The Larger Landscape Conversation: Preservation's Present

Marisa Angell Brown is the Executive Director of Providence Preservation Society (PPS). She is an active speaker and writer on preservation, American architecture, and social practice art and design. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Places Journal, Perspecta, Manual, Buildings and Landscapes, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and her curatorial projects have been featured in Metropolis, Architectural Record, the Associated Press, the Providence Journal and the Public’s Radio.

Brown teaches courses at the women’s prison in Rhode Island with College Unbound, and previously taught courses at Brown University and Rhode Island School of Design on social practice art/design, preservation, and public humanities.  Before joining PPS in 2023, Brown was Associate Director of RISD’s Center for Complexity, and prior to that, served as an Assistant Director at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University.  She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from Yale University and has an MA from the University of Chicago and an AB from Princeton University. She serves on the Executive Committee of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and on the boards of Rhode Island State Council for the Arts and the Rhode Island State House Restoration Society. She is Korean-American and grew up in Dubai and New York.
 

Jorge Otero-Pailos is an American-Spanish artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. He employs artistic methods, informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations to expand the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage, and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials like airborne atmospheric dusts, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments.

His series "The Ethics of Dust" turned experimental preservation cleaning techniques into a signature aesthetic, creating large scale latex casts from the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments. His practice highlights how the dusts sedimented on buildings function as repositories of previously unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.

After graduating with a degree in African & African Diaspora Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, Hakeem Adewumi was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship scholarship to Johannesburg, South Africa. His work has been exhibited at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, Houston, TX; the George Washington Carver Museum and Culture Center, Austin, TX; the Janette Kennedy Gallery, Dallas, TX; and is in the collection of the Phyllis and Ross Escalette Permanent Collection, Chapman University. Over the years Adewumi has curated several pop-up exhibitions including an experimental project, Juneteenth House (JH). This project is an immersive concept house and multidisciplinary studio merging design and art to explore placemaking, culture, and Black identity in Texas. Adewumi came to the Gardner Museum as an Artist-in-Residence and exhibited during the 2024 Summer Exhibition season. Adewumi is also the Co-Director of Marketing for The Theater Offensive, a Boston-based theater company that focuses on issues affecting queer and trans people of color.

Charles Waldheim is an American Canadian architect and urbanist based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waldheim’s research examines the relationships between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. Waldheim is author, editor, or co-editor of numerous publications on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim developed the theory of landscape urbanism in response to the industrial economies and emergent ecologies of the American city. On this topic, he curates Harvard GSD’s Future of the American City platform.

Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he directs the school’s Office for Urbanization. He also serves as Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston where he convenes The Larger (Landscape) Conversation. Waldheim is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan, and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University. He has been visiting scholar at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany.