Category: Profiles

Stacy Levy: Interpreting the Connections of Nature and the Built Environment through Art

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Often people think that nature ends where the city begins. But natural processes are always occurring in the city. I like to explore the idea of nature in the city and make it visible to people.

Stacy Levy, from her website

For the 2009 Water and Land Festival in Niigata, Japan, Stacy Levy "planted" 600 18-foot-tall bamboo stems, "like tall grasses moving to the choreography of the wind."

As the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River Improvements Project continues to stretch southward toward Mission Espada, the fruit of the fundraising efforts of the San Antonio River Foundation emerges as public art enhancing the linear park skirting the river’s banks. The next phase opens to the public on Saturday, June 25, and will feature a “portal” strengthening the historical connection of Mission Concepcion to the river.

Although based in Pennsylvania, Stacy Levy is an environmental artist of international standing. Recent commissions include “Tide Poles” on the waterfront in Yonkers, New York; “River of Shade” in Harmon Library Park in Phoenix, Arizona; and “Tide Flowers” in Hudson River Park in New York. She taps talents gleaned from an unusually rich interdisciplinary background – studies at The Architectural Association in London; a B.A. in sculpture with a minor in forestry from Yale University; additional studies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture; and a MFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University – for her work.

Stacy shared a flowing description of her impression of the San Antonio River:

The San Antonio River flows through the city, its liquid presence flowing past the hardscape of the urban environment. This wonderful contrast of liquid nature and solid infrastructure is intriguing to me.  Sometimes water works slowly: sometimes languidly carving its path grain by grain, sometimes with the terrible scouring speed of a flood. But whatever the flow of the river, the water is always moving in a particular pattern of fluid dynamics. This pattern is beautiful but rarely perceivable to the eye. I wanted to capture this aspect of the flowing river and to show people another world of water: the pattern of fluid motion.

Her installation reflects not only the water and natural environment but also the built environment nearby, that of the more than 250-year-old Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purisima Concepción de Acuña. Stacy wrote:

…here, the water is evoked by sloping stone walls, so reminiscent of the architecture of the Mission Concepcion. This place of stone and water is where the mission and the river meet in an artful form, borrowing patterns and materials from each of these icons.  The stone seating walls curve and undulate like the major hydrological forces, creating a pattern of vortices made from stone which sweep the park user in. I tried to make this solid and dry environment feel like the swirling movement of river water.  And the walls undulate and slope like the Mission’s walls, are rough and cool to the touch in the shade of the trees planted in the terrace.

Portal at Mission Concepcion as envisioned by artist Stacy Levy

The gracefully curved walls and walkways will be completed in time for the June 25th celebration, but they are only the first phase of her contributions to the Mission Reach. While the final design for the next portion have yet to be approved, Stacy envisions art evocative of the fluid patterns of the river meshed with the original floral patterns found at Mission Concepcion.

More wonderful reasons to keep walking the river (refer to older posts such as this and this). 

Update on June 24, 2011: Preview of the opening of the next segment of the Mission Reach from the Express-News

Update on June 26, 2011: Express-News reports about Anne Wallace’s footbridge and more art to come….

Photojournalist Hits the Hotspots

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Haiti, 1994.  Bosnia, 1996.  Kosovo, 1999.  Israel, 2001.  The aftermath of Katrina, 2006.  Along the Tex-Mex border, 2008. 

While you and I might not think of any of these locales as places you would want to be during those particular years, these hotspots around the world are irresistable magnets for Vic Hinterlang.  I’m not sure what this says about his work as an attorney in the State Comptroller’s Office, but these are the spots Vic chose to spend “vacations.”

At one point, 1987 to 1989, he even talked his wife Sharla into moving to El Salvador where they could be lulled to sleep on many nights by the sound of gunfire.  Sharla taught English; Vic tramped off through the jungle in search of rebels. 

Slinging a camera over his shoulder must be like Clark Kent emerging from a telephone booth.   The laidback Austin attorney becomes a seemingly fearless photojournalist, snapping his “vacation shots” among guerillas with soldiers’ rifles aiming at them, and then crossing the lines to capture the outcome of the encounters from the army’s point of view.

Vic Hinterlang Photo on the Cover of The New York Times Magazine

Vic retired from the state and spent the past year writing a book about their experiences in El Salvador.  While waiting for him to shop his manuscript  around and wondering what troubled spot in the world his journey as a professional photojournalist will lead him next (I believe it’s a return to Haiti.), you can view his “What-I-Did-on-My-Summer-Vacation” images on his new website.

Update on August 25, 2011: Oh, and then there’s Juarez in August 2011. San Lorenzo must have been looking after him there.

New York Notices Our Mayor

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Zev Chavets profiled Mayor Julian Castro in the May 3 issue of The New York Times Magazine.  Among his observations:

Nothing seems to ruffle him.  Recently, after Arizona passed its tough immigration law, most Hispanic politicians reacted with fury.  Some even compared the decision to apartheid.  Castro, through a spokesman, phrased his own opposition to the decision in characteristically understated and inclusive language, saying, in part:  “Texas has long been an example of how two neighboring countries can co-exist in a mutually beneficial way for the American economy.  A law like Arizona’s would fly in the face of that history.”

And, while some of Chavets’ questions to our Mayor seemed designed to stir up racial tension where it does not exist, the Mayor did not bite:

“I consider myself Mexican-American, both parts of that phrase,” he said.  “I don’t want to turn my back on my mother’s generation.  But we are less burdened.”

The last line of the following paragraph indicates Chavets did grasp part of what makes San Antonio work:

In 2000, while Castro was still in Cambridge, the political theorist Samuel P. Huntington argued that mass immigration from Mexico poses an existential threat to the United States.  “Mexican immigration,” he wrote, “is a unique, disturbing and looming challenge to our cultural integrity, our national identity and potentially to our future as a country.”  At the heart of Huntington’s critique, which many Americans share, is the sense that Mexican-Americans will form a permanent, unassimilated superbarrio across the Southwest and elsewhere.  Julián Castro’s San Antonio is one place that counters that concern.

Will continual national attention go to the Mayor’s head?

…in San Antonio, he added, “nobody likes people with big heads.”

Note Added on June 30:  View Mayor Castro on The Colbert Report