Guest contributor Aaron Asis, 2017 Making in Place Artist

Last month, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education launched, Making in Place, a creative collaboration featuring the work of 14 different Art in the Open artists invited to create (or update) work to be displayed within the Schuylkill Center’s art gallery and/or at choice locations throughout the Schuylkill Center’s grounds and trails.

As one of the selected artists invited to participate in Making in Place, I was invited to walk the grounds back in September to explore potential project sites and site-specific concepts. Easier said than done, but we found our spot! Seeing as my work tends to focus on access and awareness in urban environments, it came as no surprise that I immediately gravitated towards Pine Grove to develop an interactive installation celebrating the Pine Grove as an anomaly within the Center’s trail systems, entitled Sau Pines.

The Pine Grove was planted by Schuylkill Center staff and volunteers in the 1970s, where each of the pines that populate the Pine Grove was originally intended for timber harvesting but has become a treasured play area and plant and wildlife habitat. In fact, the project title Sau Pines is actually play on the word ‘Saw’ Pines, related to a visual experience in the Pine Grove and/or that the Pines were once planned to be sawed to the ground and sold as timber. Saw Pines. Saw Pines. Sau Pines.

The installation itself consists of a series of corded wraps to colorize a selection of pines within the grove — both at eye level as well as around the base of the trees, to show where they would have been cut. The resultant visual field is intended to prompt curiosity into both the historic and horticultural significance of the Pine Grove. A series of color matching dimensional timbers have also been situated within this banded zone for public use and relocation — as symbol of an avoided fate, and a dimensional timber complement to the natural material already widely used throughout the Pine Grove.

All that said, Sau Pines was created with the historically playful spirit of the Pine Groves in mind, and invites you to follow these simple steps to build your own art…!!

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Step 1: Wander through the Pine Grove and observe some of it’s unique characteristics
Step 2: Wander back to the Sau Pines area and admire other visitor created sculptures.
Step 3: Use these timbers to create your own unique Sau Pines sculpture in the Pine Grove!
Step 4: Photograph your sculpture and share it on Social Media and with Schuylkill Center Staff!
Step 5: Leave your new Sau Pines sculpture in the Pine Grove for others to appreciate!
Step 6: Enjoy the rest of the Schuylkill Center’s pristine trail system and natural vegetation.

Please visit the Pine Grove, feel free to play with the art, and enjoy all of the work created for Making in Place!!

By Anna Lehr Mueser, Manager of Communications & Digital Strategy

Every week or so one of us (usually our Director of Environmental Art or one of our art interns) heads out to Rain Yard, an interactive environmental art installation by Stacy Levy, for a regular check up. Rain Yard is designed to be education, art, and intervention. The steel sculpture, painted a rich blue-purple, collects stormwater runoff from our Visitor Center roof, slowing the movement of nearly 100,000 gallons of water a year. Some of the water flows through a rain garden, over which visitors walk, and some goes into a cistern from which it is pumped through the sculpture by visors of all ages.  

That’s where these regular cleaning visits come in. The sculpture allows water to pool and drain through various hoses. The little openings for the drainage hoses seem to invite children to fill them – with sticks, pebbles, and other treasures found around Rain Yard. When it’s not curious visitors, the wind is carrying leaves and grasses into these openings. The result is that we regularly have to go out and clean them, making sure that water will continue to flow through the artwork. In the three and a half years since Rain Yard was installed we’ve also had to repaint the yellow strip thin the basin representing asphalt; a lesson in maintenance indeed.

Continue reading →

By Anna Lehr Mueser, Manager of Communications & Digital Strategy and Liz Jelsomine, Environmental Art & PR Intern

This summer 14 artists will extend the Schuylkill Center’s art gallery onto our trails, with art that explores concepts in placemaking, reused materials, and natural-unnatural sound. These works were forged as part of Art in the Open, a public art event which brings art-making into public, along Schuylkill Banks in May. Dozens of artists participate in the biannual Art in the Open event and afterward, each brings their work to a gallery or art site around the City of Philadelphia, reinventing their artwork in a new context and drawing on their experience in Art in the Open.

This summer, the we are pleased to be hosting 14 of the Art in the Open 2016 artists, offering them the opportunity to bring their work into a natural context and adapt their work to our spaces. We’ll be featuring Aaron Asis, Jane Carver, Oki Fukunaga, Mary Olin Geiger, Elizabeth Hoy, Cayla Lockwood, C. Pazia Mannella, Heather McMordie, Angela McQuillan, Sarah Peoples, Leah Reynolds, Marian (Stasiorowski) Howard, and Katie VanVlient and Samuel Cusumano. An opening reception for Making in Place will be held on May 24th at 6 pm.

At the opening, artists will talk about their property and Director of Environmental Art Christina Catanese will lead a guided walk to explore the outdoor installations, ending with a performance developed by experimental accordion and vocal performer Jane Carver.

The show’s title, Making in Place, elegantly evokes one of the central components of Art in the Open: art that responds to and is part of the place where it is made. In this case, artists adapt their work and create new works to respond to the unique feel of the place where it is both created and installed. Poet Cayla Lockwood writes her poetry in reused scrap fabric woven into structures – both natural and built – to embed her words with the landscape. Sound and sculpture artists Katie VanVlient and Samuel Cusumano, of DataGarden, bring their “biodata sonification” device, which collects real-time data from plants and translates it into sound and graphic printouts as the plants respond to external stimuli. Continue reading →

By Liz Jelsomine, Environmental Art & Public Relations Intern

Perched on tree stumps, floating on water, hidden in the reeds – artist Katie Murken’s painted gourds were scattered across the  land at the Schuylkill Center in 2007. Debtor’s Inheritance was created as part of Green Machine, a multi-media exhibition on our grounds. The project was formed in collaboration with P’unk Ave, a Philadelphia based design studio with a focus on non-profit organizations, that helped Murken create her site specific and interactive work at the Schuylkill Center.

Murken described the Schuylkill Center as a place that exemplifies habitat that was once native to this region, but as a space that is still infringed upon by surrounding roadways, urban dwellings, and commercial and industrial spaces of the city. “The air, even, that pervades its empty spaces and is consumed by its organisms is manufactured by the city. In symbiosis, the fumes that we exhale are drawn in by this land.” Murken goes on to say the Schuylkill Center is visited by city dwellers as a familiar, but distant friend.

Debtor’s Inheritance aimed to visualize our conflicting relationship to the natural world. It invited viewers to consider the inverse of this scenario— a vast, wild and uninhabited landscape. Murken described Wind Dance Pond at the Schuylkill Center as being hugged by the hillsides, appearing as a bowl of water within a bowl of land. Murken took inspiration from these configurations and extrapolated and rescaled the form of the bowl. The artist used dried and hollowed gourds to convey this idea; the gourds were cut, shaped, painted, and piled together to create an installation to float on the surface of Wind Dance Pond.

Gourds also were scattered around the pond and placed throughout the Schuylkill Center, such as lining paths, set between tree limbs, and dispersed in streams. During the exhibition, visitors exploring the grounds of the Center encountered a series of stations demarcated by site-specific arrangements of the gourds. At each station, the gourds prompted participants to use their cellphones to initiate a series of narrative text-messages, a system setup with the help of P’unk Ave. The messages layered local history and ecology with residual dialogue from project collaborators.

Debtor’s Inheritance created a portrait of the Schuylkill Center as a living site that embodied the struggle between progress and preservation. As opposed to seeing the natural world as it stands today, Debtor’s Inheritance invited visitors at the Schuylkill Center to reverse that perspective, and imagine the landscape as it was centuries ago – vast and uninhabited.

By Liz Jelsomine, Environmental Art & Public Relations Intern

Artist Gary Miller began his visual arts career by studying the traditional farming techniques of isolated southern farming homesteads, and his early work reflected the simple, unadorned functionality of their commonly used materials and homemade tools.

Similar to the farms Miller studied, Brolo Hill Farm also used the same techniques to create thriving crops. Over time, however, small farms experienced crop yield reductions brought on by inefficient planting and catastrophic flooding from indiscriminate clear cutting. Recognizing that their actions were depleting vital natural resources, farmers began responsible use of the land by applying advances in animal husbandry, seed varieties, crop rotation, timber management, and innovations in tools and equipment.

However, as technology progressed, many hand-crafted tools became obsolete, and the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides were introduced. While this resulted in greater crop yields and profits, it also caused the near extinction of small family farms, as well as the loss of many indigenous plant and animal species. Continue reading →

We loved your submissions for the 2017 Winter Photo Contest– many lovely photos of happy critters, icy plants, and dreamy landscapes came in, but we’ve managed to narrow the dozens we received down to a few winners. Thank you to everyone who submitted a photo!

Anna, Jenny and Liz weigh in on our finalists below:

Winners

Abby Williams

I gasped when 18-year-old Abby Williams submitted this stunning portrait. Black and white perfectly captures the texture of the fallen snowflakes against dark hair. The ice around her chin is so visceral I can almost feel the familiar sting of an icy scarf brushing against soft winter skin. What a fierce look—we might as well declare this model a contest winner, too. – Jenny

Walking in Winter, Caileigh Mahan

Even in a big city, one can find a quiet, still moment by stepping into newly fallen snow and seeing familiar surroundings as if they were brand new. – Liz

Georgia Young

Georgia Young’s photo of a conifer in the snow captures the luminosity and stillness of new snow. A shallow depth of field draws the viewer in, creating an intimate view of the delicate dusting of snow in the foreground. – Anna

Runners-Up

Estelle Atkinson

Love the way the splintering light showcases these lively winter thorns.

Richele Dillard

Brilliant macro of this resilient winter pollinator(that’s a Hoverfly!) on witch hazel by Richele Dillard.

Rebecca Dhondt

Fun at Cresheim Creek!

Staci Vernick

Happy to see this little critter doing what they need to do to survive!