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Dear Friends of SFEAP:
WELCOME to the first issue of the SFEAP News. We plan to communicate with you initially on a somewhat irregular basis--whenever we think there is something important to tell you about! Because you are receiving this email, we assume you would like to stay on SFEAP's email list. If you do not, for any reason, please scroll to the bottom of the newsletter where you can unsubscribe.
We won't go into details here about what ecoart is or what SFEAP is, or why it was founded, as all that is amply discussed on the website ( www.sfeap.org). What we will do here is give you, with each issue, a short profile of an ecoartist, or someone helping to grow the ecoart movement--someone doing something really significant; expand a bit on what is happening with the worldwide ecoart movement; alert you to particularly important actions you can take or interesting gatherings/conferences/exhibitions, etc.; and tell you how you can be supportive or get involved in growing the ecoart movement, especially in South Florida.
We want to hear from you, so please send us your thoughts about this newsletter, let us know what you would like to learn about here, and ask questions about ecoart practice in general and in South Florida especially--we will get the answers from the experts.
We're looking forward to staying in touch...
Mary Jo Aagerstoun
Founder/President SFEAP, Inc.
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Let's Get Something Clear! Ecoart is a Process!!
Wherever I find myself lately I encounter puzzled expressions. What is ecoart anyway? When I show a photograph of Jackie Brookner's biosculpture in a park in my home city, people say "Oh, that is the ecoart!" To which I have to reply "Not exactly!" Brookner's biosculpture is located in a West Palm Beach public park retention pond where its purpose, aside from looking intriguing, is to demonstrate a new (eco-artistic) way to clean and aerate dirty stormwater. But the biosculpture is not the ecoart per se. It is only one of myriad aspects that constitute the entire ecoart work which include, along with the biosculpture, the plants along the banks that also help to clean the stored stormwater; the learning garden that honors Seminole culture with important symbols and plants; the sculptural mounds that ecoartist Angelo Ciotti designed to utilize creatively the earth dug out of what is now a lake, etc. etc. But even that is not the entirety of this particular ecoart work. Integral to it is the process that brought it into being, and, now, the process of restoring it 4 years after it was completed.
What I want to emphasize in this mini-essay is that ecoart is really all about--Process! There may or may not be something produced from ecoart process that one can touch. But what will be produced from the best ecoart works is something far more precious: engagement. A talented and expert ecoartist catalyzes. S/he inspires people to take action. S/he comes up with out of the box ideas that bring scientific theories to life. S/he imagines solutions in concert with people (and other life forms) for whom an environmental problem is not an abstraction--it affects them directly and often negatively. And, s/he draws on her education as an artist and her toolbox of aesthetically, expressively powerful communication means-color, spatial relations, shape, scale, and, yes, when needed and appropriate, technical means as well-painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, digital media, and on and on.
The real product of the best ecoart works is the process that results in an energized community, a community that, because of the intervention of a talented and experienced ecoartist, has strengthened its own sense of place, of the need to care for it, and how to do so with new expertise, an expertise that includes a broader sense of human beings' relationship to the other life forms with which we share the place we call home.
Go to the SFEAP website section Ecoart and Ecoartists in South Florida to meet some of the talented people who are bringing this art form vigorously to our region and learn more about the biosculpture and other elements of the ecoart in West Palm Beach. --MJA
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