Jackie Brookner

Jackie Brookner (1945 – May 15, 2015) was an ecological artist, writer, and educator. She worked with ecologists, design professionals, engineers, communities, and policy-makers on water remediation/public art projects for parks, wetlands, rivers, and urban stormwater runoff. In these projects, local resources become the focal point of community collaboration and collective creative agency.

Since 2002, Brookner has been collaborating with ecologists, engineers, policy makers, design professionals, and community residents to create multifunctional water remediation/public art projects. These landscape-scale public projects demonstrate how stormwater and other polluted waters can be reclaimed and used to restore habitat in parks, wetlands, rivers, former sewage treatment lagoons, and other contexts.

The first Biosculpture, Prima Lingua, was commissioned in 1995 by Appalachian State University for the exhibition "Views From Ground Level, Art and Ecology in the Late Nineties." It is a large tongue that licks and cleans the polluted water in which it stands. I’m You, commissioned in 2000 by Wave Hill, Bronx, New York, for the exhibition "Abundant Invention," resembles human hands but is based on microscopic moss structures.

This project traveled from 1994 to 1998 to the following venues: McKissick Museum, Columbia, South Carolina (1994); Diggs Gallery, Winston-Salem State University, North Carolina (1995); The Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, Tennessee (1995); The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia (1995); University of North Texas Art Gallery, Denton, Texas (1996); The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee (1996); Gallery 210, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Missouri (1998). The project evolved as it crossed the southern U.S. to follow the migration of the Cotton Belt from the Carolinas westward. At each location, Brookner spoke with former cotton farmers who hand-picked cotton in the 1930s and 1940s, as she modeled portraits of their feet with local soil. These became the focal points of installations where they rested on 60-tons of soil or 2,500-pounds of ginned cotton. Accompanying the installation was a video documenting Brookner's conversations and forty Farm Security Administration photographs from the 1930s (selected by Susan Harris Edwards) depicting the living and working conditions of cotton farmers during the Depression.

Brookner was guest editor of the College Art Association's Art Journal on "Art and Ecology" (1992). Her research for this issue inspired her to develop a practice that could provide ecological benefits and help transform cultural values.

In the early 1990s, Brookner's writing focused on how our materialistic culture could be so at war with the matrix of its own matter, the Earth. Using soil as a metaphor for raw matter in her wall pieces and Soil Chairs, she investigated the cultural associations of dirt, excrement, sex, and death. In her museum installations, Brookner focused on historical relationships of soil in particular regions.

Brookner's landscape-scale ecological art evolved from her sculptures and installations from the 1980s and early 1990s. In the early 1980s at Oscarsson Hood Gallery in New York, Brookner exhibited cast bronze sculptures that were based on the movement of water and growth in plants. In 1987, she began juxtaposing materials such as soil, velvet, inner tubes, pillow stuffing, exhaust pipes, and chiffon to explore the psychological and gendered associations these materials carried.

Brookner was born in Providence, Rhode Island, and received her B.A. from Wellesley College. She completed all work for a Ph.D. in Art History from Harvard University, except the dissertation, as her focus shifted to making sculpture in 1971. In 1975 she assisted steel sculptor Isaac Witkin in Bennington, Vermont. The following year, she moved to New York City and attended the New York Studio School, where she studied drawing with Nicolas Carone.