Pinon-Juniper Ecosystems
Aside from the inherent beauty of a pinon-juniper ecosystem, the health of such woodlands are tied to broader climate swings. This is the awareness that the project Sentinels hopes to bring to light. The brainchild of Todd Anderson, Bruce Crownover, and Gary Machlis, the Sentinels project uses art+science to showcase the pinon-juniper adaptation to increased aridification in the deserts of the American Southwest. From fieldwork in Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears National Monuments, these fine art books contain unique art prints and prose and can be found on display at fine museums and universities.
Meet the Artist: Todd Anderson
Mid-career visual artist and master printer specializing in fine art printmaking, photography, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Conducts convergent research with scientists, writers, and fellow artists in the production of artist’s books and artworks about the global climate crisis. Anderson possesses extensive fieldwork experience including expeditions in Africa, Antarctica (in partnership with the National Science Foundation and U.S. Antarctic Program), Canadian Arctic, and throughout the United States. Co-founder of The Last Glacier Collective (2010-). TLG Collective designs and executes long term collaborative Art+Science projects about glacial retreat in various parts of the world. Anderson’s artworks have been exhibited >135 times including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Basel Miami, and the New York Affordable Print Fair. Collections highlights include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, US Library of Congress, Getty, Jordan Schnitzer Foundation, Stanford and Yale universities, and Davis Museum of Art. Anderson is affiliated with Kai Lin Art in Atlanta (GA), Old Main Gallery in Bozeman (MT), PS Marlowe in Asheville (NC), and the Met Gallery Store inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC).
Meet the Artist: Bruce Crownover
Born and raised in Southern California, artist and printmaker, Bruce Crownover came to Madison to study printmaking at the UW-Madison’s renowned printmaking department.1987, his first year in Madison, was the same year professor Bill Weege founded Tandem Press. Crownover and other students were invited by Weege to volunteer at Tandem to help him launch the printmaking studio. In 1989, two years after Tandem opened, Crownover earned his MFA in printmaking.Shortly thereafter, Crownover met Keiji Shinohara, a Japanese Ukiyo-e master printer, and was offered a job carving woodblocks for his studio, Cherrywood Press, in Boston. In 1992, Crownover returned to Madison, opened an art studio of his own and was hired as a part time Associate Printer at Tandem. In 1994, Crownover became a full time printer at Tandem. He retired from Tandem in December 2018.After leaving Tandem, Crownover assumed his current role as Assistant to the Director of Installations and Facilities at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Wisconsin.Bruce has also been a guest lecturer throughout the country in museums, colleges and universities, promoting Tandem Press and the mission of the School of Education at UW-Madison, working as a guest artist, and sharing his art experiences with others.Since 2009, along with artists Todd Anderson and Ian van Collier, Crownover began working on a documentary project entitled The Last Glacier.
Meet the Scientist: Gary Machlis
Dr. Gary E. Machlis is University Professor of Environmental Sustainability at Clemson University. Prior to joining the faculty at Clemson, he served as Science Advisor to the Director, U.S. National Park Service (NPS) during both terms of the Obama administration. He also led the Secretary of the Interior’s Strategic Sciences Group, responding to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Hurricane Sandy. In addition, he led a team working on rebuilding science capacity and science education in Haiti after its devastating earthquake. Dr. Machlis received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington, and his Ph.D. in human ecology from Yale University. He has written numerous books and scientific papers on issues of conservation, human ecology, sustainability, disaster response, and science during crisis. His newest book Sustainability for the Forgotten will be published in late 2023. At Clemson, he teaches courses on social ecology, scientific integrity, and the politics of science. Dr. Machlis hs been active in international conservation and has worked in China on the Giant Panda Project for the World Wildlife Fund, the Galápagos Islands, and the national parks of Kenya, Cuba, and Eastern Europe. He serves on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Board on Environmental Change and Society. In 2010, Dr. Machlis was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Interview Excerpt: The Art and Science of Conservation
The Exhibit Sentinels is an art and science project created by printmakers Todd Anderson and Bruce Crownover and social ecologist Gary Machlis. This collaborative exhibit demonstrates the migration of pinyon pine and juniper trees as a result of increased dryness in the American Southwest, as studied in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase Escalante National Monuments.
Science Moab: It’s exciting to have this exhibition here in Moab and also in Blanding, the whole idea of looking at opinion in Juniper ecosystem in the eye of not only art and science, but in conservation. Why? What’s going on with the Pinyon Juniper ecosystem in the light of changing climate that that we want to bring awareness to it?
Machlis: I think there’s lots of reasons. One is the extraordinary beauty of these ecosystems. Secondly, and it comes from our title of the work, they are sentinels, warning us about broader deeper changes that we might not always see. The third reason is that our attitudes toward conserving pinon pine and juniper have changed dramatically. As late as 1980, chaining to destroy as much as they could to make it open for cattle was the standard practice accepted as conservation for other purposes. And we’ve had a major turnaround to understand the value of juniper and pinyon pine ecosystems, not just because they’re under stress, not just because they’re beautiful, but because we better understand them now, for their complexity and value.
Science Moab: Why was the project done in Bears Ears, and Grand Staircase Escalante?
Anderson: Bruce and I have been working on these projects for about a dozen years in different parts of the country. In collaborating with Gary and trying to understand what’s happening in this part of the country. We wanted to bring specificity to the project. And one of the most important things to us was that it’s located in a publicly owned National Space, like a national monument like Bears Ears and Grand Staircase. One way that we found to be effective to connect the artwork and the science and these projects with the public is if we all have a shared kind of stake in the places that we’re looking at, in the places we’re talking about. And so publicly on lands are a great way of doing that.
Science Moab: So you’ve put something together, where you’ve all contributed very specific items, I’d love to hear you each talk about your contribution to the project.
Crownover: All these projects are really based in a particular place. So I kind of want to wrap my mind around, okay, what is this place? The idea for me is just to go to that place with little pieces of paper and a phone camera and to spend time, I mean, it’s really about being in that place, it’s really nice to make drawings and paintings for me, because it forces me to sit and stare at something for a long time. When I go back to my studio in Madison, that’s when the real artistic work begins. the process of the technique that Todd and I both do is called reductive woodcut. So you’re using one piece of wood to get all of your colors, all of your information comes from one piece of wood.It’s sort of a tricky process. I’m not really trying to adhere necessarily to the painting that I made or the drawing, I’m letting the print dictate a little bit of the process itself. I’m really trying to devote some of my personality and the integrity that I have towards these places. I want that to come through in the artwork and that takes time.
Machlis: After a day of looking at the different trees and walking with Todd and trying to learn about how he saw this as an artist, I would journal and I would write notes. As the collaboration developed, the texts became what we call word paintings. The words weren’t just what they said, but how they were put together and how they were visualized. And so I worked with Todd to make sure that the word paintings actually had a visual component to them as important as the text.
Science Moab: This collaboration of art and science has been put together in what’s called artists books, they’re considered artwork in and of themselves. They are on display at USU Blanding and USU Moab until May.
Anderson: One of the things that art can do is that it has this great ability to serve as a tool to dialogue with future generations. So the goal for these books is to also leave a trace, a small bit of information about some of the things that we were thinking about the early 21st century things we cared about the state of the environment in this particular place here, and as a way of informing future generations of what we’ve been working on. We’re trying to talk about the present moment, why these things are important, but then also extend that conversation through time, something that can outlive all three of us.
