CALL WALKS // SPRING 2015

MAY 3rd, 2015

LOCATION: Begins at Houston and Avenue D, southwest corner.
TIME: Sunday May 3, 2015, 11am
TITLE: “Home is Where the Heart Is”
Artist Heather Hart and sociologist Dalton Conley will lead an interactive discussion on the history and future of the Lower East Side.

Hart creates interactive installations, including the recent “Oracle of Epicure,” based on her family history, part of the Crossing Brooklyn exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum. She has exhibited at The Drawing Center, NY; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL; and Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle, WA among others. 
Conley is on the faculty of New York University. He holds faculty appointments in the Department of Sociology, in the School of Medicine and the Wagner School of Public Service. His book “Honky” is both an autobiography and a treatise on the social construction of race and class in New York City during the 1970s and 1980s.

LOCATION: Begins at mezzanine level of the Broadway/Houston subway station.
TIME: Sunday May 3, 2015, 1230pm
TITLE: “Microbial Maps”
Geneticist Chris Mason and artist Will Lamson talk about microbiomes in urban spaces.

Lamson is an artist whose video works often find him playfully and strenuously interacting with his environment (both in the natural world and in his studio). Lamson’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum (NYC), the Dallas Museum of Art (TX), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (TX), among others. 
Mason is a geneticist who studies twins in space, advocates against patenting of genomes, and maps bacteria in the NYC subways. His lab’s microbal map of the NYC subways found traces of at least 637 known species of bacteria and a smattering of viruses, fungi, and microscopic animals, including 10 species of marine microbes that have not been previously detected in NYC (suspected to be leftovers of flooding from Superstorm Sandy in 2012) and as many more that are unknown.

May 16th, 2015

LOCATION: Meeting at Northeast side of Columbus Circle, by the USS Maine Monument
TIME: Saturday, May 16, 1230pm
Artist Marshall Reese and naturalist Mike Feller will address challenges facing New York City’s wildlife.

Marshall Reese is one half of the collaborative Ligorano/Reese. Ligorano/Reese uses unusual materials and industrial processes to make limited edition multiples, videos, sculptures and installations. Their 3,000-pound ice sculpture of the words ‘The Future’ installed in 2014 at the intersection of Broadway and 23rd Streets, coincided with the U.N. Climate Summit and the Peoples Climate March and underscored the necessity for immediate action to confront global warming. 
Mike Feller worked at NYC Parks for 31 years, as an Urban Park Ranger and as Chief Naturalist for the Natural Resources Group. In addition to providing tours, he was responsible for major restorations at the Paerdegat Basin, Gerritsen Bay and White Island, led the establishment of the Forever Wild Program, responded to oil spills and led surveys regarding the breeding of birds and harbor herons.

LOCATION: Meeting on Central Park West, between 63 and 64 Street, on the park side of the Avenue.
TIME: Saturday, May 16, 2pm
TITLE: “Collision Theory: Birds and Buildings”
Architect Joyce Hwang and naturalist Gabriel Willow will explore the possibilities for architecture that supports urban species. 

Hwang is the Director of Ants of the Prairie, an office of architectural practice and research that focuses on confronting contemporary ecological conditions through creative means. Her Bat Cloud: Rotterdam was designed and installed for the 2014 International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam. 
Willow has been a nature enthusiast and birder since he was a small child in rural Maine, roaming the woods and fields in search of frogs and woodcocks. Since 2003 he has been a teacher-naturalist with the Prospect Park Audubon Center and leading tours for Wave Hill, New York City Audubon, and others. Willow’s NYC Audubon summer and winter eco-cruise tours blend social and natural history with wildlife sightings.

May 17th, 2015

LOCATION: 242 Street / Broadway/Van Cortlandt Park
TIME: Sunday, May 17, 11am
TITLE: Revitalizing Urban Waterways
SLO Architecture and hydrologist Theo Barbagianis envision reconnecting and rejuvenating the fragmented waterways around Van Cortlandt Park.

SLO Architecture principals Amanda Schachter and Alexander Levi combine urban and architectural design with artistic production and social action, and collaborate with diverse partners like city agencies and local teens and volunteers. SLO's recent projects include Harvest Dome, a floating installation for Inwood Hill Park Inlet. Built at a space shared by a boat-building program and community arts group in Hunts Point along the Bronx River, SLO and volunteers collected discarded storm-snapped umbrellas and assembled them into a giant dome as a revelation of the city’s accumulated waterborne debris. 
Barbagianis is a hydrologist who has worked on many public works projects for the City of New York. His projects include assisting in the design and managing the construction of a treatment wetland in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, designing a bioretention system in Bronx River Park in The Bronx and designing over 20 right-of-way bioswales in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn.

LOCATION: meet at the west side of Broadway next to the exit/entrance of the  242 St 1 train stop
TIME: Sunday, May 17, 1230pm
TITLE: The Identity of Water
Artist Juanli Carrión and Sociologist Gianpaolo Baiocchi will lead a cultural journey through different flavors of water.  Participants will get a perspective of the different "identities" water can have and how susceptible these identities are to change, while learning about the past and the future of the neighborhood and its population.

Carrion creates site-specific interventions, gathering materials, people, actions, objects, information and geography to reconstruct "the landscape" and consequence of cultural conflicts.  His most recent project is Outer Seed Shadow (OSS),  a series of public art interventions that evokes the connections between plant and human behaviors by using different plant species to represent social groups or individuals. The main component of the Outer Seed Shadow is a community garden. The plants in the garden are selected through interviews, documented in video, in which plants are identified by community members. The garden then becomes a site for weekly workshops in partnership with local groups and institutions.
Baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer at NYU. He is interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. He researches civic life and participatory democracy. His book, The Civic Imagination  (co-authored with Elizabeth Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Stephanie Savell, and Peter Klein) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the US today. Baiocchi was one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy.