S(tree)twork (2020-2023) is a multi-year, public art project rooted in Philadelphia whose aim is to animate how we live among trees; how we perceive them; and how we imagine our future cohabitation. S(tree)twork complements the city of Philadelphia’s ten-year strategic plan to forest the city; “to set forth new ways of working with residents to mitigate climate change and to prioritize equity in delivery, ensuring that the most vulnerable communities benefit from a healthy tree canopy.”
S(tree)twork is curated by Marina McDougall on behalf of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, in partnership with the international art and design collective Futurefarmers. The project incorporates a series of public programs and workshops, public service announcements and a built intervention at Awbury Arboretum that together will create a new dialog around the vital role of trees in urban communities. Programming undertaken in conjunction with community partners will include hands-on workshops that seek to shift perceptions about the value of trees and motivate public participation in tree planting across Philadelphia—particularly in low canopy neighborhoods.
A community co-design workshop will inform the function and form of the built intervention. This hybrid structure will serve as a gathering space to support reforestation efforts in Philadelphia and as a venue for public workshops. Awbury Arboretum in East Germantown will serve as the site for the built intervention. Additional community sites and partnering organizations include East Park Revitalization Alliance, Nicetown-Tioga Community Development Center and UC Green. A culminating publication will document the project’s key phases and capture the contributions of the project’s many collaborators including microbial ecologist Ignacio Chapela, and anthropologist Michael Taussig.
The Arkestra led by Marshall Allen arrives during the Summoning the Future Forest with the Sun Ra Arkestra
Children with seedlings from Summoning the Future Forest with the Sun Ra Arkestra
Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Tree Tenders Tree Distribution in the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
(November 13, 2021 -April 17, 2022)
The first project in the Academy of Natural Science’s year-long focus on water, renews our appreciation for the vital element of water through artworks that combine the marvel and insight of both scientific and artistic inquiry. Centered around two micro phenomenon–snow crystals and diatoms—the exhibition presents two parallel histories of observation and shows the interplay between the micro-cosmic and macro-cosmic. Diatoms–microalgae–the wondrous jewels of water encased in glass, that exist in virtually every puddle of water, lie at the heart of the food chain, and generate a major portion of the world’s oxygen are often compared with snow crystals. Combining illustrations of rare books by Robert Hooke, Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, and Ernst Haekel; historical Victorian arranged diatom slides by Harold Dalton and others; microphotographs by Snowflake Bentley and Ukichiro Nakaya; artifacts documenting the groundbreaking research of diatom scientist Ruth Patrick; contemporary ceramic sculpture by Marguerita Hagan; stop-motion imagery by physicist Kenneth Libbrecht, and high resolution photography by Nathan Myrvold - the Invisible World of Water considers the hidden connections and that flow between water, land and air through earth’s hydrosphere.
The Academy of Natural Sciences important role in waterway ecology began with Ruth Patrick, a diatom researcher who advocated for an integrated, holistic approach to waterway health in her groundbreaking work in ecology.
Fog Bridge #72494 (2013) is an ephemeral sculpture created by celebrated Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. The work spanning a pedestrian bridge at the edge of the San Francisco Bay, invites the public to observe and viscerally experience how the invisible forces of wind and humidity dramatically alter fog as a weather phenomenon.
Fog Bridge was the inaugural project of Over the Water, a new public art series initiated for the Exploratorium’s new site along the San Francisco downtown waterfront.
As director of the Exploratorium’s Center for Art & Inquiry, McDougall worked with museum leadership to initiate the public art series. McDougall worked closely with Nakaya and a project team of engineers to site the work and develop the project’s water infrastructure. She later helped the Exploratorium to acquire the work for the permanent collection. Today Fog Bridge uses desalinated water pumped from the San Francisco Bay.
Marina McDougall curated the West Coast presentation of Strandbeest: The Dream Machines of Theo Jansen, featuring the arresting kinetic sculpture inspired by evolutionary processes.
The exhibition was initiated by the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem Massachusetts. Working with PEM; Dutch artist Theo Jansen; photographer Lena Herzog; and community partners; McDougall led the Exploratorium project team to adapt and re-design the exhibition for the Exploratorium’s participatory environment, and curious intergenerational audiences.
The Exploratorium exhibition presented in the summer of 2016 enjoyed 30,000 visitors.
https://www.exploratorium.edu/strandbeest
McDougall served as project director for the major exhibition The Marvelous Museum: Orphans, Curiosities, and Treasures from the Oakland Museum of California: A Project of Mark Dion (2010-2011). The exhibition timed with the renovation of the OMCA’s fine arts galleries excavated hidden institutional histories and curious artifacts reflecting the complex role of museums as cultural stewards.
The exhibition conceived by Dion as a museum within a museum included: three tableau evoking curator’s offices from different eras; interventions provoking intriguing juxtapositions; and a storage space bringing the behind-the-scenes to the fore.
Working in collaboration with OMCA curator Rene DeGuzman, artist Mark Dion, McSweeney’s editor Andrew Leland, photographer David Maisel, Chronicle Books, and the For-Site Foundation, McDougall directed the project team towards the conceptualization and realization of the exhibition and accompanying catalog. The catalog includes contributions from Lawrence Weschler, Graham Burnett, Rebecca Solnit, and many others.
An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park is an audio tour that strolls through San Francisco’s historic pleasure ground exploring the social ideals that have shaped this artificial landscape through the decades.
Developed by the Studio for Urban Projects, McDougall wrote, and narrated the experience.
McDougall also contributed to the conceptual development of the Studio For Urban Project’s public audio tour: Field Notes: Observing Lake Union. This public art commission for the Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop explores how changing conceptions of nature, and our place within it, have shaped Seattle’s Lake Union over the last two hundred years.
As director of the Exploratorium Center for Art & Inquiry McDougall initiated the ongoing research project Begin Here: Assignments, Instructions, Prompts and Cues from the Artists’ Classroom (2014). With support from the National Endowment of the Arts, the collaborative project explored the interdisciplinary learning potential of artist’s lessons. Developed in partnership with Sarah Ganz Blythe of the RISD Museum, contributors included the Albers Foundation, Aperture Foundation and a wide range of artists (including Studio Wayne McGregor, John Baldessari, and Third Coast Percussion). Begin Here took the form of participatory workshops, and lessons accessible from a project website.
Begin Here programming included “Photographer’s Playdate,” presented in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation. The workshop included a live debate on the merits/demerits of well known photographs; and hands on activities for the public.
Machine in the Garden: A Pastoral (2006), is an outdoor classroom designed for the Oxbow School in Napa, California. Inspired by Leo Marx’s book of the same title, the garden explores the long literary tradition of the pastoral in western imagination where a tension exists between the bucolic and the landscapes of human industry. The Oxbow space includes garden beds for students to cultivate with sculptural elements.
The first project of the Garden of Forking Paths, Machine in the Garden was developed with core collaborators: artist Phil Ross, architect Rick Johnson, and numerous others.
McDougall curated the exhibition Utopia Now! (2001) on contemporary utopian visions as represented in the work of eleven international contemporary artists, designers and collectives.
The exhibition included works by artists, architects and designers including: Vito Acconci/Acconci Studio, Shigeru Ban, Santiago Cirugeda, Crimson, Chad McCail, Nils Norman, Raketa, Michael Rakowitz, Superflex and Torolab.
For the traveling version of the exhibition Utopia Now! (And Then) at the Sonoma County Museum , McDougall developed an accompanying presentation on historical utopian communities based in Sonoma County, CA. Artist Nils Norman in collaboration with Wowhaus organized the bus tour Ecology/Art Expedition Survey.
Images: Michael Rakowitz Parasite Project; Shigeru Ban Emergency Shelter; Chad McCail People Take Turns to do the Difficult Jobs; Superflex Biogas.
As a film curator at the Exploratorium, McDougall working with Brigitte Berg director of the Les Documents Scientifique in Paris, organized the first major U.S. retrospective of Jean Painlevé, the pioneering poetic scientific filmmaker in 1991.
One of the first to plunge underwater with a camera to bring the subaquatic world to the screen, maverick scientific documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) captured the throes of a male seahorse giving birth, the geometric choreography of crystal formation, and the mating habits of hermaphrodite mollusks. In a lifetime spanning nearly the first hundred years of cinema itself, Painlevé made over 200 films including the Seahorse, Freshwater Assassins, The Vampire, and the Love Life of the Octopus. His lyrical and instructive animal behavior films set to avant-garde scores were much admired by Surrealist contemporaries such as Antonin Artaud, Luis Buñuel, and Jean Vigo.
With help from Kathy Geritz of the Pacific Film Archive at the Berkeley Art Museum, the program traveled nationally to venues including the Harvard Film Archives and MOMA.
Later McDougall co-edited Science is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (1999, MIT Press/Brico Press) with Andy Masaki Bellows and Birgitte Berg with a contribution from Ralph Rugoff. The book, designed to serve as a resource for further research, includes; stills from Painleve’s most celebrated films laid out in storyboard fashion; a selection of Painleve’s writings; as well as reviews by writers including André Bazin appearing for the first time in English.
(1993, 12 min., color and black & white, sound, 16mm)
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now mixes archival and original footage to describe architectural, automotive and electronic realms that have shaped the American experience of space. This experimental documentary essay combines images that evoke the ether of the American sprawl, shaped by technologies which in overcoming time and space have created a vast placelessness. The film adopts a wry, dispassionate humor in its consideration of human displacement.
The film was presented in the Dallas Video Festival, 1993; Inter-Film, Berlin, Best Essay Film, 1993; Film + Arc 1, Graz, Austria, 1993; Ann Arbor Film Festival & Tour, Honorable Mention, 1994; Melbourne International Film Festival, 1994; Athens International Film Festival, 1994; Onion City Film Festival, Chicago, 1994; Triennale of Milan, 1994, and distributed by Drift Distribution in New York and Budget Films, Los Angeles.
