Bay Ridge Through An Ecological Lens - gallery walk through
Sunday, May 21
United States: 8am PDT, 9am MDT, 10am CDT, 11am EDT
Europe: 15:00 GMT
Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens is an interactive, public, community art exhibition featuring artists from the New York area including nature walks and community art interventions sited at locations throughout the Bay Ridge community. The exhibition is curated by Jennifer McGregor and hosted by Stand4 Gallery in collaboration with ecoartspace.
How do we connect and educate people through the arts to understand and care for the environmental resources in their community?
In a time of extreme environmental dangers and social upheavals, it is important to value the resources we have and to cooperate as stewards towards a better future, where we work together towards new ideas to help us mitigate the damage the climate crisis is inflicting on our world. The exhibition, Bay Ridge Through an Ecological Lens was designed as an opportunity to instill a deeper respect for nature and connect people to each other through art. Artists were selected to design projects that work within the environmental theme of this community intervention because of their knowledge and skills in social practice and ecology. Special exhibition programming will engage the community with interventions, community collaborations, talks, and performances intended to educate the community about their surrounding ecology, bring people together for a common cause, raise consciousness, and foster stewardship.
Join us in a live walk through of the exhibition and hear from gallery director Jeannine Bardo, curator Jennifer McGregor, and two of the artists included Kate Dodd and Nikki Lindt.
Image: ©Nikki Lindt, Within the Upper Bay, 2023, painting and interdisciplinary soundscape and ©Kate Dodd, Bay Ridge Tree Collection, 2023, installation at Bay Ridge 73rd Street Public Library.
Presenters
Jeannine Bardo is the founder and artistic director of Stand4 Gallery and Community Arts Center. Bardo is a Brooklyn-born artist, curator, and art educator. She received her BFA in illustration from the School of Visual Arts and completed both a Masters in Art Education and a Masters in Fine Arts from Brooklyn College. She is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on humanity’s connections to the natural world. Bardo has over ten years of experience as a curator in both the public and private realm. She is a lifelong resident of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and a believer in community and collaboration. https://stand4gallery.org
Jennifer McGregor is New York curator and arts planner, Jennifer McGregor brings deep expertise in the areas of art, ecology, gardens, public engagement and placemaking. McGregor’s visionary thinking combined with a realistic approach is key to projects that engage communities, diverse sites, and multiple art forms. She led Wave Hill’s place-based, ecologically oriented programming for many years prior to working independently. She writes and speaks regularly about public and environmental art. www.mcgregorconsulting.net
Kate Dodd received her B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in 1983, and her M.F.A. from Columbia University in 1990, and currently lives and teaches in New Jersey. She has exhibited her artwork nationally in museums, galleries, and colleges, and has been teaching art in public and private schools for 30 years. Kate has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Papermaking, the Connemara Conservancy, Cummington Community for the Arts, the Vermont Studio School and numerous schools in the tri-state area. In addition to site-specific installations, Kate has large scale works commissioned by NJ Transit in Bayonne, Newark, South Amboy, and Hoboken. Kate's installations provide a heightened sensory experience for the viewer\occupant, while reexamining institutional and conventional notions of architecture and its relationship to the environment. http://www.katedodd.com
Dodd's work included in the exhibition is titled The Bay Ridge Tree Collection, which is a collaborative artwork located at the 73rd Street Public Library in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. The work consists of two paper “trees” in the lobby that expand up onto the windows of the two story facade. The bark and branches feature text describing every Bay Ridge street tree species, as recorded on the NYC Parks Department street tree map. A mini book collection, housed in the tree knotholes and accessible for browsing, documents individual Bay Ridge street trees; these were made by a variety of Bay Ridge residents who were invited to participate by choosing a Bay Ridge street tree to honor and collecting a few observations/ artifacts for inclusion in a mini book dedicated to that particular tree. These books will become part of the library’s permanent collection.
Nikki Lindt is a New York City based multidisciplinary artist who grew up in the Netherlands and the US. Lindt works primarily in the mediums of painting, sound and video on long term projects. Her work focuses on environmental stewardship and people’s relationship to natural areas - from the Arctic Circle to the forests of New York City. She often works with ecologists, social scientists, philosophers and others. Lindt has participated in residencies at field stations where she collaborates with various scholars associated with the field station. This collaborative process has deepened the knowledge base and the resulting work for her and her collaborators. The field stations include; the Toolik Field Station, Alaska (where she is project leader in an ongoing project), Abisko Scientific Research Station in Sweden (The Swedish Polar Research Secretariat- where she is part of a three year study in a team of three artists and three scientists), Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, and the Urban Field Station in New York City (where her collaborations are ongoing). Lindt has given many public talks about her work and has received the Pollack-Krasner Grant, Brooklyn Arts Council Grant, Puffin Foundation Grant, the Dutch Artists Grant (Fonds BKVB) and has been awarded the Environmental Cultural Award, Milieudienst (Environmental Protection Agency) Amsterdam, Netherlands. https://www.nlindt.com
Lindt's work included in the exhibition is titled The Underground Sound Project, Bay Ridge; Within The Upper Bay and is an interdisciplinary project connecting visitors to the underwater soundscape of the Upper Bay. Some of these acoustics reflect the broader natural ecosystem of the bay while others are deeply affected by human impact. Voices of three community members with strong ties to the bay are interwoven into the underwater audio piece, revealing our dynamic, complicated relationship with a complex sub-aquatic ecosystem. A painting based on the rhythms and language of the sounds heard underwater is coupled with the recording.
This event is open to the General Public for Free. All participants MUST REGISTER.
