City Art Collaboratory is a cross-disciplinary research and development fellowship for artists and STEM professionals who share a desire to collaborate on publicly oriented, environmentally focused projects that will enhance the way cities are built, experienced and sustained. Launched by Public Art Saint Paul in 2011, City Art Collaboratory is evolving as a nationally unique and vital space for individual and collective inquiry, direct experience of our urban environment, critical reflection on ecologies of place, and conceptualization of environmentally focused public art projects.

The program arose from Public Art Saint Paul’s environmental art initiatives of 2008-10, including the Sustainable Artmaking Fellowship and Hunting and Gathering Walks. Environmental artist Shanai Matteson is the program’s director. The initial City Art Collaboratory cohort was comprised of eight public artists and eight scientists and expanded in 2013 to include new members. Through open-ended field trip experiences, collaborative workshops and public conversations, the cohort explores unique places and projects in the City of St. Paul where ecological, physical, political and social systems converge.

While the City Art Collaboratory program has primarily focused on the development of a cross-disciplinary cohort and their joint research, the relationships and connections made among the cohort have given rise to exciting new projects, including the recently announced “Light the Plume” project at the District Energy facility. While these projects are not presented or supported directly by Public Art Saint Paul, they do show that the program has had a collective impact, leading to new possibilities for public art and environmental engagement across the city. Public Art Saint Paul is currently at work on a book that will document and share highlights from the first three years of City Art Collaboratory, profiling field trip sites, research and related projects that have been developed by members of the fellowship cohort.

CITY ART COLLABORATORY STEM FELLOWS

Valentine Cadieux

Valentine Cadieux is a political ecologist who investigates the geography and sociology of land use change and the politics of everyday environmental decision making, mostly where urban and rural land uses intersect. Her work at the University of Minnesota focuses on the relationships between land use and landscape ideologies and between material, representational, and knowledge practices. Her interests include food and feeding practices and related land uses and social justice politics, as well as the use of concepts of place, landscape, and nature, and the knowledge cultures involved in various approaches to nature-society relations. She has just published an edited collection with Laura Taylor on “green sprawl,” founded the Minneapolis Society of Tourists with artist Sergio Vucci, and is working on turning a plinko-bean-vote food system game she developed for the Minnesota State Fair into a tool for exploring and exhibiting the ways different people understand and want to engage with the food system.

Leslie Yetka

Leslie Yetka has a BA in Biology and an MS in Horticulture and Water Resources Science, and over 20 years of experience protecting our natural communities, especially the quality of our abundant lakes, streams and wetlands. In the past, she has worked extensively in both aquatic and upland habitats to understand and identify ways to enhance and restore their biological functions within the landscape. Currently, she is the Education Manager with the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District, where she designs and implements education and outreach activities that raise awareness and engage communities on a variety of issues related to water quality protection and management. Areas of focus include stormwater runoff, green infrastructure, non-point source pollution, land use and development, habitat restoration, and clean water practices. Leslie is a lifelong resident of Minnesota, living with her husband, two kids and a standard poodle that loves to spend his days chasing butterflies.

Matt Kumka

Matt Kumka is a landscape architect based in the Twin Cities. Since graduating with a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Minnesota, Matt has specialized the creation of green infrastructure, low impact development, and restorative place-making at Barr Engineering, where he works closely with many local municipalities and watershed districts. With a specialty in water resource management he has worked to develop thoughtful landscapes along the continuum from cityscape through exurbia and back again. He is perpetually exploring the relationship between the natural elements of stone, soil, water, animals, and plants in order to spark humankind’s intrinsic connection with our living world. Matt’s goal with the Collabratory is to help create lasing connections between those that organize and maintain our vital infrastructure and wild places and the artists and thinkers that vivify and enlighten our world.

Roopali Phadke

Roopali Phadke is a broadly trained social scientist interested in how publics engage in environmental decision-making. She is an Associate Professor of Environmental Studies at Macalester College. Her research and teaching are at the nexus of environmental policy, science and technology studies and participatory planning. Her projects have examined social activism against large dam development, the aesthetics of wind energy design, visualization and deliberation in climate change activism and the role of citizen photography in future cityscape design. Outside of work, Roopali can be found goofing about with her three children and husband in the Mac Groveland neighborhood.

Kate Brauman

Kate Brauman studies interactions between water resources nd land use, doing research motivated by people’s need for both functional landscapes and safe, plentiful water supplies. Kate works at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, where she’s leading research on a global water assessment to better evaluate how much benefit people get when using water, and where they could be getting more. In particular, Kate has focused on the global distribution of water use in agriculture and at the effects of agriculture on downstream water quantity and quality. For her PhD research, Kate designed and ran a field study on the Big Island of Hawai’i to quantify the impact of land cover on water availability and explore whether water users could manage their water supply by paying upstream landowners. A transplant from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Twin Cities, Kate has embraced Minnesota and all it has to offer. Including broomball, until that pesky broken collarbone last winter…

Adam Kokotovich

Adam Kokotovich studies decision making surrounding science, technology and the environment. He is interested in how the assumptions we hold concerning what constitutes knowledge, harm, and the desired state of the world influence decision making and the frameworks we use to inform decision making, such as risk assessment. Part of his work involves highlighting judgments that exist within (sometimes seemingly objective) risk assessment and ecological science, and helping facilitate reflection on the implications of such judgments. His dissertation work, which he is completing in the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Science and Management program, explores these themes through studying three examples of conflict surrounding risk and plant genetic engineering. In the spring of 2014 he will begin a post-doctoral position with the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center examining how decision makers and stakeholders envision potential adverse ecological effects from and management goals for invasive Asian carp in Minnesota. With the Collaboratory he looks forward to learning more about the ways in which art can help us reflect upon how we experience and understand the environment.

Bunmi Odumuye

Bunmi Odumuye is a mechanical environmental engineer and the CEO of the Renewables Research and Policy Institute, an energy engineering research firm that promotes renewable energy systems and conservation measures. In addition, he is active in the Twin Cities food justice and aquaponics communities, facilitating an aquaponics lab at North High in association with Project Sweetie Pie, and serving on the organizing committee for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy’s ongoing food + justice = democracy effort

CITY ART COLLABORATORY ARTIST FELLOWS

Molly Balcom Raleigh

Molly Balcom Raleigh lives and works in St Paul, MN. In her artistic practice, she make situations in which audiences co-author a performance, or co-create a place, through participation. To do this she makes social and physical environments that invite singing, eating together, cooking together, walking in the woods, and other group activities that draw on shared behavioral texts. She has presented her work at many public sites and galleries, including Northern Spark, The Soap Factory, and Altered Esthetics. Molly is also an avid wild-food forager, and that’s what she hopes to focus on through City Art Collaboratory. Collecting, preparing and eating wild foods are a very powerful way of understanding place. Some questions she brings to this collaboration include: How can a shared moment transform our knowledge of place? How can we safely practice this way of knowing St Paul, which honors our unique natural bounty of plants, seeds, nuts, mushrooms and berries, while considering the risks and assessing the impact of our environmental choices? And what knowledge can community foraging share with scientific research about environmental pollution/disruption/harmony?

Aaron Dysart

Aaron Dysart’s work uses humor to push viewers into thinking more critically about one’s surroundings as well as one’s physical and mental relationships to it. His recent environmental interventions push ideas of propriety, gift giving, and reciprocity, while showcasing his love of material’s ability to carry content. Aaron received Pubic Art St. Paul’s Fellowship for Sustainable Art-Making and took part in their Hunting and Gathering Walks program. He has received awards from Franconia Sculpture Park and Forecast Public art and lives and works in Northeast Minneapolis.

Amanda Lovelee

Amanda Lovelee is a visual artist based in Minneapolis, MN. She is interested in how people connect and the spaces in which they do so within contemporary society. Her work, mainly video and photography, weaves together data, stories and personal experience to create non-linear narratives about the fragility of human relationships which are presented as public projects. Her recent work has explored a myriad of topics: family history, the lives of beekeepers and ice fishermen, strangers’ love stories and the sociology of square dancing. A year-long collaboration with a scientist dealing with ideas surrounding the Mississippi River seems like a logical progression and she knows this fellowship will expand her ideas and practice.

Aaron Marx

Aaron Marx is an artist, architectural designer, and educator working at the intersection of computer and video technology, architecture, and public space. Trained as an architect, with a background in mathematics and literature, Aaron teaches design in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota, creates designs for residential and commercial architecture, makes art in the public realm, and strives to investigate social issues through artistic practice. Aaron is an active member of Minneapolis Art on Wheels (MAW), Makesh!t collective, and the City Art Collaboratory, and is currently an Artist on the Verge fellow. Through the Collaboratory, he hopes to further explore the connections between scientific and artistic thinking by developing collaborations with other artists and scientists who are interested in technology, environment, and public space.

Peter Morales

Peter Morales was born in Guatemala. The son of archeologists, he grew up amidst the ruins of the once Classic Maya city of Tikal in the forests of Northern Guatemala. His understanding of art and architecture is rooted in this experience. He came to the United States to complete his secondary and college education. Trained in the sciences, languages and visual arts he began applying his multiple interests to sculpture.Morales’s work graces various public locations throughout Minneapolis, Saint Paul, the greater metropolitan region and private collections throughout the Americas. He has exhibited widely. He currently lives and works in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

Janaki Ranpura

Janaki Ranpura unites technology with the traditional tricks of puppet theater. She creates theatrical platforms that can step over gridlocked traffic, leap across the street in a single bound, lean over, and kiss you. You can see this in the Peloton, a journey on stationary bicycles that audience members pedal madly to ignite a cinematic projection of a south Minneapolis neighborhood. This work reflects Janaki’s experience as a performer, a community artist, a writer, and a designer for parades and stage. Janaki’s commitments are: to other Diaspora Babies, people who struggle with a sense of home; to a wayward understanding of science. Janaki comes from a family of doctors with heart problems and is herself an operatic cardio-dramatist; to allusive pedagogy over agit-prop or the didactic necessarily, given the above, to the interdisciplinary; to dissolve rigid boundaries and hierarchies; to flagrant cross-pollination in polite society.

Emily Stover

Emily Stover is a designer and public artist working in alternative landscapes and temporary architecture. She is interested in revealing the hidden social and physical phenomena that exist in the everyday environment, and has recently been exploring food as a medium. In addition to a Masters in Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota, she has recently completed installations at the Bakken Museum, the Art Shanty Project, and the Walker Art Center’s Open Field.

Asia Ward

Asia Ward Asia Ward is a Minnesota-based sculpture artist whose work ranges from animatronic creatures to large-scale metal sculptures and aluminum dioramas. Asia’s work fits in an educational environment, and has been exhibited in science museums such as the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul, as well as cultural centers like the Museum of Contemporary Art in Fort Collins, and the Minnesota Museum of American Art in St. Paul. Asia loves to show others how to work with basic circuitry, computer game programming, stop motion animation, and hacked sensors and toys, and has given workshops for all ages at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Murray State University in Kentucky, and the Science Museum of Minnesota.

FELLOWS AT LARGE

Katie Hargrave

As an artist and activist, Katie Hargrave use community-oriented research to investigate the creation of mythologies, the historical record, and changes in the landscape. She makes her research visible by creating artwork that allows various perspectives and stories to come into contact. The outcome of her research varies in every project, including performance, social-practice events, printed matter, installation, sound, and video. Her projects ask the viewer to unwind a puzzle and realize her place as an actor in complicated national histories and present day systems. Crucial to her practice, she asks the viewer to step away from simply observing to write her part of the story. Katie has developed an interest in seeing complex environmental systems around in urban and rural environments. Some questions she brings are: Where do we fit within these systems? What is our effect (politically and environmentally) on our natural environments and vice versa? What is the human equivalent to a watershed system, and how can we map it and keep it healthy?

John Shade

John Shade is an Ecologist in the Biology and Environmental Studies departments at St. Olaf College. St. Olaf’s Environmental Studies program is interested in developing collaborations between natural scientists, social scientists, writers and artists to discuss how to work in interdisciplinary teams to solve problems, develop curriculum, and communicate with the public. John is very interested in understanding the impact humans have on aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems, and the scientific and social factors that influence how we develop solutions to resulting environmental problems. In his research activities, he studies the influence of climate change and agriculture on carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycling and the structure and function of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Most recently, he has been collaborating with students on projects focused on agricultural streams in Minnesota and permafrost streams in Eastern Siberia.

CITY ART COLLABORATORY STAFF & ADVISORS

Shanai Matteson

City Art Collaboratory Director Shanai Matteson is an artist, writer and co-founder/collaborative director of Works Progress, an art and design studio that produces multi-disciplinary events, programs and exhibits. She served as Community Program Specialist for the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum of Natural History for 6 years, creating a “Café Scientifique” science outreach program and an “Art-Science Residency Program” for contemporary artists, among other initiatives. She was a participant in PASP’s Hunting and Gathering Walks between artists and scientists and has worked with PASP over the past year to develop City Art Collaboratory.

Olive Bieringa

City Art Collaboratory Artistic Advisor Olive Bieringa‘s work focuses on the body both as an objective physical process and as a subjective lived experience through dance, film, installation, pedagogy and curatorial practice. Her site and context specific work investigates the physical resonance of space in urban, domestic, wild, technological and social landscapes. As co-director of the BodyCartography Project her work has toured across the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, Europe, Russia, Ukraine and South America. She holds an MFA in Performance and New Media from Long Island University and is a certified teacher of Body-Mind Centering®. Olive was co-curator of SEEDS Festival, an interdisciplinary arts and ecology festival, in Massachusetts from 2008-2010 and inspired Public Art St Paul’s Hunting and Gathering series. Her new work, Super Nature, opens at the Walker Art Center in October, 2012.

Patrick Nunnally

Program Adviser Patrick Nunnally has specialized in researching, teaching, and managing projects that celebrate the multiple connections between people and the places they value during the course of his career in academia and as a practitioner. A firm believer in the importance of collaborative efforts and community-based planning efforts, Nunnally has developed interpretive and education programs that disseminate information to public audiences through digital and in-person programming. He regularly works with diverse groups to integrate resource protection and place-based interpretation into ongoing local and regional planning frameworks. In addition to his public sector experience, Nunnally serves on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, teaching classes in landscape planning and urban studies. Over the past two decades, he has specialized in projects along rivers, trails, and scenic byways. Documenting, preserving and celebrating the cultural heritage of the Upper Mississippi River and its valley has been the cornerstone of Nunnally’s work since the mid 1990s.