Learning from the Hudson River Watershed with Billy Yalowitz & Lize Mogel

As part of the ongoing Eco-Social Salon, Site-Seeing, and Screening Series (https://ecosocialseries.wordpress.com/) this program will bring together two artists who have been making work in and around the Hudson River Watershed, Billy Yalowitz (Philadelphia) & Lize Mogel (New York City), to share their work as we continue to think about making art on a bioregional scale here in Philadelphia.

About the Venue:

The WaterShed is a climate hub empowering flood resilience in Germantown through community-driven art, resources, education, and science. Opened in November 2024 in partnership with the Philadelphia Water Department, Mural Arts Philadelphia and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, the Water Shed is a community-based hub offering flooding resources and free educational programs focused on empowering flood and community resilience.

Presenter Bios:

Billy Yalowitz is a writer, director and community arts practitioner whose writings and interdisciplinary performance works draw from public history and chronicle grassroots Movements. Yalowitz’s interdisciplinary performance works have been presented off-Broadway and internationally. He has directed critically acclaimed and nationally profiled community-based performance-installations in Philadelphia neighborhoods since 1991. Yalowitz has beetn named “Best Unclassifiable Theater Artist” by Philadelphia’s City Paper, Best Choreographer by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and was nominated for a Barrymore Award for his work at People’s Light & Theater Company. He was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to create a performance-festival, The Fathering Circle.

His work has been featured in the New York Times, Jerusalem Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, on National Public Radio, and profiled in Letting Go – Arts & Public History (Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011), Brother Keepers: New Perspectives On Jewish Masculinity (Men’s Studies Press, 2010), White Men Challenging Racism (Duke Univ. Press, 2003) , and Body and Bible (Trinity, 1992). He has been awarded grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, James L. Knight Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among others. Yalowitz is Professor Emeritus of Community Arts Practices at Tyler School of Art & Architecture, Temple University.

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist and counter-cartographer. She creates maps and mappings (among other forms) that bring the politics of place to the surface. Her work reflects the complicated, human (and sometimes non-human) experience within a place; and also engages people in the myriad potentials of that place. She’s created projects about public parks in Los Angeles, territorial disputes in the Arctic, and wastewater economies in New York City. She is co-editor of the book/map collection “An Atlas of Radical Cartography,” a project that significantly influenced the conversation and production around mapping and activism. From 2016-2024, her focus was Walking the Watershed, a long-term engagement with the landscape, history, and politics of New York City’s water supply, and the relationship between the City and the mostly rural communities that supply its water. Her current project, “Wallkill Futures”, is a two-year engagement with the Wallkill River and riverine communities in upstate New York.

Exhibitions include the Sharjah, Gwangju and Pittsburgh Biennials, “Greater New York” (PS1), and “Diagrams of Power” (OCAD, Toronto). She’s received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Graham Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, and been artist-in-residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and at Fresh Kills landfill. More about her work is at publicgreen.com

Pictured: Lize Mogel “Performing Infrastructure”

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