Ecotopian Toolkit

Nancy Agati

Nancy Agati (she/her/hers) is a Philadelphia artist whose multidisciplinary work includes works on paper, sculpture, textile, site-specific installation, and public art. Agati holds a BFA from Alfred University, School of Art & Design, NY, and an MFA from The University of the Arts, Philadelphia. She has exhibited her work widely throughout Philadelphia and nationally, with exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia, PA; Hillyer Art Space, Washington, DC; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Staten Island, NY; and The Calandra Italian American Institute, NY. Recent sculptural installations about nature and the environment were created for the New Jersey Coastal Climate Resilience Project in Atlantic City, the FLOW exhibit at The Independence Seaport Museum, Philadelphia; and We All Fall Down at The Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia. 

Patterns, movement, and the flow of water have been recurring subjects of Agati’s work and have led to several public art projects. Agati’s essay, entitled “Noticing Water”, was published by Cleaver Literary Magazine in 2014. Her work is in several public collections, including recent acquisitions from the Pennsylvania Convention Center and Temple University, Fox School of Business. Agati has been a recipient of a Windows of Opportunity Award From the Leeway Foundation and has been awarded artist residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, New Mexico; Lo Studio dei Nipoti, Calabria, Italy; Main & Station, Nova Scotia; and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Center at Meadowbrook Farm. In 2014, as a Hemera Foundation Tending Space Artist Fellow, Agati began investigating mindfulness meditation in relation to her art-making practice.

Workshop Description

Work Example
Evident Cycle - a large-scale spiraling, fingerprint form floated on the surface of the Delaware River at the Penn’s Landing boat basin, Philadelphia.

Website
www.nancyagati.com

Eli Brown

Eli Brown (they/them/theirs or he/him/his) is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, comics, and community organizing. Eli’s work explores queer and trans intimacies through time and cross-generational dynamics. They are especially interested in asking what the future of human evolution could look like if we reimagined reproduction as a queer, ecological strategy. Recent work has been featured at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Huntington Library, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, and Creative Time Summit X. Most recent work is flown at Tailgate Projects in Tampa, FL.

Workshop Description

Work Example
Toxic Places

Website
www.theelimachine.net

Juan Hurtado Salazar

Juan Hurtado Salazar (he/him/his)  is an interdisciplinary artist concerned with using craft processes, collaboration and emergent technologies in order to link the social and public, with the speculative and slightly implausible. Through his work Hurtado attempts to create the tangible elements visualizing the distance between the present and the challenges inhibiting collectively speculated futures.

Workshop Description

Work Example
Seednest

Website
https://architecture.mit.edu/student/juan-hurtado-salazar

Jacques-Jean Tiziou 

JJ Tiziou (he/him) creates public art experiences, hosts house concerts, and works as a Licensed Massage Therapist. He has walked the full perimeter of the city (nine times.)

JJ has been recognized as one of Philadelphia’s “Creative Connectors” by Leadership Philadelphia, and is the recipient of the Spiral-Q Artist Activist Award; his 85,000 sq. ft. How Philly Moves mural at PHL International Airport was recognized as one of the nation’s best public art projects by Americans for the Arts in their Public Art Network Year in Review. Based at The Cedar Works in West Philadelphia, JJ uses his work to celebrate community & cultivate connection. 

Workshop Description

Work Example
Walk Around Philadelphia

Website
You can find more of his work online at www.jjtiziou.net, www.HowPhillyMoves.org, and there's a message that he'd like to share with you at www.EveryoneIsPhotogenic.com. At www.WalkAroundPhiladelphia.com, he invites you to join him in exploring the city’s edge.

Fereshteh Toosi

Fereshteh Toosi (they/them) designs experiences that pose questions and foster animistic connections through encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. Their artwork often involves documentary processes, oral history, and archival research. Immersive performances are produced in conjunction with small sculptures, short films, installations, scores, and poetry, often situated outdoors in gardens, parks, and waterways.

In 2022, Fereshteh is in a residency program with Solar Power for Artists. In 2021, they participated in the Montréal/Miami New Narratives Lab hosted by the National Film Board of Canada, O Cinema, MUTEK, and FilmGate Interactive. They also earned a Knight New Work 2020 award for their project Oil Ancestors, and a Miami Live Arts Lab Alliance residency to develop Metaphysical Hotline, a performance by telephone for an audience of one. Water Radio, a series of contemplative canoe and kayak outings, was supported by The Ellies Creator Award in 2018.

Fereshteh lives and works in El Portal, Florida on stolen lands still stewarded by the Miccosukee and Seminole people, and previously by the Calusa and Tequesta tribal bands. They are an Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department of the College of Communication, Architecture, and the Arts at Florida International University.

Workshop Description

Work example
Water Radio: Delaware River

Website
http://fereshteh.net

Alexis Cabrera Youth Programs Supervisor, Independence Seaport Museum

Alexis Cabrera is a Camden, New Jersey native who has lived in Philadelphia for the past 5 years. Alexis got their start in environmental science education and youth development at the Center of Aquatic Sciences at Adventure Aquarium, and has since been devoted to aiding youth in advocating for our environment. Alexis has worked with the River Ambassadors for the past 3 summers, and it has been the highlight of their time at Independence Seaport Museum.

Kate Farquhar Landscape Architect

Kate Farquhar is a landscape architect, artist and thinker. For the first ten years of her career Kate Farquhar has worked to understand and manipulate the interface between urban fabric and emergent ecologies. In the next ten years of her career, she aims to serve the placekeeping traditions that precede her, and tend the relational fields within remediation and resiliency efforts. As an energetic person from a Settler background, she endeavors to settle herself first.

Terrill Haigler Ya FavTrashman 

Less than three months after accepting the position as laborer for the Philadelphia Sanitation Department, Terrill Haigler became an essential worker. To bridge the gap between residents and sanitation workers he created the Instagram page @_yafavtrashman to give residents an inside look as to what sanitation workers experience during the pandemic. When Terrill noticed that his co-workers didn’t have the proper PPE to execute their jobs safely he decided to stand in the gap and start a Custom Ink t-shirt fundraiser to purchase PPE, hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies. Catapulting him to Philly’s latest viral sensation.

Stacy Levy Artist

Stacy Levy is an artist who works with rain, urban tides, and watersheds, using a blended language of science and art to tell the ecological story of a site. Her projects reveal the action of the natural world in the urban environment, showing the passage of rain from sky to sea; making visible vast watersheds; and drawing attention to the amplitude and timing of urban tides. Some of her projects create working treatment solutions for water pollution, stormwater runoff, and habitat creation. In making large-scale works on sites from parking lots to nature centers, Levy works closely with engineers, landscape architects, ecologists, hydrologists, and biologists to solve issues on site. She blends an understanding of sustainable design and ecological concepts, harnessing the ephemeral changes of tides, water flow, weather, and seasons with the lasting presence of sculpture. Her pieces are direct collaborations with the forces of water.

Levy has created temporary and permanent works in Philadelphia, New York, Seattle, Phoenix, Tampa, Miami, San Antonio, Fayetteville, AR, Scotland, and Japan. Her permanent commissioned works include those for the Independence Seaport Museum, the Philadelphia International Airport, the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, the Ontario Science Centre, and Penn State University’s Arboretum. She holds a BA from Yale University in art and forestry, an MFA from Tyler School of Art at Temple University, and has also studied at the Architectural Association in London. Levy began her work as an urban forester in the Mid-Atlantic region; from 1985 through 1991, she was a founding partner of Sere Ltd. Native Landscape Restoration, an urban forestry firm that worked with municipal, corporate and private clients to restore the remnant woodlands and meadows in city parks, corporate campuses, and residences and to bring the architecture of the native forest back into the landscape. 

Levy has been working as an eco-revelatory artist in the public realm for 29 years. She has lectured on new ways of translating urban ecology throughout the United States and in Sweden, England, Scotland, China, and Japan. Her keynote talks include those for The Riparian Buffer Summit, the Maryland Outdoor Educators Conference, AIA Sarasota Design Conference, American Institute of Architects Philadelphia Chapter, and the New Jersey Chapter of the Society of Landscape Architects. In addition to many other talks and symposia, Levy has been awarded the Henry Meigs Environmental Leadership Award, the Penn Future Award for Women in Conservation, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Her work has been included in several books, most recently Eliza Pennypacker & Stuart Echols’ Artful Rain Water Design (2015), Sophie Barbaux’s Unique Gardens (2015), and The New Earthwork: Art, Action, Agency (2012), edited by Glenn Harper and Twylene Moyer. She is currently the Stormwater Artist-in-Residence for the City of Lancaster Engineering Department. 

Joshua Moses Associate Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies; Visual Culture, Arts, and Media Faculty Fellow (2020-2022), Haverford College

Joshua Moses has worked on religious response to the attacks of September 11th and Hurricane Katrina, studying the formation of disaster expertise (“disaster religious and spiritual care”) in what he calls the current “New Age of Anxiety.” He has worked with Nunatsiavut Inuit communities in northern Labrador on inequality, dispossession, community wellbeing, migration and identity in the context of recent land claim settlements and large-scale resource extraction. He has also conducted research in the Northwest Territories on migration, housing and homelessness. Joshua's focus on action research, collaborative research methods, and community-engaged research has lead him to work with a number of Philadelphia-area community and environmental organizations, including a partnership with the US Forest Service Philadelphia Field Station to develop youth-driven environmental studies curricula. His work on anthropology of mental health has focused on the production of knowledge in the context of disaster, intersections of spirituality/religion and mental health, and community response to disaster, environmental ruptures, and inequality. He is committed to combining research and teaching. He piloted a field school with students from Haverford College, University of Massachusetts and Inupiaq Alaskan youth in Northwest Alaska. Through the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives, a program funded by the  Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in collaboration with the North Philly Peace Park, Friends of Mt. Moriah Cemetary, East Park Revitalization Alliance, and Philadelphia artist Li Sumpter, he developed the Urban Ecology Arts Exchange. Joshua also focuses on the response of educational institutions to climate change, and the ways we are (or are not) preparing students for futures that society itself struggles to imagine.

Howard Neukrug Professor of Professional Practice, Earth and Environmental Science and Director, The Water Center at Penn, University of Pennsylvania

Professor Neukrug is the former Commissioner and CEO of Philadelphia Water, where he was responsible for all aspects of operations, financing, planning, engineering, human resources, public affairs, legal and policy decisions for an integrated drinking water / wastewater / stormwater utility serving 2.3 million people. He currently serves as Professor of Professional Practice and the Founding Director of the Water Center at Penn. He is a Principal of CASE Environmental LLC where he provides consulting services to cities and utilities in stormwater management, urban planning, systems design, sustainability, organizational development, strategic planning and trends and innovations in the global water industry.  He chairs the Delaware River Basin Commission’s new Advisory Committee on Climate Change and is Senior Advisor to the Global Water Leaders Group and chair of its CEO-Network of Leading Utility Leaders of the World.  Mr. Neukrug is a national expert, lecturer and inspirational leader in moving from innovation to implementation; integrated urban water systems; river management; utility operations; water regulations and policy; drinking water quality and treatment; and green infrastructure.  He is the creator of Philadelphia's $2.5 billion "Green City, Clean Waters" program which has revolutionized how American cities approach land and water management for sustainability and resiliency, as well as developing the City’s Stormwater Regulations and move to parcel-based billing.  At the University of Pennsylvania, Professor Neukrug currently teaches classes on the Role of Water in Urban Sustainability and Resiliency and the US Water Industry in the 21st century.

Maya K. van Rossum Environmentalist and Delaware Riverkeeper

Maya van Rossum is the Founder of Green Amendments For the Generations, a grassroots non-profit organization inspiring a nationwide movement to secure constitutional recognition and protection of environmental rights in every state and ultimately at the federal level. van Rossum is also the Delaware Riverkeeper, leading the watershed based advocacy organization, the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, for over 28 years in its efforts to protect the health of the Delaware River and its tributaries. Maya was a lead petitioner in the 2013 landmark Robinson Township, Delaware Riverkeeper Network, et. al. v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania case that breathed new life into Pennsylvania’s long ignored environmental rights amendment. A skilled activist, attorney, strategist and community organizer, she was named in 2020 as a River Hero by River Network, in 2019 as one of Philadelphia Business Journal’s Power 100, and One Of The “10 Most Influential People of 2015” When It Comes to Energy Issues by SNL Energy. She is author of, The Green Amendment, Securing Our Right to a Healthy Environment which was selected as the 2018 Living Now Evergreen Awards GOLD Winner in the Nature Conservation category. Since launching Green Amendments For the Generations, constitutional amendments have been proposed in 12 states, with New York formally passing a Green Amendment in 2021.

Bethany Wiggin Founding Director of the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, an Associate Professor of German and member of the Graduate Groups in Comparative Literature and English, University of Pennsylvania

Bethany Wiggin’s scholarship explores histories of migration, language, and cultural translation since the Columbian exchange across the north Atlantic world; she is currently completing Utopia Found and Lost in Penn’s Woods. Her collaborative projects engage audiences beyond the academy and have been supported by the National Geographic, Whiting, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations; they include: An Ecotopian Toolkit for the Anthropocene, Data Refuge, Futures Beyond Refining, and My Climate Story

Zay River Ambassador, Independence Seaport Museum 

Zay is a Philadelphia high school student who joined Independence Seaport Museum in 2018 for the museum’s boat building program, SAILOR. In 2019, Zay joined the River Ambassador program, a 12 week internship in which participants learn to lead community science programs for the public. Zay became interested in the program because they want to make their environment safer and cleaner, and in turn, educate their community to do the same.

Now in 2021, PPEH is supporting the creation of another cohort of human toolmakers who will retain an engagement with floating on/sinking in/and otherwise living with urban waters; and will similarly explore what it might mean to face contemporary ecological challenges with critically attuned and creatively oriented tools. In partnership with the Independence Seaport Museum (ISM), we will turn our focus to the Delaware River and to water justice. Each artist/team's project will be highlighted in a public demonstration led by the artist/team, documented on the PPEH and Schuylkill Corps websites, and archived and included in ongoing Toolkit initiatives.