November 22, 2008 – February 28, 2009


Field Reports
                                                                           Documents and Strategies
                                                                           from Land Arts of the American West

                                                                           Temple Gallery is supported in part by
                                                                           the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and by
                                                                           Friends of Temple Gallery
 

PARTICIPANTS 

Matthew Coolidge is the Founder and Director of CLUI in Los Angeles, a non-profit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized and perceived. The CLUI takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use, drawing on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history. The work of the Center has been presented in museums and noncommercial exhibit spaces, nationally and abroad, as well as in the institution’s network of public exhibit facilities. The Center maintains an online database of unusual and exemplary land use in the United States, publishes books, operates a residence program and interpretive site in the salt flats of Utah, and conducts public tours. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  He is the author and editor of several books, including Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation's Nuclear Proving Ground. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004, a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2005, and the Lucelia Artist Award from the Smithsonian in 2006.  

Winifred Lutz has created major site-integrated sculptural installations and permanent public works in the United States and Europe. Her permanent public projects include the Garden for The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, the Memorial to the Pennsylvania Recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor in Harrisburg (with artist Stacy Levy), and Zones of Change, a 425-foot-long sculptural landscape for the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, GA.  Lutz has been the recipient of numerous awards and her work is represented in museum and private collections nationally. Currently, she lives and works in Pennsylvania and recently retired as the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Sculpture at Tyler School of Art of Temple University.

Thaddeus Squire is a curator, consultant, conductor, writer, sound artist and producer. In 2004, Squire founded Peregrine Arts, a multi-practice platform dedicated to producing, presenting, consulting and research, focused primarily on contemporary multidisciplinary artistic practices. He has lectured and served on panels at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel University, MATA Festival (NYC) and the Philadelphia Art Alliance, and has conducted research for and contributed to publications from Slought Foundation, Ryerson College and Drexel University. Mr. Squire received an A.B. in Music from Princeton University, and studied a J. William Fulbright Scholar at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He has served on numerous artistic and funding panels, including the Institute for Museum and Library Services, The Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the American Composers Forum, Philadelphia Chapter, Delaware Division of the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council and the Creative Community Committee of Innovation Philadelphia.

Chris Taylor is an architect and educator teaching in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech University.  He studied architecture at the University of Florida and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, and is the recipient of the 1998 Steedman Traveling Fellowship in Architecture. He is the director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech University, a program he has developed with Bill Gilbert of the University of New Mexico since 2002. Land Arts is a field program operating within the intersection of geomorphology and human construction. Including everything from petroglyphs to roads, dwellings, monuments and traces of those actions, land art or earthworks begin with the land and extend through the complex social and ecological processes that create landscape—and they show us who we are. In 2007 he led the Atacama Lab: 07, a conference and field workshop extending the interpretive frame and working methods of Land Arts to Chile to examine terraforming in the Atacama Desert. Taylor also explores the interstitial forces creating landscape through his practice, the Architecture Workers Combine, which has built work in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

Kate Wingert-Playdon is an architect with research and design areas addressing overlaps of architecture, site, and settlement. Her current work includes both research and on-site work focused on the role of community, the underlying cultural manifestation of place and the particularity of site.  She is currently a professor at Temple University, the editor of Architectural Research Centers Consortium Journal, and is working on projects in that research the historical layers of Philadelphia’s ideal plan, the 2448 mile Route 66, the Old Acoma Village in New Mexico, and the Main Road in Cape Town South Africa.