Welcome to the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures (FRIEC), a place to imagine and build cities that nurture humanity’s relationships with urban nature, through art and creative, cross-culture, cross-discipline collaboration. All of our projects try to fold art, science, and practice into unified collaborations.
See also our other projects, including: Art-Science-Practice Residencies (a project with the US Forest Service), Fiction, Poetry, and Graffiti. We also launched in June 2023 a comics series on Nature-Based Solutions.
Interested in joining the FRIEC urban artist collective?
Write us here: [email protected]
What is FRIEC?
We are a place for radical imagination
about what cities could be,
where artists and practitioners of all backgrounds
can come together to:
collaborate with each other,
cities, and nature
challenge the framework
of established knowledge
allow new ideas for sustaining cities
across disciplines, species, and ways of knowing
imagine collaborative movements for livable,
resilient, healthy, poetic cities and regions
in partnership with nature
Exhibitions
Enjoy our latest exhibitions, featuring virtual and physical artistic collaborations across all borders.
Reverberations
Reverberations An exhibition exploring the elements through art, science, and sound, Reverberations features more than 30 contributors from various disciplines in a multimedia experience. Produced by the USDA Forest Service and The Nature of Cities. This is an immersive sound-based…
Carmen Bouyer — Les savoirs vivent dans la terre // Knowledge is in the land
Nous vous invitons à embarquer pour un voyage artistique qui connecte l’urbain et le rural dans un désir de créer des formes artistiques qui nous relient à la nature locale // Join us on this artistic journey between urban and…
Shade in the City
Rising Heat Inequity in a Sunburnt Era
Shade in the City Rising Heat Inequity in a Sunburnt Era In a warming world, shade equity is an issue that disproportionately affects low-income and working-class communities, people of color, and communities in developing nations who are more likely to…
Nikki Lindt—The Underground Sound Project
The Underground Sound Project is a collection of underground sound recordings made by artist Nikki Lindt over the course of the past year in the five boroughs of NYC and in rural Cherry Valley, NY. The recordings are made by…
Nikki Lindt—If The Trees Speak to Us, How Will We Reply?
Nikki Lindt explores sounds in unexpected places: rumbling in the soil of subways passing; snowflakes crashing to earth; sap flowing. These sounds lead us to perceive and appreciate trees and their environments in new ways, and experience sounds from parts…
The State We’re in Water: Constructing a Sense of Place in the Hydrosphere
An exhibition by Robin Lasser and Marguerite Perret Originally produced by Oklahoma State Museum of Art,adapted and digitally-curated for The Nature of Cities by the Forum for Radical Imagination on Environmental Cultures (FRIEC). Introduction “…from so simple a beginning…
Hidden Flows — photographers uncover the invisible flows in African cities
Introduction Welcome to our exhibition! It’s been a year in the making, and will keep evolving. We’d love to hear your thoughts: [email protected]. The hidden flows exhibition emerged out of a need to enrich current conversations about resources, infrastructure and…
NYC Urban Field Station—Who Takes Care of New York?
Welcome! This interactive exhibition–originally mounted at the Queens Museum in 2019–highlights the stories, geographies, and impacts of diverse civic stewards across New York through art, maps, and storytelling. This is the Gallery Space’s “front door” and we are asking for…
Emilio Fantin—Dreams of Trees
Welcome to an exhibition and workshop that asks: how do we re-member what once rooted us in our own being and in the mutual being of the world around us? Fantin helps highlight a universal consciousness, and a relationship that…
Katrine Claassens—Love Letters to the Muted World
Welcome to an exhibition of paintings, musings, and written interventions that has us consider climate change, urban birds, and the ‘ecologically messy world’ that we inhabit. All that, and a love letter. This is the Gallery Space’s “front door” and…
Typhoon Queens—The Multicultural Life of Clouds & Rain
Welcome to our first TNOC virtual exhibition, featuring a collective of artists from Japan, Korea, and the United States. They bring us into the hydrological cycle through a theatrical exhibition, while storming, raining, and drinking our way through the social…
Roundtables
A series involving artists and creative practitioners from around the world, exploring relationships with the elements of nature in cities.
Recent Essays
Essays from individuals of many disciplines, revealing the roots of ecological wellness in cities and cultures.
Lost and Found: A Companion Essay to the Art Works of Katrine Claassens
Before / Winter We are celebrating our 3-year friendship. Artist-climate activist and ecologist-designer. We met in Portland (a tip of two floral hats, and a gracious thank you to David and The Nature of Cities), a long way from Toronto…
What the Garden Belongs To: Sensorial Listening in Urban Space
On Emily Street between 7th and 8th in Philadelphia lies the Growing Home community gardens—two discrete plots of land separated by an assortment of old and new construction rowhomes that are the architectural hallmark of the neighborhood. Chainlink fences separate…
Highlights from The Nature of Cities in 2019
Today’s post celebrates some of the highlights from TNOC writing in 2019. These contributions—originating around the world—were one or more of widely read, offering novel points of view, and/or somehow disruptive in a useful way. All 1000+ TNOC essays and roundtables are…
City as Nature Festival, Osaka, Japan
Co-sponsored by The Nature of Cities and FRIEC, the inaugural City as Nature Festival took place from 11-22 October 2019 in Osaka, Japan. Featuring interactive, place-based art, workshops, concerts, walks, talks, and storytelling events, the festival aimed at cultivating our…
Can Artistic Knowledge Bring Us Closer to Encountering the Co-influence of all Living Organisms?
“the knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, and can thus only develop in combination with others.” — Donna Haraway in Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, p586 I grew up…
A City Designed by Trees
Awake a few hours earlier than necessary, we are on bicycles heading through urban infill, in a part of town that used to be Osaka Bay. Moving inland, we pass through a few old shopping arcades, and several dozen close-knit…
Reviews & Reactions
Surveying diverse ecological arts practices in cities and cultures around the world.
My Past, Present, and Future: A Review of Ecological Mediations
The sciences meet the arts in the poetic renderings of Dr. Karan Aggarwala’s 2010 collection, Ecological Mediations(Xlibris). An optometrist by training, Dr. Aggarwala’s poetic view of the world reflects years of science met with a holistic ecological view of the…
Nature in Korea’s Capital: The Magic Stops at the Car Bridge
A review of Min Joung-Ki, an exhibition of large-scale urban nature paintings at Kukje Gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Founded in 1982, Kukje Gallery is one of Korea’s most prolific exhibitors of international contemporary artists. Indeed, the institution is more…
Cloud Cities, Melting Cities: A Review of Yumiko Ono’s “Epitomes” at Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei
A review of “Epitomes,” an exhibition by Yumiko Ono, on view at Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei through 2 February 2020. Situated a few blocks from Taipei’s central train station in an old school building, MOCA Taipei is…
French Landscape Painters and the Nature of Paris
A review of Masterpieces of French Landscape Paintings from the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts Moscow, an exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Art in Osaka, Japan. If we learn anything from an exhibition such as “Masterpieces of French…
When a Korean Hillside Town Disappears, Who will Notice?
A review of “A Local Neighborhood Traveler,” an exhibition of painting and drawing by Korean artist Se Hee Kim at the Boroomsan Museum of Art in Gimpo, South Korea. On the outskirts of Seoul, tucked away into a traditional hillside…
Half-Earth Cities
In Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life, published in 2016, E. O. Wilson made a reasoned and impassioned call for making our human future fit within the boundaries of just half a planet, with the other half given over to…
Patrick Geddes’ 19th Century “Pocket Park” Inspires Art Installation
A review of “Palm House”, a commissioned project on view at the Edinburgh Art Festival until 27 August 2017. The year is 1880; the place is Edinburgh, Scotland. Edinburgh’s Old Town is internationally known for its squalid conditions; its tenement…
Drought and Flood: A Silicon Valley Museum Explores Water, Society, and City
A review of “Liquid City,” The Darkened Mirror,” and “Fragile Waters,” a trio of water-related exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art, currently on view together through August 6, 2017. As the representative contemporary art institution of Silicon Valley,…
LEAF Episodes
Every third Wednesday, three artists from the FRIEC collective share their work in a themed discussion.
More Arts Essays
More arts related essays and writings, revealing the roots of ecological wellness in cities and cultures.
To Live in Companionship with Trees, Plants, Rivers, and Mountains
We are gardening. Feeding our trees. We decide to cut the deadwood off the Fejoa tree. Afterwards it’s considerably squat and oddly shaped, but we agree it looks better. Or it feels better. Or it seems to us that it,…
The Shape of Water, the Sight of Air, and Our Emergence from Covid
“Absences should not cause us to look elsewhere, but to look closer.” i I have been working on a mind map of emptiness, inspired by an old Wiccan meditation practice of gazing into a bowl of water and trying to see…
We Had Forgotten That We Are Ecological Beings
It’s afternoon in the middle of the work-week, and our local park is filled with people as if it were a holiday. There are little kids wildly chasing pigeons, and slightly bigger kids carefully stalking beady-eyed herons. There are teenagers…
Who Takes Care of New York?
Civic leaders and community members regularly put time and energy into caring and advocating for the environment. We call these acts of care stewardship. Beyond improving green and blue spaces, stewardship can also lead to other types of civic action.…
Plastic Bag as Tumbleweed: Poetic Observations of the Everyday Around Us
A review of Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary, by Harryette Mullen. Greywolf Press 2013. Buy the book. For renowned poet and professor, Harryette Mullen, awareness is walking. Inspired by the Japanese syllabic verse form of the tanka, Mullen set…
Ramsar COP 13: What can Artists Contribute to Urban Wetland Restoration?
The Ramsar Convention (also known as Convention on Wetlands) is the first of the major intergovernmental convention on biodiversity conservation and wise use. It was signed in 1971, in the City of Ramsar in Iran. This October, the 13th Ramsar…
SALT: Restoration + Recreation = Water in California
It is late June and we are up to our knees floating a small tent sculpture in a containment pond filled with a thick green milkshake-like goo. A combination of duck week and blue-green algae (cyanobacteria), this overgrowth or bloom…
Socioecological Science is Failing Cities. The Humanities Can Help
“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.” — Max Planck As a graduate student,…
Opportunities
Nothing currently