A collaboration with Ben KinselyUsing mushrooms as a material and metaphor, Myco-Ramblings explores the intersection of mycology, folk knowledge, and storytelling. We invited participants to join us on a ramble through Central Park to forage for mushrooms, to cultivate collective knowledge related to fungi, and to create a chance-based field recording. We walked, we noticed, […]
OnBehalfof.Life is a platform for submitting public comments on environmental justice issues to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of another species. It was developed by the Environmental Performance Agency in collaboration with Dan Phiffer and input from Kimberly Reinhardt, Karolina Sobecka, and Tara Daino. Previous campaigns include: “We Demand a Strategic Plan”, “It’s Time to Ban Neonic Pesticides” and “DWA Climate […]
Embodied Scientist Parkour is a training for interspecies communication and deepened relationships with the in-between landscapes of the Schuylkill River. Reimagining a conventional fitness course, the project invites participants to engage in a series of site-specific movement scores situated along the Grays Ferry Crescent Trail to expand the possibility of how we collect and co-generate […]
Fruiting Bodies is an experiment in fungal sociality, exploring the possibilities of mushroom cloning, remediation and social exchange through collaborative experience and community science. The project launched with a workshop at GenSpace in Brooklyn, NY where participants created agar-based sculptures modeled from chosen body parts. The sculptures were inoculated via oyster fungi with the intention […]
Location: Queens, NY Collaborator: Amplifier Inc., Catherine Grau, Stephen Zacks, and Nathan Kensinger Chance Ecologies is a framework for artistic gestures and research projects exploring the un-designed landscapes and wilderness found in abandoned spaces, post-industrial sites, and landfills. The main trajectories of the project are to create research and discourse around the value of wild […]
Location: Greensboro, NC Collaborator: Elsewhere Museum The Collaboratory at Elsewhere is a gathering space for public and educational programs exploring a range of art, design, cultural and historical disciplines. Situated inside Elsewhere’s living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC. In 2010, I began to develop programming and funding to support the expansion of the platform, reimagined […]
Location: Queens, NY Collaborator: Thomas Choinacky, Flux Factory Weedy Nomad is a movement-based storytelling project that explores neighborhoods in transition through plant-body encounters. We invite activists, artists and publics to share their experiences of development and gentrification through guided walks and movement scores that look particularly at marginalized urban ecosystems and spontaneous plants (aka weeds) […]
Location: Philadelphia, PA Collaborator: Penn Program in Environmental Humanities, EPA Tool-making is a signature trait of the human species. What tools can we make, and might we require, in the age of the human, the anthropocene: a name for the present geological epoch when humans are the most potent force shaping earth’s systems? Global warming […]
Location: Greensboro, NC Site: Elsewhere Museum South Elm Projects is a series of site specific activations with artists and neighborhood partners reforming overlooked alleys and green spaces to enhance downtown walkability, community investment, and grassroots creativity. These activations will further encourage naturally occurring development in the neighborhoods adjacent to South Elm. As a curator and […]
Location: Queens, NY Collaborator: Ellie Irons An Atlas of Endangered Surfaces identifies and categorizes a range anthropogenic, naturally occurring, and hybrid surfaces in the area known as Hunter’s Point South in Long Island City, Queens. In collaboration with artist Ellie Irons, the project is a part of Chance Ecologies, a platform for documenting, learning from, […]
Location: Red Hook, New York Collaborators: Eva Perrotta and Corinne Cappelletti, and DE-CONSTRUKT [projeckts] A movement-research collaboration with Eva Perrotta and Corinne Cappelletti, and DE-CONSTRUKT [projeckts]. As the first in a three part laboratory dedicated to understanding the life, function and characteristics of the wild plants in Red Hook Brooklyn, we explored the detoxification capacities […]
Above Middle and Below is a three-part laboratory dedicated to formulating ideas for an Open Movement score through collaboration facilitated by Leila Mougoui Bakhitiari (urban ecologist), Christopher Kennedy (teaching artist), Athena Kokoronis (choreographer), and Jan Mun (artist-scientist). Part One is dedicated to presenting and mapping Fort Greene Park’s social and ecological relationships. Part Two focuses […]
Location: Charlotte, NC Collaborator: Levine Museum of the New South StoryBank is a platform for sharing and collecting stories. StoryBank was originally created at Elsewhere museum in Greensboro, NC alongside a residency with Nick Szuberla of Appalshop, a Kentucky-based arts and education center in the heart of Appalachia. The storyteller machine (pictured below) was collaboratively […]
Then & Now is a documentary storytelling project inviting LGBTQ-identifying elders and teens to share stories and oral histories. A collaboration with Elsewhere and the Creative Aging Network of North Carolina. What was it like living in the south and identifying as LGBTQ? What is that experience like now? The project is inviting youth and […]
A collaborative project with designer Elliott P. Montgomery to connect a 4.8 kW rooftop solar array on the roof of Elsewhere museum with the streets of downtown Greensboro. The final design is a public charging station called the Solar Energy Commons, which also doubles as and solar karaoke kiosk after dusk. The project also included […]
Location: Greensboro, NC Collaborator: International Civil Rights Museum, the Greensboro Historical Museum Read-Ins encourage reading in public spaces to activate possibilities for shared wisdom. The first Read-In was organized on August 8, 2012 in partnership with the International Civil Rights Museum and Elsewhere to accompany the Greensboro Historical Museum’s Fighting the Fires of Hate: America […]
A movement-research collaboration with students at Dudley High School and artist Athena Kokoronis to create a site-specific dance for downtown Greensboro. The Listening Story of No Words explores a dance process that draws inspiration from the tradition of quilt making, line drawing, personal experience and expression through movement and improv. The project was developed during […]
Location: Greensboro, NC Collaborator: Guilford Green Foundation, Elsewhere Museum I Don’t Do Boxes is a magazine exploring LGBTQ experience, published at Elsewhere and edited by a team of queer-identifying youth. The first issue, Schools Out! collects over 30 artworks, stories, poems, comics and essays exploring queer southern experience and beyond. I Don’t Do Boxes: Out […]
Location: Durham, NC Collaborator: Elsewhere, Scrap Exchange, Acre TV Alive in the Kitchen is food performance for the internet & real life. Alive in the Kitchen re-imagines the cooking show format as a platform for participatory culinary experiments, inviting local communities, puppets, and artists to broadcast a-live from Elsewhere’s kitchen commons. A-LIVE in the Kitchen is […]
For four years now I have served as a teaching artist and education curator for Elsewhere, a living museum and artist residency program set inside a former thrift store in downtown Greensboro, NC. )
Everyday Obsolescence is a video work created during SoundLab, a youth-led media project exploring the role of technology and the everyday. The project challenged a group of high school students in Greensboro, NC to create sculptures from discarded media equipment and video self-portraits to compose an experimental score of music and sounds. The project was […]
The Queer Explorers Club is a civil service technical guild. A place to explore the androgynous unknown, and the in-between space of gender one adventure at a time.
School of the Future is an experiment in what school can be. It was the child of the Teaching Artist Union and the Institute for Applied Aesthetics. In 2010 it grew into an outdoor intergenerational free school in Brooklyn. Since then it has become an archive of lessons learned and a network of radical educators […]
StrataSpore is a platform for collective knowledge about mushrooms. Initiated by Kate Cahill, Christopher Kennedy, Athena Kokoronis, Caroline Woolard, and mycologist Gary Lincoff, Strataspore uses mushrooms as material and metaphor for latent potential and unseen infrastructure. Right now, mushrooms are eating oil spills, connecting old members of Fluxus, feeding communities, and growing as alternative packaging […]
A small native plant set inside a discarded hardware pouch; an epiphyte for human architecture. Collaborators wore an epiphyte on their bodies while navigating NYC as both biological indicator and platform for urban play.
A collaboration with Janette Kim at the Urban Landscape Lab at Columbia to map fungal communities in New York City using a tool called Project Noah which nature lovers can use to explore and document local wildlife using a common technology platform. Right now, mushrooms are eating oil spills, providing insulation for buildings, and decomposing […]