Walter Hood, Stacy Levy, and Alisha B. Wormsley

November 8 @ 5:30 – 7:00 pm | Elsie H. Hillman Auditorium

Experience:

How can an urban landscape preserve its community’s history and ecological story, all while celebrating the future?

GBA’s Inspire Speakers Series returns with renowned landscape designer Walter Hood, environmental sculptor Stacy Levy, and interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer Alisha B. Wormsley who will share their experiences capturing the multi-faceted stories of urban spaces. Levy’s work includes the Rain Ravine at the Frick Environmental Center. Wormsley’s body of work includes There Are Black People in the Future and The People Are the Light. Hood, who works across the country, has deep connections to Pittsburgh as he led the Green Print master plan for the Hill District and is the commissioned artist for that neighborhood’s Curtain Call community art project. As always, the inspiring conversation comes with dinner, drinks, and a warm and inclusive community atmosphere.

About Our Presenters:

Walter Hood is the Creative Director and Founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California. Hood Design Studio is his tripartite practice, working across art + fabrication, design + landscape, and research + urbanism. He is also a professor of landscape architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally.

Walter designs and creates urban spaces and objects that are public sculpture. Believing everyone needs beauty in their life, he makes use of everyday objects to create new apertures through which to see the surrounding emergent beauty, strangeness, and idiosyncrasies of urban space. His ideas emerge from years of studying and practicing architecture, landscape architecture, and fine arts, and yet Walter tactfully eschews from differentiating between the three on any one project.

The Studio’s award winning work has been featured in publications including Dwell, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, Architectural Digest, Places Journal, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. Walter Hood is also a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award.

Visit Walter’s website HERE and see his TED talk HERE.

Stacy Levy’s projects show the presence of urban nature clarifying the patterns of natural processes at work on the site. She works with urban streams, rivers, tides & rainwater. Her work registers the changes in nature over the course of a day, a season or a several years. Stacy likes to collaborate directly with natural forces, like tides, She creates works that allows nature to show its very own patterns to the viewer.

She concentrates on making places for people to experience urban nature and to witness the fluctuations of the natural world, to bring a sense of wonder and connectedness. Her projects include a temporary tide work on the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and historic stream mapping on the sidewalks of Brooklyn and New York. Many of her projects solve simple site issues like storm-water runoff. Her rain-based works include Rain Ravine at the Frick Environmental Center In Pittsburgh and the Rain Yard at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia

Stacy graduated from Yale University with a BA in Art and a minor in forestry. She earned her MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. She is a recipient of the Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

Stacy grew up within the Wissahickon Watershed in Philadelphia, at the edge of Fairmount Park and played in storm water runoff when she was little, which informed her work. She now lives in Central Pennsylvania in the Penn’s Creek Watershed.

Visit Stacy’s website HERE.

Alisha B. Wormsley is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work is about collective memory and the synchronicity of time, specifically through the stories of women of color. Wormsley’s work has been honored and supported with a number of awards and grants to support programs: The People Are The Light, afronaut (a) film and performance series, Homewood Artist Residency (recently received the mayor’s public art award), the Children of NAN video art series, There Are Black People in the Future body of work. These projects and works have exhibited widely. Namely, the Andy Warhol Museum, Octavia Butler conference at Spelman University, Carnegie Museum of Art, Johannesburg SA, HTMLES in Montreal, Project Row House, the Houston Art League, Rush Art gallery in NY, and the Charles Wright museum in Detroit. Currently, Wormsley is working on a number of public art projects and exhibitions, namely, The People Are the Light Publication, August Wilson Park, ArtUp South Africa at the Mattress Factory, and Pittsburgh’s Market Square. Wormsley has an MFA in Film and Video from Bard College.

“There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now…” – James Baldwin

Visit Alisha’s website HERE.

Please use code inspireCOMMUNITY for a free ticket.

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