The Art, Community, and Environmental Stewards (ACE Stewards) program, co-run by Mallory Craig and Ryan Davis (2018 - 2021), offers a year-long paid internship that invites young people ages 15‒20 to explore the connections between community-building, cultural organizing, and nature-informed arts education. Interns work together to imagine and share new possibilities for their relationships to community and environment through looking to nature as a teacher, making art, and telling stories.
Throughout the internship, youth work to foster connections to land and culture with the community, as they address their own histories, experiences, and legacies as young people affecting social and environmental change in New York City. Interns engage with working artists and organizers and take part in rigorous dialogue and art-making to generate conversation around systems-change. They take field trips to museums, cultural institutions, green spaces, and artist studios, and plan and develop collective projects to share their learning. By supporting the Family Art Project, ACE stewards learned best practices in facilitation, and engaged their Bronx community in deepening their relationships to their local ecologies through the vehicle of artmaking.
By taking on roles as stewards, interns critically engage with the questions:
What does it mean to steward?
How do we bring care, possibility, and a sense of wild play to the people, ideas, and environments we steward?
How do our practices as stewards impact our communities?
Regenerative Futures
The 2020/2021 ACES cohort participated in Teens Take the Met, and collaborated with the young people in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Australia for the live-streamed and recorded panel: Teens Make Zines. ACES interns participated in studio visits and workshops with Katherine Miranda, Sean Desiree, Rachelle Dang, and Carlos Jiménez Cahua. ACES interns also engaged with Mary Mattingly’s pop-up of the Ecotopian Library in the Gund Theater at Wave Hill through stewarding its presence and helping to curate a section of the library with Family Art Project’s Future Species and their own artistic renderings of future species from conversation with Mary Mattingly on adaptation and evolving in the Anthropocene.
Before Us, With Us, After Us
The 2019/2020 ACES cohort investigated cultural and environmental organizing through curriculum that delves into the questions: Who and what came before us? Who and what is working with us? Who and what comes after us? How doe we support this as stewards of community and the land?
ACES interns took field trips to the Flux Factory, American Museum of Natural History, Central Park, Socrates Sculpture Garden; met with visiting artists; and engaged with Wave Hill’s own gardens, woodland, and WH cultural center through the Figuring the Floral exhibition, and Sunroom Project Spaces. ACES also deeply engaged with Bahar Behabani’s Generated@Wave Hill project, Water Has the Perfect Memory through multiple working sessions, assisting in research, and taking part in the rituals and public events around the project. ACES interns worked with Bahar to present three public programs: a family art project activating the sculpture, a woodland walk, and an artist talk in which they shared the zines documenting their involvement with the project and adding their own artistic responses. They also visited the studios of Duy Hoàng, Emily Olivera, Environmental Protection Agency Artist Collective, Samanta Batra Mehta, Anh Ta, and Stephanie Alvarado.
Our Most Wild Imaginings
The 2018/2019 cohort focused their year-long internship engaging with ideas around their Most Wild Imaginings to map out radical imagination, pretend, and play as tools for world-shaping. ACES interns also explored ideas of the wilderness within them—and worked to unpack what they’ve been socialized and conditioned to nuture/unnuture. ACES interns engaged with Wave Hill’s own gardens, woodland, and WH cultural center through the Here We Land exhibition, and Sunroom Project Spaces and engaged with artists Nobutaka Aozaki, Jessica Seagall, Tijay Mohammed, and Natalie Stopka. ACES interns also made visits to the Queens Museum, Bronx Open Studios, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Sugarhill Children’s Museum.
Youth presented a final exhibition in which they transformed the Gund Theater at Wave Hill, an inter-generational informal learning space for storytelling, into a Wild Garden that represented their visions for the future. Our Most Wild Imaginings was an installation that acted as a portal to a magical garden. ACES interns built their installation to reflect the inspiration they felt when spending time around children who are consistently in awe of nature. ACES interns invited families to sit with the over-sized flowers, glowing mushrooms, and under the rainbow canopy of a willow to remember what it feels like to feel playful, small, and in total awe with nature.