Art Talk: David Brooks and Mary Mattingly

Join us on February 27, 2023 for an engaging art discussion with exhibiting artists David Brooks and Mary Mattingly. This will take place over Zoom, please RSVP below for a link.

In 2014, Bomb Magazine featured an interview of David Brooks by fellow artist Mary Mattingly. The tagline read, “Nature, sustainability, urbanism, and the overlapping interests of two artists who produce very different work.” Today Brooks and Mattingly, both featured in Kimball Art Center’s current exhibition, continue to create compelling work that engages our relationship with the natural world. We are thrilled to have these artists in conversation once again.

About the artists

David Brooks is an artist whose work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. His work investigates how cultural concerns cannot be divorced from the natural world, while also questioning the terms under which nature is perceived and utilized. 

Mary Mattingly is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Among other noteworthy projects, she founded Swale, an edible landscape on a barge in New York City. Docked at public piers but following waterways common laws, Swale circumnavigated New York’s public land laws, allowing anyone to pick free fresh food. It instigated and co-created the “foodway” in the Bronx’s Concrete Plant Park in 2017, the first time the New York City Parks Department is allowing people to publicly forage in over 100 years. It’s currently considered a pilot project.

Image Credits:

Mary Mattingly, Ecotopian Library, Soil Stories, 2020. Soil samples and narratives collected from participants around the country. Photo: James Walton

David Brooks, Death Mask for Landscape, 2022. Aluminum casts from drone scans of Amazonian forest sections just before the forests’ removal, dimensions variable. Photo: James Walton