Gretchen Hupfel Symposium 2013

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EARTH PERFECT? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden
June 6 - 9, 2013

The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts is proud to be a participating venue in the University of Delaware's Earth Perfect? Symposium.

EARTH PERFECT? Nature, Utopia, and the Garden is a four-day symposium showcasing the garden as an emblem of the ideal human relation with nature. The symposium is designed for an academic audience, garden professionals, and a general public interested in the importance and meaning of gardens.

Event Locations:

Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Delaware
The University of Delaware, Delaware
Longwood Gardens, Pennsylvania
Winterthur Estate Gardens, Delaware
Chanticleer Garden, Pennsylvania
Mt. Cuba Center, Delaware
The Delaware Center for Horticulture, Delaware

Full details on the University of Delaware website:

http://www.udel.edu/ihrc/conference/earthperfect/

Events Include:

Themed garden tours and exhibitions, and lectures and academic paper sessions focusing on topics such as wellness and the garden, environment and society, historic preservation and land use, green textiles, CSAs, the garden in the visual arts, the garden in literature, the meaning and function of domestic and public gardens, architecture and the garden, the spiritual associations of gardens, gardening the planet in the face of ecological decline, political aspects of gardening, and economies of the garden.

This symposium is interdisciplinary and international in scope. Participants will be both academics and non-academics from around the world working in a wide range of fields including art, art history, architecture, anthropology, agriculture, philosophy, literature, horticulture, botany, nutrition, landscape architecture, garden design, and law as well as earth and life sciences more generally. While ours is a topic appropriate for any "age," it is particularly appropriate now when people are more than ever engaged in discourse about our relationship with and responsibilities towards the natural environment.

Speakers Include:

Jane Knight, landscape architect of The Eden Project, Cornwall, UK.
Stephen Forbes, Director of the Adelaide Botanic Garden, South Australia
Emma Marris, author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Margaret Morton, photographer and co-author of Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives
Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens

2013 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium

imPERFECT City:

Participation, Art & Activism

Saturday, June 8, 2013

5:30 - 9 pm

DCCA will present its 2013 Gretchen Hupfel Symposium dovetailing with the University of Delaware’s Earth Perfect? Nature, Utopia and the Garden symposium. UD symposium attendees and the general public are invited to attend the DCCA for an evening of talks, food, cocktails, and entertainment surrounding the DCCA's groundbreaking utopian exhibition, imPERFECT CITY. DCCA curator Maiza Hixson will introduce the Gretchen Hupfel Keynote Speaker, acclaimed photographer Margaret Morton of NYC who will speak about her black and white images of makeshift urban gardens in New York City. A convivial event in keeping with the garden focus of the Earth Perfect? symposium, attendees will have the opportunity to view a site-specific garden created by artist Christopher Golas for Imperfect City, and Participating scholars and artists from imPERFECT CITY will host interactive engagements with this experimental exhibition throughout the event.

$35 members, $40 non-members, $15 students. Cash bar.

Reserve your seat now! Click here.

This program is partially funded by a grant from the Delaware Humanities Forum, a state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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More about keynote speaker Margaret Morton:

"Margaret Morton's black-and-white photographs of environments that were created by the homeless people of New York City are all about making something from nothing. Morton's respect for the ingenuity of the men and women who built these shelters is clear. The photographs capture their architectural resourcefulness, and Morton's work neither romanticizes nor sentimentalizes; it simply honors what she found: the need to have a place of one's own. As we see in her pictures, rubble and discarded wood can be as powerful as marble."

—The New Yorker

Biography: Margaret Morton's photographs of the dwellings that homeless individuals have assembled in public parks, vacant lots, along the waterfronts, beneath the streets, and in the abandoned buildings of New York City are combined with oral histories in Glass House, her book about thirty-five young squatters who set up a highly structured community in an abandoned glass factory; Fragile Dwelling (Aperture Foundation); The Tunnel: The Underground Homeless of New York City (Yale University Press and Schirmer/Mosel, Germany); and Transitory Gardens, Uprooted Lives (co-authored with Diana Balmori, Yale University Press). Morton is currently working on projects in Kyrgyzstan and Argentina.

Morton's projects have received numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Graham Foundation, University of Central Asia, and the Harry Chapin Media Judges' Award from World Hunger Year. Read more...

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Schedule of events: (Subject to change)

5:30 - 6:00 imPERFECT City Galleries
Cocktails & Hors d’oeuvres in the galleries

6:00 - 8:00 pm Wings Foundation Auditorium

DCCA Director Maxine Gaiber Welcome Remarks

DCCA Gretchen Hupfel Curator of Contemporary Art Maiza Hixson
Welcome to Utopia: Hixson introduces the history and definition of participatory art and asks Imperfect City participants to report on their specific projects and how the aesthetics of participation could be considered productive for the construction of the contemporary city.

Imperfect City Project Presentations:

Utopia Above the Law Wall by Annette Giesecke

Peoples Park by Eric Leshinksy

Jules Bruck on Who’s Downstream?

John Muse & Jeanne Finley on Imperfect City/Imperfect State, Roadside Memorials

Lauren Ruth, DRIFT Report and Awards Ceremony

15 Minute Intermission with Hors d'oeuvres in the Auditorium

7:00 Keynote Address
Cooper Union Photographer Margaret Morton discusses her DCCA exhibition on Gardens made by homeless people living in New York City

Q & A session

Maiza Hixson, Conclusion

8:00 pm imPERFECT City Galleries
Imperfect City Festival & Performance in the galleries with Special Musical Guests and Utopian Dance Party

For more information contact Sarah Ware, Curator of Education at 302-656-6466 ext. 7101 or sware@thedcca.org.