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WEAD
East I Michele
Brody
The seven women in this exhibition come to us with a story of our relationship to our earth. They have in common a connection to WEAD, the Women Environmental Artists Directory, a publication developed on the West Coast by Jo Hanson and Susan Leibovitz Steinman. Over one hundred women from all over the world are listed in this directory that has become a clearing ground for people concerned with the future of our world. Last summer I saw an exhibition of West Coast WEAD artists entitled “Ecovisions” at the Thoreau Center for Sustainability in the Presidio in San Francisco; that exhibition was the inspiration for this one. To narrow down the impressively large field of East Coast WEAD artists, I chose only those with an address in Manhattan. Perhaps these two shows are only the beginning of many world-wide WEAD exhibitions. The stories these women tell through art are some of the deepest human stories, each told differently. The artists all work with earthly materials—stone, paint, seeds, plants, metal, concrete, even dirt—to shape ideas of reverence, revelation, beauty, joy, and sometimes pain. Some work individually, in private studios, engaging in a direct and intimate dialogue with materials and meaning. Others collaborate with groups of engineers, scientists, city planners and politicians on projects that show us how to work with nature instead of against it. Eco-art has the capacity to reveal the earth as our source of sustenance and joy. It can also help us understand and temper the ever-more overwhelming and destructive human presence on this magnificent blue and green whirling ball that is our home. We are all creative beings, and perhaps our greatest challenge is still before us: to honor this Earth and work in concert with it. If we do so, we can literally make a better world. Much of our past comes to us not through the word, but through the image. And it may be that our future will come to us the same way: via art. Jeanne
Wilkinson
Exhibition Checklist Michele
Brody Untitled River
Röder Floodplain Park Mother
Tongue Canova
Nymph Chrysanthemum
Dress (Back) Homage
to Rousseau Female
Genie Homage
to Diego Rivera Fata
Morgana
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