Art, Science and Sustainable Community Symposium
Sean K. Garman, AIA, LEED
http://www.mitchellgarman.com/
Sean is a licensed architect and sustainable designer leader for the Perkins+Will Design Dallas office and acts as an in-house consultant and design collaborator with Kelly Mitchell. Sean’s passion for sustainability stared at Montana State University where he received both his Bachelor and Master of Architecture degrees. Practicing since 1993, Sean’s experience ranges from restaurants, commercial and interiors, to a focus on higher education facilities, with an emphasis on science buildings. Currently serving on the board of directors for Dallas Architecture Forum, Sean also served a term as Education & Events committee for the US Green Building Council- North Texas Chapter.
With over 15 years of experience, Sean has performed numerous roles on a variety of project types ranging from complex research and teaching facilities to corporate headquarters and interior design. Completing the Harvard School of Public Health’s “Guidelines for Laboratory Design” program has further strengthened this particular knowledge base.
Sean has a passion for sustainable building practices and has put this passion to work by actively engaging in the LEED coordination and goal setting for the majority of projects in the Dallas office of Perkins+Will. As co-chair of the Dallas office’s “Green Team”, Sean remains at the forefront of the latest sustainable technologies and trends. This also gave him the opportunity to be a founding member of Perkins+Will’s corporate Sustainable Design Initiative committee.
Sean devotes personal time outside the firm by chairing the Events & Education Committee for the USGBC-North Texas Chapter. Through this, he educates the industry and general public on issues regarding sustainability through public presentations, workshops, tours and community outreach.
Sarah Jane Semrad
http://www.sarahjanesemrad.com/http://lareuniontx.org/
is an award winning photographer, social entrepreneur and community organizer committed to cultivating creativity in Dallas. After producing art shows independently around Dallas for some time, Semrad founded Exposition Park’s IR Gallery in 2004, exclusively representing emerging Dallas artists in all media. She went on to co–create Pigeon–Stone Project in 2005, connecting local artists with new collectors in businesses’ public spaces. PSP earned Semrad a mention in the Dallas Observer’s 2005 “Best Of” issue as “Best Art Invasion”. She is the co–founder, president and trusted consigliere for all things Art Conspiracy (est. 2005) – a non–profit committed to connecting artists and musicians with each other for the benefit of the local art economy. In 2006, Semrad co–founded La Reunion TX, a non–profit organization creating an artist in residency program on 35 acres in Oak Cliff. In 2009, Sarah Jane was named one of DFW's 25 Most Interesting People by NBC. Sarah Jane and her husband – musician Paul Semrad – live in Oak Cliff with their two children. Semrad holds a BA in chemistry from the University of Dallas.
Paul Villinski
Paul Villinski was born in York, Maine in 1960, and has lived and worked in New York City since 1982. A scenic route through the educational system included stops at Phillips Exeter Academy and the Massachusetts College of Art, and a BFA with honors from the Cooper Union in 1984.
His work has been included in more than ninety exhibitions, including recent shows at The Museum of Arts and Design (NY); The Hillwood Art Museum (NY); the Ogunquit Museum of American Art (ME); Carnegie Mellon University (PA); Arkansas State University; the University of Wyoming Art Museum; Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans), and Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC). His work is included in numerous collections, including major works created by commission. He has been a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Millay Colony (NY); the Ucross Foundation (WY); the Djerassi Foundation (CA) and the Villa Montalvo Arts Center (CA). He taught as an Adjunct Lecturer in Art History at the CUNY LaGuardia Community College.
A pilot of sailplanes and paragliders, metaphors of flight and soaring form a central theme in his work.
• Download complete biography (Adobe PDF)
Paul Villinski is a visual artist who lives and works in New York City. He received a BFA with honors from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, in 1984. Villinski’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout the United States. Recent solo exhibitions include “Emergency Response Studio” at Rice University Gallery, Houston, which also travelled to Ballroom, in Marfa, Texas, and Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut. Recent group exhibitions include “Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary, the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, and “Prospect .1 New Orleans”, an international Biennial held in the Cresent City.
Karla Klay, Executive Director of Artist Boat, Galveston
Karla Klay currently serves as the Executive Director of Artist Boat. She has 15 years of experience integrating the sciences and the arts. She has worked as an artist in residence for the Texas Commission on the Arts and an environmental educator for Texas A&M University at Galveston and the Galveston Bay Foundation. She earned a bachelor’s of fine arts in drawing from Southern Methodist University and a bachelor’s of science in marine biology from Texas A&M University at Galveston. She is an American Canoe Association (ACA) kayak instructor and is certified in 1st aid and CPR.
Artist Boat integrates art & science to promote awareness and preservation of coastal margins & the marine environment through Eco-Art Adventures via kayak and vessels and interactions with coastal peoples. This program teaches appreciation for nature and bay related science allowing participants to leave with a visual arts outreach tool and hands-on/minds-on environmental education.
Elizabeth Dunbar
Elizabeth Dunbar is Curator at Arthouse at the Jones Center in Austin, Texas. Previously she served as Curator at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. With a focus on emerging artists working in all media, she has organized more than thirty exhibitions in her career and has written frequently about contemporary art. Recent projects include the group exhibitions “Phantasmania” and “Decelerate,” both of which explored the visual manifestation of prevalent topics within the broader culture, and solo exhibitions with Fritz Haeg, Florian Slotawa, Gajin Fujita, Phoebe Washburn, Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Lisa Sanditz, Nikki S. Lee, Amy Cutler, among several others. Dunbar holds a MA in Art History and a MA in museum studies from the City University of New York.
Chris Taylor
Chris Taylor is an architect, educator, and director of Land Arts of the American West at Texas Tech
University. He studied architecture at the University of Florida and received his Master of Architecture
from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In 1998 he was awarded the Steedman Traveling
Fellowship by Washington University and spent a year in Venice Italy mapping the spatial character of the
city’s relationship between water and sky. Taylor teaches in the College of Architecture at Texas Tech, he
has also taught within the interdisciplinary design program in the Department of Art and Art History at the
University of Texas at Austin and in architecture programs at the Universities of Arizona, North Dakota
State, and Florida. He explores the interstitial forces creating landscape through his practice, the
Architecture Workers Combine, which has built work in New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and Pennsylvania.
Through his investment in the mechanics of construction and collaboration he has translated renga, an
ancient form of Japanese communal poetry, into an operative model for building that pivots on excellence
without requiring consensus.
Land Arts of the American West is a field program operating within the intersection of geomorphology and human construction. Land art or earthworks begin with the land and extend through
the complex social and ecological processes that create landscape. Including everything from petroglyphs
to roads, dwellings, monuments and traces of those actions, earthworks show us who we are. Examining
gestures small and grand, Land Arts directs our attention from potsherd, cigarette butt, and track in the
sand, to human settlements, monumental artworks, and military-industrial installations. Land Arts
extends the contemporary earthworks practices begun in the 1960’s through a combination with broader
overlays from ecology, archeology, geography, performance, architecture, and science. Each year Land
Arts travels more than 8,000 miles with a small group of students to live and work in the landscape of the
Southwest for over fifty days. Visiting sites such as the Roden Crater Project, Chaco Canyon, Spiral Jetty,
and the Bonneville Salt Flats, our itinerary combines investigative sites, where we encounter significant
cultural interventions, and work sites, where we produce work in direct response to an expanding
definition of landscape. Land Arts operates with a “no-trace” ethic, making every effort to minimize the
impact and evidence of our work and inhabitation. The program was started in 2000 by Bill Gilbert and
has developed through collaboration between Gilbert and Chris Taylor since 2002. We are currently
working on a book about the development of the program that will be published by the University of Texas
Press in 2009. In 2007 Taylor led a group of students and professionals on a Land Arts expedition in
Chile called Atacama Lab: 07, which is documented in a December 2008 book published by Incubo of
Santiago.
http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/taylan.html
ISBN: 978-0-292-71672-8
Contact info for the press is at http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/contact.html
Atacama book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/9563196112?ie=UTF8&tag=christaylor05-20
Ignacio Busnter: Keynote Speaker
http://www.wrtdesign.com/people/bio/Ignacio-Bunster-Ossa/5
Ignacio is a landscape architect and urban designer whose work is consistently recognized for design innovation. He is a pioneer and leading practitioner of Landscape Urbanism, an approach to urban design based on the fusion of ecology, community identity, infrastructure, recreation, and public art. Ignacio continues to develop and refine this practice as he directs our landscape architecture studio in Philadelphia and of many of the firm's large-scale landscape projects. Ignacio is a Harvard Loeb Fellow and periodically lectures, teaches, writes, and serves on design award juries.
Ignacio is a landscape architect and urban designer whose work is consistently recognised for design innovation. He is a pioneer and leading practitioner of Landscape Urbanism, an approach to urban design based on the fusion of ecology, community identity, infrastructure, recreation and public art.
A principal of Wallace, Roberts & Todd, Ignacio continues to develop and refine this practice as he directs the landscape architecture studio in Philadelphia and many of the firm's large-scale landscape projects. Ignacio is a Harvard Loeb Fellow and periodically lectures, teaches, writes, and serves on design award juries.
Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa is a Principal with Wallace Roberts & Todd, LLC, a national planning and design firm based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with an office in Dallas. Within a broad spectrum of interests, Ignacio specializes in the revitalization and enhancement of urban areas through open space and landscape interventions. As a landscape architect and urban designer, he has led many of the firm’s significant urban projects, including award-winning designs for Santa Monica’s Palisades Park and Beach Boardwalk, Liberty State Park in New Jersey, and the Anacostia Waterfront Initiative in Washington, DC. He is currently leading the design of the Trinity River Corridor Project Dallas, in collaboration with CH2MHILL, URS and artists Brad Goldberg.
Ignacio has been a contributing editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine and was a member of the Joint Task Force of the Landscape Futures Initiative, a professional and academic initiative directed towards identifying the potential impact of global landscape change upon the profession of landscape architecture. Ignacio holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami (FLA), a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Loeb Fellowship in Environmental Studies from Harvard University. He has taught advanced design studios at these and other universities and has lectured widely on the practice of landscape architecture.