Paradigms on the Move: The Groundworks Monongahela Conference

Elkhorn City, Kentucky, site of "Beneath Land and Water " by Suzanne Lacy, Susan Leibovitz Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi. See Steinman's Web site.

“Welcome agents of change!” cheered Tim Collins, artist and conference organizer, as he welcomed attendees to the Groundworks Monongahela Conference, a public exchange of international views on art, ecology and planning. From these first few words, it was clear that something refreshing, important and transformative was happening here. Set on the Pittsburgh, Pa., campus of Carnegie Mellon University in the Regina Gouger Miller Gallery, the environmental-art weekend, October 15-16, 2005, featured a full schedule of artists’ presentations describing community-specific projects.

Observation became engagement, instantly promoting discussion as attendees moved through the gallery. Balancing interpretation of place, community collaboration, planning, negotiation, physical transformation of sites and the aesthetic presentation of projects, these visual artists working in the field of environmental art have been problem solving and planting seeds of change.

Developing a Locus for Dialogue and Exchange

The conference and exhibit concept began three years ago when artist Tim Collins arranged commissions for several artist residency projects to take place in the Pittsburgh area. Collins said, “Pittsburgh has been very lucky to attract the investment of the Warhol Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation and others in this effort.” The next step was enlisting author/art historian Grant Kester of the University of California at San Diego to curate a culminating exhibit.

“Artists over the past decade have developed a remarkable range of projects that offer concrete solutions to specific ecological problems ranging from brown-field reclamation to the survival of family farms,” said Kester in his curator's statement. Imagining this exhibit and deliberately choosing “not to be synoptic,” Kester started with the Pittsburgh community residency projects, which he wanted to present publicly within a conference format. He then wove in artists from around the world to complement the residency work, opening up a regional/local and international dialogue.

The result celebrated the diversity of process these artists employ, while helping, as Miller Gallery Director Jenny Strayer said, to “raise specific questions of how they integrate formally what is exhibited in the gallery with ongoing processes and their impact upon communities, places, ecosystems and policies.”

Can Artists Create or Manifest Social Change?

The evidence presented in the exhibit answered that question quite clearly with a resounding yes. These artists have indeed demonstrated through their work that it is possible to inspire and incite changes in social visions. They presented “works that are generated through collaborative or participatory approach in which the inhabitants of specific sites are actively involved in a process of physical and creative transformation,” said Grant Kester. It was enlightening to see how widespread and diverse the community-centered work is.

The projects have taken place in many corners of the world including the Pittsburgh area, Kentucky, New York, Maine, Germany, Japan, India, England, Argentina, Austria and Senegal. Much of the work represented is grounded in redefining relationships between communities and their respective built environments, including industrial-waste, water-pollution, land-reclamation and common-green-space issues. Many of the sites were themselves waste products of industrial histories. Connie and Tom Merriman described these as locations where “extractive industry” has taken place; where people and industry “have come in, extracted resources, wealth, and power and left.”

These artists have chosen to take an active role in these communities’ plans for the future. As Kester said, “What is more unusual in recent art practice is that this essentially representational relationship to nature has been supplemented by a commitment to direct intervention…” Their approaches differ, but recurring ingredients in their plans include research, negotiation, marketing, program planning, collaborative community artwork making, poetry, photography, design, video, interviews, sculpture and more. The common denominator was a sense of inspiring a reconsideration of the particular environment’s identity and future as it relates to the residential, industrial, economic and social identity. These people have moved mountains and inspired change, but not by themselves. Much of the discussion during the conference centered on how to build in, or connect to, local assets.

Helping Cities To Re-imagine the Future

Positive outcomes have occurred when artists connected on a deep and multidisciplinary level with specific communities. The ideas that have emerged are not the artists' but the assembled group’s.

"To help McKeesport imagine itself as a thriving place where people want to work and live, and to instill local pride about rich natural and social resources, we created a fictional tourist brochure set in 2020, after McKeesport had won the coveted 2018 Urban Conservation Excellence Award." -- Jackie Brookner, Stephanie Flom and Ann Rosenthal for "The Transformation of McKeesport from Fire to Water." See Brookner's Web site.

“Building trusts, building relationships, we come in caring, connect with people who care” said Jackie Brookner, Stephanie Flom and Ann Rosenthal. Their project, “The Transformation of McKeesport from Fire to Water” combined several agendas and residents to explore positive alternatives for the future of the town of McKeesport, Pa. The town has an industrial history and a current lack of employment mixes with a low level of civic pride. The alternative vision introduced a natural trail system, celebrating the confluence of two rivers. The project included plans to repurpose several vacant industrial structures, creating enlivened spaces that will attract visitors and celebrate the area’s natural resources and valued past. Ideas such as a Trail Visitor’s Center with people and activities, a “Confluence Park” and a meadow picnic area were part of the plan. The artists began by considering McKeesport as an ecosystem in the widest sense of the word.

In their description of the process, the artists said, “Speaking with a broad cross section of the community clarified the necessity of linking social, economic and ecological revitalization. …The keystone of our concept plan for McKeesport as a Trail Town is to create a vibrant youth job training program where youth learn and earn as they help create the trail system.”

The collaborating artists devised an ice-breaking tool for engaging their audience in the meetings with the many community groups. Projecting themselves into the future (the year 2018) through script and costuming, they suggested that McKeesport had won an award for Urban Conservation Excellence due to the integration of a trail system into the town’s planning. Starting their community discussion at this envisioned end point, the tool inspired and opened minds so they could begin to discuss the tangible steps needed to achieve this goal. Ann Rosenthal said that part of the job was to make connections; the city had resources available but the efforts and people were fragmented.

Dennis Pittman, who works with the McKeesport mayor’s office, found that this approach to a major community project led to some measurable change within the community. He announced at the conference that the city had actually changed its plans for condo units to accommodate the new vision for the area. “Suddenly you have a broad base of desire” inspired by artists encouraging “people to think outside the box.”

Using the “Eye of the Stranger”

Helen and Newton Harrison’s installation: “Fecal Matters: A Proposal for Braddock, North Braddock, and the Lands Above”

Helen and Newton Harrison’s work described how they bring the “outsider’s” eye to the sites they confront. They started, as many of these artists do, by meeting and consulting with a diverse group of local residents and experts in various fields. They objectively considered this rich mix of information, and then “invented” a tool for understanding and revisioning the future of the site. Their project for Braddock, Pa., presented a practical alternative solution for a city water problem. "Fecal Matters: A Proposal for Braddock, North Braddock and the Lands Above" is described in the Harrisons' proposal as making "an argument for channeling surface waters on to the many empty lots in Braddock in order to reduce the flow of surface waters into the existing sewer system. The idea is that after appropriate planting and attention to the over-compaction of earth, waters would then be able to percolate into the ground where they would be purified and slowly find their way into the Monongahela River.”

Bringing a fresh look to an existing problem, the Harrisons turned a negative situation into a positive opportunity by rethinking, rerouting. After working with a “co-creative group,” they present their vision, and then they often turn the responsibility of the physical transformation back to the community. “Localism is really critical,” says Newton, “We don’t coerce people. Ideas bubble up. Nobody has to do anything. The idea is to leave the impression that it’s worse not to do it than to do it.” Allowing for the time it might take for the ultimate transformation of the site to happen is important. It doesn’t take place overnight. As Helen said at the conference, “some expect the magic to happen…but it takes time.” She continued to explain the importance of stepping back, saying that most of their proposals that have been achieved “probably wouldn’t have if it was us doing it, the projects had to become the communities’ idea.” Some of those projects have taken 10-15 years to come to fruition, but that’s okay with the Harrisons because they are content to let the ideas evolve within their indigenous areas, and just as it takes 15 years for a pine tree to grow to an impressive height, so it must be for the ideas. They must take root within the soil of the community, and be allowed to spread, and become firm in resolve.

Visual Art as a Tool for Communication

Connie and Tom Merriman’s installation, “Hays Woods Project”

Going beyond public awareness to actually incite negotiation, public discourse, petitions, land planning, potentially “saving” a site from further harmful development was the tricky territory that Connie and Tom Merriman traversed. Their "Hays Woods Project" considered the “role and value of green space in the urban environment.” The privately owned and at-risk for development 650-acre site where they have focused their efforts is the largest undeveloped tract of land in the City of Pittsburgh. There was a proposed development for a large woods area that would flatten and pave it for a horseracing complex.

The Merrimans approached their project with specific goals, which included establishing and communicating an identity for this previously unnamed site. They began with Burma Shave-type signs along a nearby roadway, calling attention to the value of the open land. The result was a “Save Hays Woods” initiative that challenged the proposed development. Their installation for the Groundworks exhibit included large photographic collages and a quiet topographical sculpture describing the woods as it is, in what they consider its best use. This was one of the projects that Grant Kester said, “seek to directly engage the mechanisms of policy and planning that govern the use of a given eco-system.”

Co-creating the Work

CMU students try Laurie Palmer’s “Oxygen Bar”

Laurie Palmer’s "Hays Woods/ Oxygen Bar" related to the Merriman’s project, demonstrating the “pollution filtering function of the foliage.” She said, “Few people in the area know the woodland exists, as it is isolated from the surrounding inhabited communities due to a highway interchange and railroad tracks.” She created “three mobile oxygen bars, containing mini-forests (Hays Woods in microcosm) that have been making short visits to public gathering places in Pittsburgh neighborhoods.” Palmer asked her audience to try the oxygen masks, which inevitably generates questions about the relationship between the earth and foliage inside of the oxygen bar and the provided oxygen masks. As Palmer said, “the asking is itself the project in this piece.” Maps on the side of the oxygen bar linked this portable sculpture to Hays Woods.

“Public artists must have the ability to bring people together” and “successful public art has to bridge differences of class,” said Tom Finkelpearl in his keynote speech. Finkelpearl, Director of the Queens Museum of Art in New York, stressed the need to view local residents as the “experts.” Listening to their perhaps diverse needs, histories and ways of working as well as their visions for their local environment and acting as a spider, artists can help these issues and people together to form a sound foundation for a sustainable collaborative project.

The Elkhorn Project installation

Applying this “social charisma” and integrating the artist’s plan with the community input, collaborating artists Suzanne Lacy, Susan Steinman and Yutaka Kobayashi worked with Elkhorn City, Kentucky, on "Beneath Land and Water." They encountered a community with strong opinions -- voices that needed to be heard, honored and woven into all corners of the work. Sensitive to the area’s history of social and environmental exploitation, the artists began meeting with various citizens and, using what Suzanne Lacy identified as “asset-based methodologies,” they “developed a sense of ethics for the project: Keep it cheap; leave something permanent; take nothing out, only give back.” The artists engaged in what Susan Steinman thinks of as the “art of permission” finding out what people want. Their resulting plan brought the artist right into the center of town. Over time, more and more people would become engaged. As Steinman says, “working in the middle of the street…you get a lot of sidewalk superintendents.”

The local residents participated in the project “restoring a waterfront; designing an interpretive park with mini-wetlands, where storm-water runoff from a gas station hits the river". The experience drew the artists in as much as it drew the local community in. They kept going back, and they said it must have been something about the relationships made with this community -- it held them, and continues to do so. They found a mixture of citizens and artists interested in continuity, and by passing on some of the collaborative work to these local people, they ensured the work will continue after the visiting artists have left.

Local Problems are Global Problems

International artists and artist groups included in the exhibit and the conference demonstrated the common themes that have been explored around the world. Working in Hamburg, Germany, Park Fiction expanded the art of negotiation and activism to include a parallel planning process “creating platforms for exchange among people from many different cultural fields: musicians, priests, a headmistress, a cook, café-owners, bar-men, a psychologist, squatters, artists and interventionist residents.” Ichi Ikeda, from Japan, created awareness about water issues, using a ”water’s-eye view” assembling a marketing platform and taking his presentation to the public in galleries, a condo showroom, science museum, market, temple and more. Navjot Altaf of India immersed herself in locally gathered groups, combining their video interviews with sculpture, describing water-rights issues.

Shifting the Paradigm

Paradigms have been shifting; models that blend artistic authorship with the work done by farmers, builders, city officials, engineers and scientists into community-based projects have become stronger and more critically important. These artists have taken their roles as instigators, provocateurs and problem solvers seriously.

Summing up the conference, Tim Collins said, “I believe that we made a case for a depth of local expertise and impact in Western Pennsylvania that withstands international comparison. The international practitioners challenge us all to reconsider the scope of western ideology and what we might consider a typical context for practice. The question of art never came up, allowing us to focus upon the diverse range of what art might become and do -- tomorrow! The future is a post-industrial mix of legacy impacts to air, soil, water to climate, to human health with significant challenges to planetary life support. Art has a role to play in that future.”

What’s on the Horizon for these Artists and their Collaborations?

Working in a community-specific manner, this developing group is constantly sharing resources, making conceptual connections, honoring the hopes and dreams of each community and working together to engage in critical dialogue, to create a new aesthetic vocabulary. The artists continue to develop the field, positioning it on the front edge of the contemporary art scene. ”We have done our best to construct a discursive situation that welcomes all,” volunteers Tim Collins, “We need to identify cultural centers that have the wherewithal to nurture what I describe as a mighty oak. The most minimal shelter possible, a gathering place out of the rain, imminently accessible, a place of respite where all voices can always be heard. The voices are sometimes convivial, sometimes conflicted as in any social group, but we respect the gathering. I would argue that lyrical, critical and transformative practitioners exist within the same Venn diagram. Most of us slip and slide between these ways of working. Let's keep the field broad, the discussion critically informed and the sharing focused upon getting better at what must be done.”

Cynthia Robinson lives in New Hampshire, where she is a visual artist working in the environmental art field and has been the program director for Friends of the Arts Regional Arts Council for over ten years. Her work may be seen at her Web site.

See the outstanding Groundworks Conference Web site for further information and 14 position papers by participating artists. Also see the Green Museum Toolbox for Communities for case studies of many of these projects.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2005