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LandLab is an environmental art residency at the Schuylkill Center that interweaves art, ecological restoration, and public engagement. LandLab offers resources and space on the Center’s 340-acre wooded property for multidisciplinary artists to engage audiences in environmental advocacy, scientific investigation, and artistic creation.

The LandLab Residency blends art and environmental science to engage diverse audiences in innovative investigations of environmental problems. Selected artists/teams receive professional development and mentorship by partnering with scientists and fellow arts professionals to create original, site-specific installations on our land and in our gallery. Our art programs and events engage residents throughout the region in discussions about current environmental issues, the artists' creative processes, and their experimental proposals.

Past Projects

LandLab 2017-2018

• Dance Exchange activated Philadelphia's waterways through movement exploration with visitors and local artists and scientists, culminating in installation and performance at the Schuylkill Center using interdisciplinary dancemaking to move community members from a place of observation to participation to active stewardship.

• Kate Farquhar is a Philadelphia based artist and landscape architect whose work occupies the space where habitat, green infrastructure and myth overlap. Kate conceived a collection of mythic micro-environments–called Synestates–to thoughtfully insert materials or elements from the cityscape into the Center's wild and managed lands, speculating about future possibilities for contact between people and the environment.

• Jan Mun explored mycoremediation and shared her passion for mushrooms as "ecological instigators," ultimately constructing The Mushroom Vortex Maze–wooden logs inoculated with three types of edible mushrooms to create separate rows that each form a logarithmic/golden ratio spiral.

LandLab 2014-2015

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• WE THE WEEDS (a collaboration between artist Kaitlin Pomerantz and botanist Zya Levy) created a woven installation constructed from invasive vines, simultaneously encouraging dialog about the global movement of plants, and removing hazardous invasive species from the forest.

• Jake Beckman explored the detritus cycle of a forest and its disruption by invasive earthworms, creating a sculptural installation that makes these hidden processes visible to visitors.

• Marguerita Hagan, B.H. Mills, and Maggie Mills built Native Pollinator Garden, a pollinator-focused series of raised beds accompanied by a sculptural installation to educate the public on native plants, chemical-free gardening, sustainable practices, and the relationship between humans and bees.

• #StormSnakes by Leslie Birch, explores the issue of stormwater run-off using electronics to collect data from a Schuylkill Center stream.

For more information about LandLab, please reach out to art@schuylkillcenter.org.

Past LandLab projects have been in collaboration with The Center for Emerging Visual Artists (CFEVA) who provide career development services for professional visual artists, help artists reach their audiences, and promote interest in and understanding of the visual arts among citizens of the Philadelphia region.

Funding was provided by the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dolfinger-McMahon Foundation and the William Penn Foundation, as well as in part by the Pennsylvania Partners in the Arts program of the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and PECO.