WEAD—Women Environmental Artists Directory announces publication of ISSUE No. 6, the newest edition of its online progressive art MAGAZINE. In ISSUE No. 6 a dozen plus critical essays discuss DIRTY WATER.
GUEST EDITORIAL CONSULTANT
ELIZABETH DOUGHERTY
FEATURED ARTIST
This issue proudly honors BETSY DAMON, a first-generation feminist performance artist and influential environmental art role model. From China to Pittsburg, she has made significant contributions to the art and understanding of remediating water for three+ decades. Sharing expertise, she founded the “Keepers of the Waters”—an artist-run nonprofit that helps other artists and communities create their own local water saving projects.
ESSAYISTS
Social justice activist JOURDAN IMANI KEITH—a charismatic poet and spoken word artist, voices a visceral personal connection to water as an intimate living ecosystem that sustains us internally and externally.
STACY LEVY is known for visually arresting public artworks that combine the clarity of maps and diagrams, the pragmatism of environmental science, and a deep sense of site. She hopes to affect wonder and surprise, while illuminating hidden urban infrastructure systems.
JACKIE BROOKNER brings plant-based water remediation for parks, rivers, and wetlands together with habitat restoration, landscape sculpture, and active community collaboration. She creates evocative public places where people can connect with natural systems essential to supporting life.
British artist CHRIS DRURY relates his multi-year experience of working with a land trust and public input to create a wild “Heart of Reeds.” A dynamic living sculpture Drury’s “Heart” has increased the biodiversity of old railway land that has been left to “return” to nature.
Linda Weintraub perspective on Nigerian artist Bright Ugochukwu and the Swiss team of Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger
Art writer-curator LINDA WEINTRAUB brings a broad, global perspective. Well-known for her art theory textbooks, (including To Life! Eco Art in Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet) Weintraub writes on three projects by four international artists: Nigerian artist Bright Ugochukwu Eke, Chinese artist Yun-Fei Ji, and the Swiss team of Gerda Steiner and Jorg Lenzlinger.
Chilean architect DANIELA CORVILLION has been traveling for several years to the city of Palma Soriano, Cuba to assist an on-going community based wastewater treatment project designed to combat garbage dumped in an essential local river. One of her collaborators is ENNEGRO, an Afro Haitian environmental art group that works to construct a sacred relationship between ecology and cultural religion.
COMMENTATORS
For our op ed column “On My Mind”, esteemed artist-poet-writer-educator BASIA IRLAND laments the enormous growing litany of disease-borne pollutants spreading throughout the world’s waterways. She seeks an “ecological reverence,” hoping to affect behavior to protect earth’s finite supply of clean water.
Originally from Belgium, Australian multimedia artist SUZON FUKS created “Waterwheel”–an online international site where people meet to share, present and perform about water across disciplines, cultures and ages. Open to all, Waterwheel sponsors a web-based annual global symposium. The next will be in March 2014. Suzon writes about Waterwheel, and some of the many artists it has brought together.