Art Talk: David Brooks and Mary Mattingly

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. Join us as these artists are once again in conversation.

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.