Hargreaves Associates, in collaboration with Julian Lang, Markings 2001, site-specific installation for Revelatory Landscapes, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photograph © Richard Barnes

Project Title: Revelatory Landscapes
Recipient Organization: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Lead Artist: Leah Levy on behalf of five landscape architects and their collabortive teams
Genre and Date Awarded: Visual Arts, November 1998
Presented: May 5-October 14, 2001

Working with five acclaimed landscape architects, independent curator Leah Levy (serving as lead artist) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's (SFMOMA's) then Curator of Architecture and Design, Aaron Betsky, created Revelatory Landscapes , combining a museum exhibition, landscape installations, and public art. Five site-specific projects placed around the Bay Area and a unifying exhibition at SFMOMA explored the urban landscape as a place that can be mined to reveal the history, social significance, and natural properties of land. A catalogue and web site accompanied the work.

Participants were ADOBE LA, Kathryn Gustafson, Hargreaves Associates, Hood Design, and Tom Leader Studio. In keeping with the project's collaborative nature, most of the five participants worked with partners and collaborators from fields outside of landscape architecture, enabling the project to reach beyond the traditional boundaries of the design disciplines.

Revelatory Landscapes asked viewers to consider their relationship with the urban landscape--how they have constructed or otherwise exploited it, and conversely, how it shaped their sense of self and community. The exhibit was constructed around the premise that over the last 30 years, a new form of art and design has emerged that evolves from both landscape design and environmental installation. This practice merges a concern for ecology and sustainable resources with the realization that transformed land reveals aspects of our social and cultural history. The curators wrote,

At the end of this century, these works on the land have evolved in a critical manner and at a particular location: at the edge of the urban scene. These edges happen not just at the borders of the cities, in the intermediate zones between urban and suburban, but also within the city. They are found where redevelopment leaves scars, where earthquake faults or wetlands open space up, or where zoning creates fissures in the urban fabric. These are the places where we often are made most acutely aware of our environment, where our identity and relationship with the earth stands revealed.

In exploring these dynamic fissures, the collaborating designers created the following pieces (descriptions excerpted from the exhibition guide published by SFMOMA):

• Red Is Out was an exploration by ADOBE LA of the idea of the chinampas (floating gardens) of pre-Columbian Mexico. It was placed in the rapidly developing Mission Bay neighborhood at the site of Mission Creek. Life-size cutouts of a running family, fabricated of cast resin, seemed to be heading toward the bay, and fragmented glyphs surrounding the family were inspired by the Aztec calendar. The forms of the family were derived from highway signs in southern California intended to warn drivers of illegal immigrants running across traffic, making Red is Out a metaphor for shifting cultural and economic priorities.
• Wind, Sound, and Movement, a collaboration among Kathryn Gustafson, Jaimi Baer, and Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture, at Candlestick Point in San Francisco, examined natural qualities of a remnant of natural landscape in an otherwise urban environment. Placed at San Francisco's wind-swept southeasternmost corner, hundreds of shimmering mylar spinners marked a path uphill through pampas grasses and other flora. At the hill's plateau, three "sound chairs" were positioned so that the urban noise was diminished and the sounds of the natural environment mixed with delicate wind chimes
• Markings , a collaboration among George Hargreaves and Mary Margaret Jones of Hargreaves Associates and artist Julian Lang was placed in a two-and-a-half acre site under Interstate 280 near to where it crosses Highway 87 in San Jose. The area was once inhabited by the Chocheño tribal group of the Costanoan Indians. Mammoth concrete pylons supporting the freeway were painted with a shimmering silver coat and marked with English and Native American words that evoked the contrast between new and ancient cultures.
• Landscape in Blue--Entropy in the Landscape, a collaboration among Hood Design, composer Olly Wilson, and artist Douglas Hollis, offered a series of installations in a three-block-long site along Seventh Street in West Oakland that uncovered the area's history as the center of a vibrant blues and jazz scene in the 1930s and 40s. Features included benches marking the site of a former neighborhood church, low walls marking the foundations of former buildings, posters tracing the neighborhood's history, and speakers transmitting echoes of the jazz that once made the area famous.
• Coastlines , a collaboration among Tom Leader of Tom Leader Studio and landscape planners Anurahda Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, evolved from Leader's observation that the California coast can be seen as an interaction between two systems of alignments. One is the linear, north-south system that includes the natural elements of the fault lines, mountains, and shorelines, and such parallel manmade lines as train tracks and freeways. The other, an east-west system, includes the path of wind and fog and the movement of people. The installation, based at Aquatic Park in Berkeley, used four lines of black vinyl screen, that traced four north-south lines: the railroad tracks, the original shoreline, the frontage road, and the edge of the landfill. The enclosures formed by the screens were filled with materials that accumulated from the flow of the east-west systems as they intersected the north-south lines.

Serving as lead artist Leah Levy has worked as an independent curator since 1985. She was founding curator of the internationally recognized Capp Street Project artist-in-residency program, working with residents from the inception to the realization of every project from 1983-85. Among other exhibitions, in 1993 she developed "The Way of Collaboration: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Walker in Collaboration with Architects--Arata Isozaki; Helmut Jahn, Ricardo Legorreta; Kunihide Oshinomi; Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; Yoshio Taniguchi," for the Yamagiwa Foundation Galleries in Tokyo. SFMOMA has a long tradition of exploring landscape architecture, which began in the 1940s with an important exhibition of the work of Telesis, a group of landscape designers active in the Bay Area after the second World War. Designers of today continue to refer to this exhibition when considering the evolution of landscape architecture. Additionally, SFMOMA has a history of recognizing design as a significant part of its exhibition programs. Aaron Betsky, who collaborated on behalf of the museum, was Curator of Architecture and Design at SFMOMA from 1995 until 2001. During the same period, he also was an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Betsky came to the Bay Area with a distinguished background coordinating public presentations and college curricula in design and architecture; and as a contributing editor, critic, columnist, and correspondent for Architecture Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolitan Home, The Los Angeles Times and other publications.

Tom Leader Studio, in collaboration with Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, Coastlines,
site-specific installation for Revelatory Landscapes, organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, photograph © Richard Barnes

Leah Levy has worked as an independent art curator and art historian, based in Berkeley, California, since 1985. She has initiated and organized contemporary art exhibitions and installations, and written or edited a number of distinguished publications.

Professional Experience

• Art curator (1985-present)
• Art consultant/advisor to public art projects and design competitions (1985-present)
• Founding curator, Capp Street Project, San Francisco, California (1983-1985)
• Trustee, The Estate of Jay DeFeo

Public Art Program Coordination

• Art Master Plan, Mission Bay, San Francisco (2002)
• Foundry Square, First and Howard Streets, San Francisco (2002-2003)
• Millennium Partners/WDG Ventures, Inc., , and the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency for Central Block One, Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, California (1998-2004)

Selected Publications

• Jay DeFeo and "The Rose," co-editor, University of California Press and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2003)
• Kathryn Gustafson: Sculpting the Land, Spacemaker Press (1998)
• Review of Lucy Lippard's Lure of the Local in Land Forum (Winter, 1998)
• Peter Walker: Minimalist Gardens, Spacemaker Press (1997)
• Review of David Bourdon's Designing the Earth in Land Forum (summer/fall 1997)
• Walter Hood: Urban Diaries (editor), Spacemaker Press (1997)
• Review of Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory in Land Books (winter, 1996)
• Squeak Carnwath: Lists, Observations & Counting (forward), Chronicle Books (1996)
• "The Collaborative Quest," Graphis 295, (1995)
• The Way of Collaboration: The Landscape Architecture of Peter Walker in Collaboration with Architects," (catalogue), The Yamagiwa Foundation, Tokyo, Japan (1993)
• Capp Street Project: The Inaugural Year 1984 (catalogue), essays on David Ireland, James Turrell, and others (1984)

ADOBE LA

ADOBE LA (an acronym for Artists, Architects, and Designers Opening the Border Edge of Los Angeles) produces provocative installations, performances, and documentaries. The group's work emphasizes the transforming power of Latino street life on the culture at large, confronting inequities and prejudices by broadening the definition of what's valuable and memorable in art and design.

Kathryn Gustafson

Landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson first gained recognition for her work in France, where she trained and created her early sculptural designs. Now working internationally, one of Gustafson's recent projects is the acclaimed Arthur Ross Terrace at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where she created a complex work that uses stone, light, and lawn to evoke the shadows cast by a lunar eclipse. For Wind, Sound, and Movement, Gustafson's Seattle office, Gustafson Partners Ltd., teamed with Bay Area architect Jaimi Baer and the firm of Conger Moss Guillard Landscape Architecture.

Hargreaves Associates

Hargreaves Associates follows the premise that the true conditions of a landscape can be the subject of its design. Often working in hostile natural areas passed over by urban development, the firm's projects create functional and beautiful spaces at locations that had been neglected. Previous work includes San Jose's Guadalupe River Park, the Sydney Olympics 2000, and the conversion of San Francisco's Chrissy Field into a multi-use park and wetlands area.

Walter Hood

Walter Hood's work is deeply rooted in the everyday rituals of the neighborhoods for which he designs. In addition to the local parks he has created in Oakland, he is the landscape architect for the new M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, and a member of the design team for Yerba Buena Lane, a new pedestrian pathway being created in San Francisco linking Market Street with Yerba Buena Gardens.

Tom Leader