Environmental Art Grants (EAG)
Thursday, January 19
United States: 10am PDT, 11am MDT, 12pm CDT, 1pm EDT
Europe: 18:00 GMT/WET
Mary Swander, Kaitlin Bryson, Maru Garcia, Nansi Guevara
In August 2022, Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) and The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) announced the recipients of the Anonymous Was A Woman Environmental Art Grants (AWAW EAG), which provided one-time grants of up to $20,000 to support environmental art projects led by women-identifying artists nationwide. The program awarded a total of $250,000 in funding to artists from states and territories including California, Kansas, Louisiana, New York, New Mexico, Puerto Rico (Borikén), and Texas. Selected projects use a range of media to address soil, air, and water pollution; colonialism and its environmental and human impact; and climate change issues including coastal erosion—many which directly involve and engage affected communities.
For this Zoom event we will hear from four of the fourteen recipients, who are ecoartspace members, about their funded projects including Mary Swander's decolonizing play called Squatters on Red Earth, Kaitlin Bryson's collaborative multi-species community work Bellow Forth in New Mexico, Maru Garcia's urban soil project Prospering Backyards in California, and Nasi Guevara's The Magic Valley y Nuestra Delta Magica: settler imaginaries and community resistance in Texas.
For more information on the grant and all 14 recipients, go here
Presenters
Mary Swander is a Iowa Women Hall of Fame honoree, and Artistic Director of Swander Woman Productions, a theatre troupe that performs dramas about food, farming, and the wider rural environment. She is also the Executive Director of AgArts, a nonprofit designed to imagine and promote healthy food systems through the arts. Her latest book is The Maverick M.D.: Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez and His Fight for a New Treatment for Cancer (New Spring Press). The former Poet Laureate of Iowa, Swander is an award-winning author who has been given grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to the Whiting Foundation. She has published scores of books of poetry and nonfiction as well as essays, magazine articles, individual poems and radio commentaries in such places as National Public Radio, The Nation, The New York Times Magazine, and Poetry Magazine. She is best known for her poetry book Driving the Body Back and for her memoirs Out of this World and The Desert Pilgrim. Currently, Swander is performing her dramas from coast-to-coast in venues that include farmers’ barns to New York University, The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, The Mayo Clinic, and the Idaho Wine Commission. Her touring productions are: The Girls on the Roof, an adaptation of her poetry book with the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre; Vang, a play about recent immigrant farmers; Map of my Kingdom, a play about farmland transition; and Farm-to-Fork Tales, a storytelling performance. Her most recent play Squatters on Red Earth, about the white settler land grab from the Native Americans, will go on the road this summer. maryswander.com
Squatters on Red Earth is her project that was awarded the AWA Environmental Arts Grant for 2022.
Kaitlin Bryson is a queer, ecological/bio artist concerned with environmental and social justice. She primarily works with fungi, plants, microbes, and biodegradable materials to engage more-than-human audiences, while also facilitating human communities through social practice and environmental stewardship. Her practice is research-based and most often collaborative, highlighting the potency of working like lichens to realize radical change and justice. In 2019 Bryson co-founded the Submergence Collective, an environmental arts collective focused on multidisciplinary projects that imagine more collaborative, creative, hopeful, and ecologically connected futures for our human species and rest of the living world. Using biodegradable materials, she endeavors to make work that is materially low impact and does not create harmful waste or participate in a global, capital economy. Bryson seeks to instead facilitate the economy of the more-than-human world by creating habitats, ecosystems, and microbial forms of nourishment. Working with fungi, multispecies and other humans, this practice facilitates posthuman environments and dialogues that foster inclusion and justice, celebrate (bio)diversity, challenge myths of individualism, and center alternative ways of learning, knowing and being. kaitlinbryson.com
Bellow Forth is her project that was awarded the AWA Environmental Arts Grant for 2022.
Maru Garcia is a Mexican, LA-based artist/chemist working across art + science + environment. Her methodology combines laboratory and fieldwork tools from her background in plant chemistry and the pharmaceutical industry. Her use of media includes research, installations, performance, sculpture, and video, usually with the presence of organic matter to help understand the biological processes occurring in complex systems. Her areas of interest are biosystems, multispecies relations, and the capacity of living organisms (including humans) to act as remediators in contaminated sites. Her work highlights the importance of eco-aesthetics, in which relations are proposed as ways of building cultures of regeneration. At the same time, she questions the ways science and technology have influenced humans and more-than-humans within the natural world. Maru holds an MFA in Design & Media Arts from UCLA as well as an MS in Biotechnology and a BS in Chemistry both from Tecnológico de Monterrey, México. marugarciastudio.com
Prospering Backyards is her project that was awarded one of the AWA Environmental Art Grants for 2022.
Nansi Guevara is a designer, artist, & teacher based in Brownsville, Texas.Originally from Laredo, Texas, she holds a bachelor’s in Fine Arts in Design from the University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s in Education from Harvard University. Guevara is currently focused on design, education, and community public art to create spaces of resistance and affirmation, and economies of community cultural wealth and support. She is a graphic designer, an illustrator, and a textile/rasquache based public artist. She runs her own freelance design & education practice, Corazón Contento, based out of Brownsville, Texas. Guevara has been awarded residencies, fellowships, & grants from Fulbright, the NEA, Artplace America, a Blade of Grass, NALAC, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and most recently the AWAW Environmental Art Grant. Nuestra Delta Mágica
The Magic Valley y Nuestra Delta Magica is her project that was awarded one of the AWA Environmental Art Grants for 2022.
Members and one guest are free. General Public can attend for $10. All participants MUST REGISTER.
