Designing for Public Life 6: Mary Miss and City as a Living Laboratory (CALL)

In this final Dialogue of the Designing for Public Life program series, artist Mary Miss will present her New York City work and discuss founding the City as a Living Laboratory (CALL), where sustainability is made tangible through the arts.

City as a Living Laboratory uses the power of art and science to promote understanding of critical environmental challenges in local communities and spur action for sustainable solutions. Working with artists, scientists, and residents of urban communities, CALL helps imagine sustainable solutions for urgent environmental issues including climate, equity, and health. Through CALL’s work, people connect environmental challenges to personal experiences and take action.

Mary Miss has had a 50-year career expanding the role of art and artists. Over her career, her work has increasingly involved collaborations with other artists, architects, landscape architects and finally, with the founding of City as a Living Laboratory, with experts in all fields. What has remained consistent is her desire to investigate the built environment and how the public engages with the natural world and the built systems they often take for granted.

Bringing an artist’s perspective to physical examples of public places and how we inhabit them, some of the themes that will be examined are:

• What role does art play in expanding sustainable solutions for communities?
• How do interdisciplinary collaborations reshape the experience of public space?
• How can people connect to environmental challenges through direct experience in NYC’s public places?

Speakers:
Mary Miss, Founder, City as a Living Laboratory (CALL), Artistic Director
Ann Marie Baranowski, FAIA, Founding Principal, AMBA PLLC

About the Speakers:
Mary Miss has reshaped the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, landscape design and installation art by articulating a vision of the public sphere where it is possible for an artist to address the issues of our time. Her installations focus on social, cultural and environmental sustainability to reveal history, ecology or aspects of sites that have gone unnoticed. In addition to "BROADWAY: 1000 Steps," she recently completed a project for the Indianapolis Museum of Art focusing on a 6-mile stretch of the White River. Miss was one of four artists who developed concepts for envisioning the future of Long Island City as part of an exhibition, Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City, at the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park. Miss has worked for the past decade on "WaterMarks: an Atlas of Water" for the City of Milwaukee, creating an urban scale network focused on water. She has received grants from the NEA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation. In 2012 she was awarded the NYC Design Commission’s Award for Excellence in Design for "The Passage: A Moving Memorial" on Staten Island.

Ann Marie Baranowski, FAIA, is the Founding Principal of her eponymous NYC-based architecture firm, AMBA. Her practice is founded on the belief that culture as an investment embedded in the built environment is as essential as the physical infrastructure of our buildings and cities. Baranowski focuses on the intersection of public space and art. Working in the public realm, she has partnered on significant projects that set a national example for enriching urban life, including public art installations at Fulton Center and South Ferry Terminal for the NY Metropolitan Transit Authority, and as Museum Architect for the Brooklyn Museum of Art, directing the planning and implementation of the $32M Eastern Parkway Entrance to renew the Museum’s identity.