CREATIVE THOUGHT AT WORK
Linking arts and ecosystems
“I always wanted to be an artist, and Skidmore had a fantastic art department,” says Betsy Damon ’63. After three years on campus and her junior year in Japan, she went on to earn an MFA at Columbia. “After that, it was all about finding my way as an artist. It took a long time to find my voice. Women were not sup- posed to become real artists.” Damon’s involvement in the feminist movement in the early 1970s initiated much self-exploration and was “a time of great innovation,” she recalls. Steering away from her tra- ditional training, she created per- formance-art pieces such as the 7000
Year Old Woman, in
which she painted herself white and tied several hun- dred small sacks of colored flour—60 pounds’ worth—to her body. She also founded a Feminist Art Studio at Cor- nell University and for 20 years led workshops through No Limits for Women Artists, which in- spired artists nationwide to pursue their greatest visions. “That may seem old-fash- ioned,” she says; “however, it was a real struggle, and I never met a successful woman artist who was not aware of that.” Her own success has been marked by numerous awards and grants.
CREATIVE THINKERS
As part of Skidmore’s showcase of cre- ative thought at work, Scope presents these alumni profiles. For more about how their Skidmore studies shaped their life’s work, see
http://cms.skid-
more.edu/ctw. More CTW profiles are in this issue’s Class Notes section.
Undertaking ever-more-complex sci- ence and art projects led Damon to create a 250-foot cast of a dry river bed in Castle Valley, Utah, in 1985—a pivotal point in her career. While working on A Memory of Clean Water, as she named it, Damon real- ized her knowledge of water was limited and decided to devote her artistic endeav- ors to “awakening public consciousness” to the importance of this natural re- source. In 1991 she founded the non- profit Keepers of the Waters (with support
WATER ACTIVIST AND ARTIST BETSY DAMON ’63 ON BEIJING’S LIANG MA HE
from the University of Minnesota’s Hu- bert Humphrey Institute), which works with communities to inspire and promote projects that restore, preserve, and reme- diate water sources using art and science. “We have acted as if it does not matter what we do to and with water,” Damon says, catching herself on the brink of what she calls a “long lecture” and then stating simply, “Water is life.” One of her best-known projects to date is the Living Water Garden, a six-acre award-winning public park in downtown Chengdu, China. Polluted river water moves through a natural and artistic treatment system of ponds and filters, making the process of cleaning water visible. Accord- ing to Damon, the park was initially op-
posed by Beijing’s central government but later declared “the best model of environ- mental education in the country. It opened the door for a dialogue to chal- lenge the national policy of ‘develop first, clean up later, and engineering and chemicals will solve all our problems.’” Much of Damon’s work has been com- pleted in China, including water treat- ment systems at Olympic Forest Park, the Wenyu River, and Tongzhou Ecological Park, all in Beijing. The United States has “so many archaic rules and regulations that it is hard to do meaningful projects here,” she says, not- ing that historically there seems to be “less respect for nat- ural systems and artists than in Eu- rope and China.” Nonetheless, some of Keepers’ notable projects in the US include the Sounds of Water fountain at the Turtle Bay Arbo - retum in Redding, Calif., the DaVinci Water Garden in
Portland, Ore., and Water Marks in Car- nation, Wash. (For details and photos, visit
www.keepersofthewaters.org.) “I like uniting diverse groups—artists, scientists, engineers, city planners, archi- tects, and a wide variety of cultural and class perspectives—to focus different kinds of intelligences on a problem,” Damon says. “Cities all over the planet can be filled with vibrant water- and art- filled community centers, parks, school- yards, businesses, and backyards that help people become intimately connected to their water sources. These projects will lead the way for fully sustainable water infrastructures, visible and integrated into our everyday lives, rather than hidden under the ground.” —MTS
28 SCOPE SPRING 2010
MR. DENG
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