Environmental Artist to Speak at Middlebury College

For Immediate Release: April 2, 2009
Contact: Emmie Donadio, Chief Curator, at (802) 443–2240

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.— Environmental artist Stacy Levy will speak at Middlebury College in the Hillcrest Environmental Center, Rm. 103, at 4:30 p.m. on Tues., Apr. 7. Her lecture is titled “Picturing the Earth: Making Visible the Patterns of Commonplace Nature.”

Levy—a Yale graduate with experience in sculpture, architecture, and forestry—strives to combine art and science to highlight invisible processes fundamental to the natural environment. Her installations often focus on the movement of water and wind and their effects on microorganisms, vegetation, and the relationship between natural and built environments.

Uniting land-use planning, research, and aesthetics, Levy has worked with architects, engineers, scientists, and landscape architects on most of her sites. “In my work, I mesh the clarity of maps and diagrams, the beauty of natural forms, and the visceral sense of the site,” says Levy. “I try to design a project so that the site tells the ecological story of itself, to create an instant of wonder and understanding for the viewer.”

Recent projects have included sandblasted stone maps of the Delaware River Watershed for the Friends’ Central School in Pennsylvania; Tidal Flowers on the Hudson River in New York, which used bright red flowers to signal high and low tide; and Lotic Meander, a sculpture at the Ontario Science Center representing the hydrologic patterns of local streams. Levy also collaborated on the design of Acid Mine Drainage and Art, a functional—as well as educational and recreational—wastewater treatment facility and public park in Pennsylvania.

Her talk is cosponsored by the Middlebury College Museum of Art and the College’s Committee on Art in Public Places with additional support from Atwater Commons and Weybridge House.

The Committee on Art in Public Places (CAPP), established in 1994 by the Board of Trustees of Middlebury College, oversees the acquisition and maintenance of works of art on the college campus. Currently numbering 19 public sculptures, the works comprise one of the most significant campus-wide sculpture collections of any American liberal arts college. In keeping with its mission to inform and educate the community at large about the works of art on campus and public art projects in general, CAPP also sponsors lectures by distinguished artists. Levy joins previous artists Kiki Smith, Michael Singer, Patrick Dougherty, and Dan Graham, whom CAPP has in the past brought to campus. Levy’s talk is free and open to the public. More information about CAPP and its programs can be found online at http://go.middlebury.edu/capp.