The Artists
In Reclaiming Ground, artists and scholars will examine and question how we might reclaim our own relationships with our food, community, and environment through one of Alabama’s popular pastimes—gardening.
| MATTHEW GROSHEK | |
Matthew Groshek is Public Scholar of Civic Engagement and Assistant Professor of Exhibition Planning and Design at Indiana University, Herron School of Art and Design at the School of Liberal Arts at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. A joint appointment connects his teaching in the Department of Visual Communications with the Department of Museum Studies. Groshek’s community/ civic engagement and collaborative projects involving UIPUI Museum Studies and Visual Communications students span an impressive list of more than 20 projects over the last four years. Each semester, he engages students with three to five civic engagement projects that involve community organizations. Projects include interpretive plans for landscape and beautification projects as well as exhibition design for cultural, historical, and sustainable resources projects. He is the recipient of a number of grants that support his research and civic engagement projects. |
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| FRITZ HAEG | |
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Fritz Haeg works between Fritz Haeg Studio (an architecture and design practice), Sundown Schoolhouse (a self-organized educational community), and the ecological initiatives of Gardenlab, which includes Edible Estates, the replacing of domestic front lawns with edible landscapes. Haeg studied architecture in Italy at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia and Carnegie Mellon University, where he received his Bachelors in Architecture. He has taught in architecture, design, and fine art programs at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), Art Center College of Design, Parsons School of Design, and the University of Southern California. Haeg’s projects and exhibits have been widely publicized internationally, including profiles and features in The New York Times, Financial Times, Frieze, Artforum, The Independent, Dwell, Men's Vogue, BBC, NPR, ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, and The Martha Stewart Show. |
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Christopher McNulty is a visual artist who engages in task-based projects to create sculptural objects, video, and works on paper. He has exhibited work in galleries and museums nationally, including the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center; Saltworks Gallery; the Mobile Museum of Art in Mobile; Axel Raben Gallery in New York City; Penn State University; the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters; the South Bend Regional Art Museum; the West Bend Art Museum; the A.R.C. Gallery; the Evanston Art Center; the Madison Art Center; and the Rockford Art Museum. His work has been featured in many publications including Art Papers, New American Paintings, The Atlanta Journal Constitution, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and The Week. McNulty has received many grants and awards including an Alabama State Council on the Arts Grant for 2005-2006 and Madison CitiARTS grant in 2001. He has completed artist residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. A dual citizen of France and the US, McNulty holds an M.F.A degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. |
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Jeff Schmuki received his M.F.A. from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, New York and his B.F.A. from Northern Arizona University. His approach combines environmental, social, economic, and aesthetic concerns with a nomadic sensibility developed after Hurricane Katrina. Whimsically functional yet serious hydroponic plant growth systems such as mobile garden machines, botanic “enhancements,” and “portable fields” often begin as a response to a specific place and are fashioned to mutate and adapt to new situations and environments along the way. Schmuki often encourages the audience to consider art-making a collaborative research laboratory, empowering the community and promoting a more accountable use of natural resources. |
| KELLY WACKER | |
Kelly Wacker is an art historian at the University of Montevallo. While her teaching expertise spans the period of the Baroque to the Contemporary, her special interest is in Land Art. Her research over the last seven years has examined the transformation of this modernist movement from its inception in the 1960s and 70s, typified by massive earthworks emphasizing the role of the individual, into the ecological and social-activist art that represents the current period. She has wide-ranging interests and has recently edited an anthology, Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art (2007), and has written essays on diverse topics including David Bowie's reflections on postmodern contemporary art trends, geo-politics in the work of Mel Chin, and social and political issues reflected in contemporary wood sculpture in Zimbabwe. |
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| LINDA WEINTRAUB | |
Linda Weintraub is the author of Avant-Guardians: Texlets in Ecology and Art (2006 – ongoing) and founder of Artnow Publications. From 1982 - 1993, Weintraub served as the first director of the Edith C. Blum Art Institute located on the Bard College campus where she originated fifty exhibitions and published more than twenty catalogues. Prior to her appointment at Bard College, Weintraub was the Director of the Philip Johnson Art Gallery at Muhlenberg College. She has taught both contemporary art history and studio art. Weintraub served as Henry R. Luce Professor of Emerging Arts at Oberlin College from 2000-2003. She holds a M.F.A. degree from Rutgers University. Weintraub is currently a contributor to the international art journal Tema Celeste. She lectures frequently on contemporary art and its intersection with ecology. |
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