"LAND/ART," a massive six-month environmental art project involving more than 25 presenting organizations in New Mexico, opened last weekend with a symposium. Coordinated by 516 ARTS, events began June 27 with a guided bus tour by The Center for Land Use Interpretation through dramatic built landscapes. Continuing through December 2009, "LAND/ART" explores relationships of land, art and community through dozens of new exhibitions, community-based projects, site-specific art works, speakers series, performances, tours, excursions and a culminating book. "Historically," says the organizers, "New Mexico has been a place where the intersection of nature and culture is at issue. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the American Southwest was the location of the first generation of Land Art or Earthworks," including The Lightning Field, the Star Axis, Spiral Jetty, the Sun Tunnels and Roden Crater. Details are online. [LINK]

Baltimore community members have been donating recycled items and volunteering to help build "The Reverse Ark," an exhibition that illustrates the city's industrial past. The Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, will serve as gallery, laboratory, workplace and studio to explore the social and environmental history of Baltimore's mills and textile industry in the site-based exhibition "The Reverse Ark: In the Wake," on view through August 22, 2009. Using the concept of an "ark" as a place of preservation and exploration, local citizens helped San Francisco-based Futurefarmers art collective create the multidisciplinary exhibition with locally sourced waste and surplus materials including fallen trees, hundreds of floorboards from abandoned row homes, cast-off paper and surplus clothing and textiles. Community engagement continues in The Reverse Ark Schoolhouse with public workshops, readings and discussions in an exploration of the environmental themes of the exhibition. [LINK]

MIT's Visual Arts Program donates its Armadillo trailer to Pasadena's Side Street Projects in an upcoming ceremony at Rose Kennedy Greenway in Boston. The handover event is June 18, 2009. The Armadillo trailer is the result of a year-long collaborative art project, the MIT FEMA Trailer Project, in which faculty and students transformed a surplus FEMA trailer into a "green" mobile composting center with vertical gardens, rainwater catchment system, permaculture library and indoor multipurpose space. The trailer has been dubbed the "Armadillo" for its ribbed retractable shell. It was originally one of thousands of trailers purchased by FEMA for temporary housing in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Side Street Projects will take the Armadillo on a tour to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and the Louisiana State Museum. (Slide show at http//www.sidestreet.org/armadillo.) [LINK]

In honor of the centennial of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, N.Y., artist Katie Holten is creating a Tree Museum, and the trees tell stories. Holten has marked out 100 trees along the Concourse, a street about four and a half miles long. Each tree will have a sign that gives a phone number and a code to listen to short recordings of people speaking about the Bronx, their lives and their work. The tree museum will open on June 21, 2009. Four of the stories can be heard online, accompanying "A Museum of Trees That Speak of History," a story about the project by Jim Dwyer. You can hear stories by architect Daniel Libeskind, preservationist Dart Westphal and community gardener Lurry Boyd, as well as Carlos Lazarte's recording of the chirps of coquis, Puerto Rican tree frogs. [LINK]

Exit Art in New York City has extended the run of an interesting show: "Vertical Gardens," a project of Papo Colo's SEA (Social-Environmental Aesthetics). Extended through June 6, 2009, "Vertical Gardens" is an exhibition of architectural models, renderings, drawings, photographs and ephemera that depict or imagine a vertical farm, urban garden or green roof. It features over 20 projects, both imaginary and real, by artists and architects that envision solutions for building greener urban environments. Special events have included talks by public-health scientist Dickson D. Despommier, founding director of the Vertical Farm Project; and SITE Founder James Wines on ways to meet the demands of economic crisis, energy efficiency and sustainable design without a loss of aesthetic quality; plus poetry readings and composting workshops. SEA is an endeavor that presents a diverse multimedia exhibition program and permanent archive of artworks that address social and environmental concerns. [LINK]

T. Allan Comp, founder of AMD&Art, addressing acid mine drainage, has been named a National River Hero by the River Network. Comp, who left AMD&Art in 2005, is now founding director of the Appalachian Coal Country Watershed Team (ACCWT) and the Western Hardrock Watershed Team (WHWT), coalitions of grassroots-level groups created to repair the environmental degradation left by historic coal mining while creating economic stability needed in rural communities.. He will be honored on May 31, 2009, at the River Network’s National River Rally in Baltimore. Comp is the first federal employee to receive the award since its inception in 2002. An employee of the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, Comp works through the ACCWT and the WHWT to support the efforts of small community/watershed groups in mining communities of Appalachia and the Rocky Mountains. [LINK]

Pallazzo Strozzi, an extraordinary example of Renaissance architecture in Florence, Italy, is the site of a three-month exploration of art, ecology and sustainability called "Green Platform." The Centro di Cultura Contemporanea Strozzina is hosting Green Platform, Aptil 24-July 19, 2009, offering an exhibition, lectures, workshops and films by artists and environmentalists from all over the world. For example, Enzo Tiezzi, professor of mathematical, physical and natural sciences at Siena University, speaks about "Beauty and Sustainability," June 18. there are artist talks by Denmark's Tue Greenfort, Serbia's Nikola Uzunovski and Italy's Michelangelo Consani. Screenings include "A crude awakening. The oil crash" (Switzerland), "Garbage! The revolution starts at home" (Canada) and "One Water" (USA). Green Sunday, May 24, is a free educational activity for children, 6-12, about the practice of environmental sustainability. Green Platform is curated by Lorenzo Giusti and Valentina Gensini. (Thanks, Land Arts listserve: landarts@lyris.ttu.edu. [LINK]

BIG CAAKe and the League of Imaginary Scientists + E.K.K.O have been awarded the 2009 iLAB residencies by iLAND, the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance. BIG CAAKe, a collaborative team including an artist/engineer/educator, a choreographer/cook, an artist/designer, an architect and a mycologist, will conduct "StrataSpore," a project using mushrooms to develop dialogue about local New York City ecosystems and urban sustainability. The League of Imaginary Scientists and E.K.K.O., a collaborative team including an artist, a composer, an architect, an environmental researcher and a choreography collective, will develop "Waterways: fluid movements in a liquid city," a project that examines water through environmental and sociological study and "transforms that information into choreographic actions that engage New Yorkers." Get connected through the ongoing discussion on the iLAND Symposium blog. [LINK]

"PERSEVERANCE: waterbodies," on the outskirts of Oaxaca, Mexico, in June, is a six-day laboratory in the restoration of watersheds through environmental and dance practices Choreographer Jennifer Monson will facilitate a core group of up to 20 participants, camping and working together with members of Instituto Naturaleza y Sociedad de Oaxaca (INSO), and sharing methodologies and creative practices. Activities will include learning about the projects of INSO, assisting with community-based restoration projects, investigating the site through dance practices developed by Monson and proposed by the group and creating a public engagement and discussion based on the lab's experiences. The event, June 27-July 4, 2009, is part of a forum by Prisma, an artist self-education initiative funded by the European Union. [LINK]

The SEEDS Festival, June 14-28, 2009, in Plainfield, Mass., is an interdisciplinary summer festival dedicated to arts and ecology. SEEDS 2009 will focus on potentiality, say the presenters, Earthdance, a nonprofit that cultivates dance and the art of improvisation. "Potential for new growth is generated in places where diverse organisms meet. In this year of potential political change, we invite this phenomenon into our interdisciplinary investigations." The festival will feature "Ritual Dance: Intimate + Universal Spaces," a group experience with Diego Piñón; "Along the Watershed," a workshop with Simon Whitehead and Jennifer Monson; "Mycoscaping + Ecology of Transformation," a mushroom intensive with Rafter Sass; "The Sustainable Landscape," a permaculture workshop with R.U.S.T./Skott Kellogg; "Integrating Interior + Exterior Spaces," a dancing/building workshop with Daria Faïn and Robert Kocik; "Eco-Art for Everyday Life," a course with Beverly Naidus; and a full-day public community celebration. [LINK]

Want to take part in an international eco-art project? The Sachaqa Art Center is building an Eco Art Village in the heart of the Amazon jungle, in Tarapoto, Peru. "The main aim is to build a creative community where painting, music,writing, sculpture, ceramic artists can find inspiration from the natural environment and each other," says English artist and Sachaqa founder Trina Brammah. The Center is currently located in the village of San Roque De Cumbaza, Lamas; studios there cost $200/month, including kitchen, accommodation and shared studio space. Sachaqa is in the process of building a new center near the village, designed to use ecologically friendly materials and renewable energy sources, using an Eco-Dome Plan designed by architect Nader Khalili. They invite participation in the building process as well. [LINK]

The role that art, architecture and design play in land reclamation and urban ecology is topic of an upcoming panel at Parsons the New School for Design in N.Y.C. The panel, set for April 10, 2009, will discuss transdisciplinary fieldwork in art, landscape architecture and industrial reclamation, focusing on the field methods of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech and the Incubo Atacama Lab in Chile. Land Arts, directed by Chris Taylor, is a field program that investigates the intersection of geomorphology and human construction beginning with the land and extending through the complex social and ecological processes that produce contemporary landscapes. The Incubo Atacama Lab project began when the curatorial exchange organization Incubo invited Taylor to bring the working methods of Land Arts to Chile. Taylor will participate along with Incubo artists and more. [LINK]

"Rising Tide: The Arts and Ecological Ethics" is an upcoming conference in San Francisco, Calif., organized by California College of the Arts and Stanford University. The conference, April 17-19, 2009, is an interdisciplinary gathering, bringing together artists, activists, community organizers, venture capitalists, philanthropists, students and educators who are described as "helping to push the green revolution to a tipping point." Conference events in a variety of media have titles like "Bioanthrophony," "Material/Culture Sustainability" and "Green Capitalism." Keynotes are by artist David Buckland, leader of The Cape Farewell Project in the High Arctic, "widely acknowledged to be the most significant sustained artistic response to climate change anywhere in the world"; and Sheila Kennedy, a founding principal of the interdisciplinary design practice of KVA MATx, which explores relationships between architecture, technology and emerging public needs. [LINK]

April 8, 2009, is the last day of the 14th Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan Prisoners, this year showing works addressing the global climate crisis. The show, presented annually by the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP), opened March 24 at the Duderstadt Center Gallery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Curated by UM Professors Buzz Alexander, Janie Paul and Jason Wright, it shows 300 works by 200 artists from 40 prisons. Events included a keynote speech by Chicago Citizen of the Year William Ayers, a panel discussion on women and children inside prison, a speak-out by Detroit youth, an artists talkback, a conversation about Michigan Parole and Commutation Board practices, a film about art inside Jackson Prison and release of the first annual Literary Review of Writing by Michigan Prisoners. "Acts of Art," a PBS documentary about PCAP, was broadcast across Michigan in March and April. [LINK]

San Francisco's OMI/Excelsior Living Library & Think Park sponsors an Art, Ecology, Garden: Think, Talk & Do event this Saturday and every Saturday "into the future." The event, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. March 28, 2009, "provides a unique opportunity to think and talk about issues of sustainable and ecological design, education, art, food and much more while gardening, getting dirty and having fun in a beautiful setting full of native trees, fruits, flowers and vegetables," says artist/founder Bonnie Ora Sherk. A Living Library (ALL), she says, "transforms sunken meadows and brownfields, urban sprawl and desolation, public parks and plazas, concrete and asphalt schoolyards, civic centers or undeveloped wastelands into vibrant and relevant community learning environments and highly visible public magnets offering innovative and practical community and economic development." In San Francisco, there are three Library/Think Parks underway. [LINK]

Cornerstone Theater is talking with scientists, advocates, river lovers, politicians, Native Americans, artists, and residents along the banks of the L.A. River for "Flow." The latest production in Cornerstone's Justice cycle, the community-based play will explore the mysteries of this massive river-turned-concrete-drainage-channel. Playwright Julie Hebért is leading the environmental-justice project, engaging people working to reclaim the waterway and its benefits, and visiting the river's adjacent communities like Frogtown, Atwater Village and Glendale Narrows, from which the cast will be drawn. Partners include Farmlab, Friends of the L.A. River and the South Asian Network. The play, directed by Juliette Carrillo, runs May 28-June 21, 2009. The Justice Cycle is a series of six world-premiere plays designed around the question of how laws create and disrupt communities. [LINK]

Local residents, historians and area artists will be telling their stories about the Jackrabbit Homesteads of California's Wonder Valley in a "listening party" at 29 Palms Historical Society Museum. The March 28 event is part of artist Kim Stringfellow's Jackrabbit Homestead project, a Web-based multimedia presentation (and forthcoming book) featuring a downloadable car audio tour exploring the cultural legacy of the Small Tract Act of 1938 in the Morongo Basin near Joshua Tree National Park. Historical evidence resides in several hundred mostly abandoned desert shacks built by people taking advantage of the 1938 homestead program to dispose of “useless” federal lands from the public domain -- “one of the strangest land rushes in Southern California history" (L.A. Times). Some cabins have been reclaimed by artists. There's also a March 28 "cabin-related" art show at the 29 Palms Creative Center & Gallery. (Thanks Patricia Watts and Facebook.) [LINK]

A film about a French mountain reforested with 68 million trees by a forester and a botanist will be featured in the 11th Annual Environmental Film Festival in the Nation's Capital. "Aigoual, the Rebirth of a Forest" by Marc Kahanne will have its U.S. premiere at the National Arboretum, March 18-2009, introduced by American Forests' Deborah Gangloff, who will talk about the importante of the arboretum's research. Presented collaboratively by 101 local, national and global organizations, the films screen March 11-22, 2009 at 52 venues throughout D.C., including museums, embassies, libraries, universities and local theaters. There's a welcome film on the festival's Web site by Philippe Cousteau, including clips from nine festival films. The site also features a Green Film Forum where you can view short films, submit your own films and learn more about environmental filmmaking. [LINK]

iLand, artist Jennifer Monson's cross-sectoral arts organization, will present its first symposium on "Connecting to the Urban Environment" at The New School, March 28, 2009. Subtitled "Creating embodied and relational approaches to environmental awareness," the symposium will address issues emanating from creative collaborations of iLAB residencies paired with environmental organizations designing new relationships to urban space. The symposium will include oral and media presentations, workshops and small-group discussions with previous iLAB residents Michelle Nagai, Lise Brenner, Uli Lorimer, Sarah White, Gerald Marks, Angel Ayon, Karl Cronin,Theresa Duhon and Colin Grubel as well as Megan Fellerath and Brian McCormick of the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative; environmental sculptor Mara G. Haseltine and her New School students who are building oyster beds; and James Cervino fo the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. iLand (Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance) says the next iLAB residency application deadline is March 20. [LINK]

"Sustaining our planet, our culture and our creative enterprise" are the topics of "Systems of Sustainability: Art, Innovation, Action (S.O.S.)" at the University of Houston in March. Part arts festival, part academic symposium, "S.O.S." explores "how creative enterprise can be an integral tool for cultural growth and social change." Organized by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and the Art Museum's Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston, the event includes site-specific projects, participatory activities, lectures, scholarly panels and opportunities for dialogue with artists, researchers, activists and scholars such as Matt Coolidge, The Center for Land Use Interpretation; Lindsay Utz, GOOD Magazine; Robert Harriss, Houston Advanced Research Center; Liz Lerman, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange; and more. The symposium runs March 27-29, 2009. [LINK]

Applications are being accepted for the U.C. Institute for Research in the Arts/UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center Joint Residency at the Boyd Deep Canyon Research Center in Palm Desert, Calif. The residency, February 13-16, 2009, will be facilitated by members of the Luminous Green Collective, an interdisciplinary laboratory calling upon the creative sector to enrich the public debate around environmental sustainability, ethical living and eco-technology. The residency will focus on issues relevant to the Sustainable Desert Gardens Initiative: future desert ecologies, native desert knowledge systems, sustainable design strategies for a world without water, desert soundscapes, desert navigation, the new desert social order and desert food and waste cycles. The gathering is designed as an Open Space workshop. Hurry, application deadline is February 7. [LINK]

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) spent 2008 as the first artist-in-residence at the University of Houston’s Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center. The CLUI is a California research organization involved in exploring, examining and understanding land and landscape issues. The CLUI has worked with U. Houston students in the School of Art, College of Architecture and the Creative Writing Program and established a field station on the banks of Buffalo Bayou. "Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry" is the CLUI's residency-culminating exhibition at the University Art Museum's Blaffer Gallery, January 17-March 29, 2009, showing how the extraction and refining of oil has sculpted the state’s terrain. It's accompanied by a publication and a series of events including Buffalo Bayou boat tours, field-station site visits, screenings and public talks. The Buffalo Bayou field station will remain as a permanent research platform. [LINK]

"Body Burden," year two of Intermedia Arts' Art & Healing initiative to creatively explore the concept of health in the 21st Century, is underway in MInneapolis. Intermedia, in conjunction with numerous activist and social-service partners, is presenting gallery exhibitions, performances, brown-bag dialogues and youth workshops on the theme through January 9, 2009. Exhibitions include work by National Geographic photojournalist Peter Essick, examining the plight of workers and low-income communities worldwide exposed to work and home-related chemicals; and a group show investigating the concept of "body burden" from creative, philosophical, sociological and mythical perspectives. Workshops and roundtables will explore body image, environmental justice, cleaner products and production methods and learning and behavioral disability, in partnership with Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota, Women’s Environmental Institute, Health Legacy, Women's Cancer Action, the Learning Disability Association of Minnesota and Arc Greater Twin Cities. [LINK]

The Ecodrama Playwrights Festival and Symposium on Ecology and Performance calls for proposals for the symposium, May 21-31, 2009, in Eugene, Oregon. The events, sponsored by Earth Matters on Stage, a program of the Department of Theatre Arts of the University of Oregon, will be dedicated to nurturing "ecodrama": theatrical works that not only "take environmental issues as their topic, hoping to raise consciousness or press for change, but also work that explores the relation of a 'sense of place' to identity and community." January 1, 2009, is the deadline for proposals for workshops, round-tables, panels, working sessions, installations or participatory community gatherings that "explore, examine, challenge, articulate or nourish the possibilities of theatrical and performative responses to the environmental crisis in particular, and our ecological situatedness in general." [LINK]

In 2009-2010, Exit Art’s subterranean venue, Exit Underground, will present five exhibitions for its new initiative SEA (Social Environmental Aesthetics). SEA’s central mission is "to provide a vehicle through which the public can be made aware of socially and environmentally engaged work, and to provide a forum for collaboration between artists, scientists, activists, scholars and the public" through exhibitions, performances, panels and a permanent archive. SEA uses a curatorial model called ConceptPlus, which begins with a theme or concept that is then publicized through a call for proposals. The exhibitions and their entry due dates are: "Vertical Gardens" (January 15, 2009), "End of Oil" and "America for Sale" (both February 15, 2009) and "Consume" and "Contemporary Slavery" (both March 15, 2009). Exit Art is a 25-year-old cultural center in New York City founded by Directors Jeanette Ingberman and Papo Colo. [LINK]