Mary Jo Aagerstoun has just posted the following to the EcoArt South Florida website:

Why does South Florida need EcoArt?

EcoArt SoFla believes art must be integrated into sustainability strategies. In South Florida, like everywhere else on the globe, sustainability strategies have been driven by science and political expediency. One searches in vain at all levels of the worldwide sustainability research/policy development community to find the tiniest acknowledgment of the role art could and should play in making sustainability a reality. The sustainability discourse is, therefore, very uni-centric in the knowledges it taps.

It seems self-evident that the kinds of environmental crises we face worldwide require that we tap a multiplicity of knowledges. To infuse societies with sustainability-enhancing scientific innovations, culture must be both mobilized and transformed. And communities and the general public must be inspired and educated to pursue serious and committed environmental stewardship. Artists are the expert innovators and creative thinkers most engaged with the art knowledge and cultural integration skill that help to create the cultural glue holding societies together. Art and science, as twin knowledge forms, must be tapped in tandem to create the wisdom, and activate hope, that underpin sustainability.

But not just any art will do. EcoArt SoFla will seek support for and promote artists whose practices are inspired by the precepts of Joseph Beuys’ “social sculpture” and address environmental problems with creative combinations of conceptual art, process art, connective aesthetics, participatory and socially engaged practices, phenomenological and eco-philosophies, direct democracy processes and other social/aesthetic forms and techniques.

EcoArt SoFla seeks nothing less than development of a large contingent of ecoartists committed to staying in South Florida and who are, or wish to become, master cross-disciplinary learners and social system choreographers, skilled at drawing into the collaborative creation of ecoart stakeholders from grass roots community organizations, scientific institutions, public policy agencies and pioneering philanthropic entities. EcoArt SoFla will dedicate itself to development and promotion of the best ecoart projects: those that engage and mobilize community while employing, enhancing and melding techniques, knowledge and wisdom from landscape architecture, environmental biology and chemistry, planning and engineering and many other disciplines, and collaborating with their practitioners, while drawing from the deep roots of art history and the broadest lexicon of aesthetic methods.

You can also connect with EcoArt South Florida on Facebook.

Lynn Hull, Migration Mileposts, 2004

Rick Mills, Professor of Printmaking at Long Island University, is also artist in residence at the Teaneck Creek Conservancy and through this has developed a programme of art and education.  He has involved a range of artists with environmental/ecological practices, as well as work with children and young people in local schools. Using resources of the site, both natural and man-made (a significant amount of concrete from roadworks was at some point dumped in the Conservancy) the site now demonstrates their motto: Where nature, history and art come full circle.

Works address the specificity of the local (Ariane Burgess’ Turtle Peace Labyrinth) as well as the larger landscape of migration (Lynn Hull’s graphic work highlighting the origins and destinations of birds migrating through Teaneck Creek).  They reference other artists working in natural contexts (Mills homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay), as well as the issues of sustainability (Eduardo Rabel’s mural project).