“Watershed: Art, Ecology, and Community Engagement”

I really like how you can feel the watershed’s pulse from a simple digital elevation model (left, Milwaukee River watershed), a living earth even with the faintly visible rifts of freeway and sometimes railroad; let’s not stretch her resilience any further.  And, how the 1836 hand-drawn survey maps so powerfully evoke another time in this place: everything that goes with managing to survey and walk square mile sections, crossing swamps, bluffs, rivers, forests, savannas, blazing trees and identifying each one you cross… at a time when you’d be unlikely to meet another person for days.  Thank you to Nicholas and Raoul for the opportunity to have a tiny part in their far-reaching multi-year project (see Watershed for more), and for making community engagement and activism central to art.