, Vic Kosciuszko to Coast Project, Canberra, ACT Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT Balonne Shire Council, St George, Qld EcoForum Limited, Sydney, NSW Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Vic The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, Sydney, NSW Australian Research Council, Canberra, ACT St. George Visitor Information Centre, St George, Qld

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2008 • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT EcoForum Limited, Sydney, NSW Australian Research Council, Canberra, ACT Tumut Shire Council, Tumut, NSW SnowyHydro, Cooma, NSW Adelong Falls Gold Mill Ruins Committee, Adelong, NSW Tumut Visitor Information Centre, Tumut, NSW TAFE Tumut, Tumut, NSW The Australian Landscape Trust, Renmark, SA McCormick Centre for the Environment, Renmark, SA Calperum Station, nr Renmark, SA Graphic Design Department, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT Sydney Gallery School, Northern Sydney Institute of TAFE, Sydney, NSW Kimbriki Recycling and Waste Disposal Centre, Sydney, NSW

2009 • • • • • • • • • • • • •

Murray-Darling Basin Commission, Canberra, ACT Australian Research Council, Canberra, ACT Benalla Rural City, Benella, Vic Benalla Art Gallery, Benella, Vic Department of Sustainability and Environment, Benalla, Vic Regent Honeyeater Project, Benalla, Vic Indigenous Community Garden, Benalla, Vic Mokoan Yacht Club, Benalla, Vic Goulburn-Murray Water, Shepparton, Vic EcoForum Ltd., Sydney, NSW University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT Northern Sydney Institute of TAFE Kimbriki Recycling and Waste Disposal Centre

2010 • National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU, Canberra, ACT • Urbanism, Climate Adaptation, and Health Cluster, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation, Canberra, ACT • Hawkesbury Harvest Inc., Sydney, NSW • Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU, Canberra, ACT

Manual  237

• • • • •

Sydney Gallery School, Meadowbank College of TAFE, Sydney, NSW University of Western Sydney, Sydney, NSW Enniskillen Orchard, nr Richmond, NSW Shields Orchard, Bilpin, NSW Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, ACT

2011 • • • • • • • • • • •

NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Merimbula, NSW Bega Valley Regional Gallery, Bega, NSW Wild Art, Bega, NSW Bega Valley Shire Council, Bega, NSW NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Bombala, NSW Sapphire Coast Marine Discovery Centre, Eden, NSW NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, Merimbula, NSW Eden Aboriginal Lands Council, Eden, NSW ABC South East Region, Bega, NSW ANU Student Equity, ANU, Canberra, ACT South East Art Region, Bega, NSW

2012 • National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, ANU, Canberra, ACT • Urbanism, Climate Adaptation, and Health Cluster, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation, Canberra, ACT • Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, ACT • International Society for Human Ecology, ANU, Canberra, ACT • RiverConnect, Shepparton, Vic • The Greater Shepparton Council, Shepparton, Vic • Goulburn Broken Catchment Management Authority, Shepparton, Vic • Goulburn Murray Landcare Network, Shepparton, Vic • Yorta Yorta Nation Aboriginal Corporation, Shepparton, Vic • Parks Victoria, Shepparton, Vic • Goulburn Valley Environment Group, Shepparton, Vic • Gallery Kaiela Inc., Shepparton, Vic • Goulburn Murray District Scouts, Shepparton, Vic • Shepparton Camera Club, Shepparton, Vic • Shepparton Heritage Centre, Shepparton, Vic • Northern Victoria Irrigation Renewal Project, Shepparton, Vic • Friends of the Shepparton Art Museum, Shepparton, Vic • Word and Mouth, Shepparton, Vic • Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne, Vic • SheppARTon Festival, Shepparton, Vic

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2013 • South East Coast Adaptation Research Project, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT • University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT • University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW • National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Brisbane, Qld • Canberra Urban and Regional Futures, Canberra, ACT • Monaroo Bobberrer Gudu Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Pambula, ACT • Twofold Aboriginal Corporation, Eden, NSW • Sapphire Coast Marine Discovery Centre, Eden, NSW • Atlas of Life in the Coastal Wilderness, Bermagui, NSW • Eden Community Access Centre Inc., Eden, NSW • South East Arts (NSW) Inc., Bega, NSW • ArtsNSW, Sydney, NSW

2014 • People and Place Research Program / The Crace Study, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT • Goodwin Aged Care Services, Canberra, ACT • PBS Building, Canberra, ACT • The District Café, Canberra, ACT • Connections Community Development, Canberra, ACT • Crace Early Learning, Canberra, ACT • Crace Community Development Office, Canberra, ACT • Bush on the Boundary, Conservation Council, ACT Region, Canberra, ACT • CIC Crace Pty Ltd., Canberra, ACT • Design Canberra Festival, Canberra, ACT

FIGURE 8.1 On

the Road Again to Lucin, Utah

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHYBIBLIOGRAPHY

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INDEX

Aboriginal 80 – 81, 91, 103, 120 Acoma Pueblo 115 – 121 Adler, Judith 14 administrative forms 170 Adventure West Virginia 70, 124 aesthetics 17 – 18, 22, 24, 73, 77, 95, 117 American southwest 25 – 27, 85; ceramics program 114 – 115, 121; environment 132 – 133, 144, 146 Anand, Julie xi, 72 – 75, 85, 109 Ancestral Puebloan 27 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation 66, 145 Animas Valley 138 – 139 Antechinus 83 – 84 anthropocene 8, 134 Appalachia 3, 63, 85, 86, 97 Arcosanti 137 art: centers 14, 22, 26; contemporary 8, 22, 50, 76, 90, 92, 96, 122 – 123, 147, 152; degrees 13 – 17 (see also MFA); education 25, 50, 74, 105, 147, 152; global 22; international 3 – 4, 60, 85, 94, 119, 145; majors 15; market 14, 121; Native American 117 – 118, 120, 127, 133; relational 77, 151 Art & Ecology 22, 68, 72, 108, 147 – 148 Art + Environment 70, 89 Artifact 83, 93, 126, 158 artistic production 37, 47 – 49, 50, 51, 106 Arts of the Americas 118, 124 assessment: program 23, 72 – 73; student 47, 50, 72 – 74, 75, 91, 130 Australia 64, 80 – 81, 99, 101, 103

Australia National University (ANU) 62, 65, 66, 69 A-Z West 2, 137 backpacking 56, 70, 74, 129 Badgett, Steve 138, 230 – 233 Balawan Elective 65 – 66, 81, 101 Banerjee, Subhankar xxi – xxiii, 41, 145, 148 Bauhaus 20 Benally, Malcolm 147 Bender, Keith xi, 103 Bingham Mine 134 – 136 bio-region 78, 97, 122, 135, 136 – 137, 146 Black Mountain College 20 Bonkemeyer, Kristin 123 Brody, Jerry 118, 126 budgets 124, 181 Buena Vista Neighborhood Association 88, 139 – 141 Bundian Way 19 Bureau of Land Management (BLM) 86, 127, 149 Camino Real 26 career: art 15, 20, 22, 24 Carlos, Armando 139 – 141 Casas Grandes 143 Cement Lake 141 – 142 Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) 2, 79, 134 – 137 ceramics 114 – 115, 117 – 118, 121 – 122 Cerrillos, NM 114

Index  245

Chaco Canyon 125 – 127 Chihuahuan Desert 54 China Town 135 classroom 16 – 18, 28, 56, 63, 68, 85, 94 Clean Livin’ 138 climate change 7 – 9, 136, 153 collaboration: cross-cultural and community 118 – 120, 135, 136 – 139, 147; cross-program 4 – 5, 94; interdisciplinary 2; models 27, 99 – 100, 130, 157 Colorado Plateau 127 Colorado State University, (CSU) 89 community: art 3 – 4, 19 – 20, 50, 60, 68, 72 – 73, 85, 105 – 106; engagement 19, 22, 26, 33, 51, 54, 80, 88, 95, 99 – 103; local 19, 33, 69, 87, 88 – 93, 130, 135; partner 3, 19, 23, 41, 45, 56, 136, 139 – 142, 147, 227 – 239 context: environmental 84 – 88, 92, 95, 100, 107, 137, 148; institutional 34, 37 – 38, 63 – 68; social 1, 4, 8, 25, 28, 50, 79 convener 45, 67 Coolidge, Matthew xv, 134 – 135 COP 21 80 corporation 1 Cortez, Constance 148 course: fee 66, 118; requirements 41, 56 Cox, Anicca xiv, 33, 120 Creative Arts Lab 134 creative research 17, 37, 45, 60, 77 – 84, 117 creativity 16 – 24, 132 crisis: ecological 1 critique 18, 50, 64, 72, 74 – 75, 130 Cueva de la Olla 119 – 121 cultural: site investigation 70 Currawong 83 – 84 curriculum 24 – 31, 68 – 72 Davis, John x, 121 debt, student 15 Dewey, John 15 – 24 dialogues: community 99, 102, 120, 135 Diné 137, 146 – 147 disciplinary: artist 72, 77 – 81, 105, 109, 115, 142; identity 18, 27; program 22, 93, 115, 119, 132; silos 22, 89; values 33, 50, 62, 68, 91, 105 doctor of philosophy (PhD) 14 Dotson, Thomas 117 – 118 Double Negative 127 driver safety 56

ecology: deep 8 economics 16, 21, 63 – 66, 151 Ecuador 119 – 121 education: art 25, 50, 74, 105, 147, 152; tertiary 14 – 15, 65, 153 El Paso, TX 70, 85, 88, 139 – 141, 144 Emerson, Larry 146 – 147 environmental: movement 7 equipment list 183 – 189 Evans, Eden xi, 108 evolution: LAAW 134 – 136; LMoA 63; practice 27; program 91 – 99 exhibitions 4, 57 – 59, 88, 147, 207 – 226 field: locations 190 – 201; programming 89, 105, 106 – 107; study 65, 82 field-based 27, 91, 132, 151 Fisher, Mark 16 Florina 62, 139 foodshed 28, 78, 93, 136 – 137, 143 foundations: private 41, 66, 145 Fox, William xiv – xv Free International University 20 Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE) 117 – 118, 120 – 122, 125 funding 114, 123 – 126 Fusco, Coco 15 Gallegos, Hector 142 – 143 Garcia, Mary Lewis 115 – 122 Gazsi, Benjamin 100 GI bill 13, 28 Gibson, Larry 97 – 99, 110 Gila Wilderness 100 Gilbert, Bill 66, 72, 81, 95, 97, 107 Glanzberg, Joel xv grading: philosophy 17, 75, 165 Grand Canyon 6, 75 Great Basin 127 Greece 62 – 64, 87, 143; see also Ziogas, Yannis Gropius, Walter 20 Gruenewald, David 25 – 27 guest: artist/activist/scholars 202 – 206 Haag, Gloria 131 Hamada, Soji 114 Harris, Catherine Page viii, 134 – 136, 141, 146 Hart-Mann, Jeanette viii, 3, 66 – 70, 78, 89, 93, 96 – 99, 104 – 107, 128, 136, 145 – 148

246 Index

Hayashi, Yoshimi ix, 3, 37, 45, 63 – 71, 74, 79, 91 – 92, 103 – 105, 133 Henel, Ryan xii, 77, 88 Hole to China 135 – 136 Homestead Act 127 Horseshoe Canyon 127 Humble Douglas 123 indigenous 3, 9, 20, 28 – 29, 87, 90 – 91, 96, 101 – 102, 114 – 115, 119 – 121, 125; communities 146 interdisciplinary 8 – 9, 88 – 91 investigative sites 55, 127, 134, 173 Ioannidis, Christos xii, 75 Irland, Basia 72, 147 Japan 63; see also Hayashi, Yoshimi John Sommers Gallery 134, 136 Juan Mata Ortíz 118 – 122, 142 – 146, 150 Kayford Mountain 97 – 98 labs 47, 51 Lake Powell-Blue Notch 130 – 131, 134 Land Arts Mobile Research Center (LAMRC) 145 Land Arts of the American West 113 – 149 Land Marks of Art (LMoA) 37, 41, 46, 50, 67, 70, 92, 103 – 104, 108, 152 Lannan, Patrick 123 – 125 Lannan Foundation 66 Leach, Bernard 114 leadership: structure 129 – 134; transitions 144 – 147 lecturer 35, 39, 42 Lewis, Lucy 116 Lila Wallace Foundation 119 logistics 52 – 55 Lynch, Matt 138 manifest destiny 79 Martinez, Graciela 142 Maslow, Abraham 20 Master of Fine Arts (MFA) 13, 37, 152 Maxwell Museum of Anthropology 122 Mead Christopher 66, 123 – 125 mestizo 121 – 122 methodology 2, 18, 68, 79, 88, 135, 136 Mimbres 121, 123, 143 Mira Costa College (MCC) 37, 46 models: curriculum 68 – 72, 156 – 157; program 2, 34 – 60 modernist art 22, 99 Monga State Forest 82 – 83

Moon House 27, 127 mountain top removal (MTR) 86, 100, 134 national monuments 127 national parks 2, 127 national recreation areas 127 Native American 26, 116, 117 – 118, 120, 127, 133 No Trace 127, 164 Organization of People Indigenous to Pastaza (OPIP) 119 Orr, Chrissie 141 Osborne, Erika ix, 63, 67 – 70, 74 – 79, 85 – 89, 95, 97 – 99, 105 Otero Mesa 109, 139 participant: community 69; student 34, 50, 60 pedagogy: arid lands 118, 134 – 135; evolution 117; field-based, critical 24 – 27, 45, 62 – 64, 74; interdisciplinary 89, 93; radical 15 permaculture 164 photography 72, 114 Pitzer College 20 Place Appalachia 79, 85; student experience 109 – 110 place-based: art making 123; ceramics practice 115; curriculum models 24 – 25, 33; education and aesthetics 84, 95 – 96; pedagogy 106, 133; program 62, 127 potsherds 116 – 118 pottery: Asian 114, 121; Pueblo 115 – 124, 142 – 143 practice: academic 89; art 19, 51, 60, 77 – 81, 88 – 91, 97, 118 – 120, 123 – 125; collaborative 19, 23, 51, 56, 77; contemporary 50, 147; development 28; interdisciplinary 2, 8, 22 – 23, 81, 88 – 91, 151; social 2, 23, 77, 99, 136; teaching 85 program: coordinator 89; development 42 – 44; director 89, 145; origins 61 – 63, 114 – 117; residency 2, 79 publication and dissemination 57 – 59 Qualitz, Heike ix, 77, 96 Quezada, Juan 119 – 121 Quichua 119 – 121 Raven, Lucy 135 – 136 reading list 166 – 169

Index  247

regional 101, 135, 151 Reid, John x, 62, 65 – 75, 80 – 85, 90, 93 – 95, 99, 106 research 17 – 20, 50, 73, 77 – 81, 108 – 109, 114 – 115, 156 – 157 Reub, Teri xiv Rio Grande Watershed 28, 96, 136, 143 – 144 Roby-Williams, Ernie xii Roden Crater 19, 96, 123 Romero, Gabe 6, 131 Running with Arrows 147 Salas, Roberto 139 – 140 Saltz, Jerry 15 San Rafael Swell 128 Sarayacu 119 School of Global Environmental Sustainability (SoGES) 89 sculpture 66, 72, 79, 114 SeedBroadcast 78 Shantiniketan 18 SIMPARCH 3, 138 Singerman, Howard 14 social justice 9, 96, 136, 146, 147 Spanish Entrada 26 Spiral Jetty 27 stakeholders 91, 107 STEM 15, 64 Stuart, Amanda x, 65, 76 – 80, 87, 90 – 94, 101 – 102, 106 – 107, 120 studio production 70 Sun Tunnels 127 sustainability 7, 45, 95, 138 syllabi 156 – 165 Tagore, Rabindranath 18 Tamarind 114

Taylor, Chris xiv, 125 – 126, 132 – 134 Taylor, David 138 teaching: assistant 40 – 44, 125, 128; philosophy 72 – 76 time: campus 50 – 56; field 50 – 56 trans-cultural 68, 89, 153 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 122 University of New Mexico (UNM) xxi, 17 – 19, 26, 113 US Border 138, 144 US Forest Service 136 utopian 2, 137 – 138 Valle del Oro Wildlife Refuge xv Visual March to Prespes (VMTP) 63 – 64, 69, 72, 75, 92, 78, 134 watershed 143 – 144 Wendover Air Force Base 12, 134 – 138 Wenger, John xiv, 74, 127, 130, 132 Western Macedonia University (WMU) 14 West Virginia 63, 85, 98, 110; see also Appalachia West Virginia University (WVU) 70 wilderness medicine 56 William, Aaron xii, 73, 110 Wood, Cedra xiii, 140 workload 67 work sites 127, 134 – 135, 156 – 157, 173 Wupatki 127 Yanagi, Soetsu 114 Yuin 102

Ziogas, Yannis x, 62 – 64, 69, 77, 87 – 90, 92, 105, 143