Acclaimed sculptor and environmental artist Stacy Levy will engage students at Loyola University Maryland to create an ecological art installation that benefits human beings and nature alike.
Described as a “a logarithmic spiral planted with native species for a contemplative walking experience,” Levy says she hopes the work will benefit the North Baltimore campus, its students and faculty, and the environment.
The project will tentatively be unveiled in March and held in conjunction with Loyola’s annual Humanities Symposium. This year’s symposium theme is “Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor,” exploring climate change and the environment.
Jmore recently spoke with Levy, who lives in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania, about her creative process, as well as how we can all look at rain a little differently. A Philadelphia native, Levy, 64, comes from a Jewish and Quaker background.
How did this project come about?
Loyola was looking to do a project for the spring semester for its 2025 Humanities Symposium. They often include artists creating works. This year’s symposium has a distinct environmental bent. I was very thrilled to be part of this.
How do you combine art and nature?
I wanted to do something that dealt with water running across the campus. One of the primary water sources that runs across a Mid-Atlantic campus would be rainwater.
Because of climate change, we’re getting so much more rain. It’s more frequent, and the amount of rainwater that comes out of the sky is much more copious. Dealing with where all that liquid goes is really interesting. Here’s this precious resource falling out of the sky: water. Everyone needs this stuff, and yet we treat it like it’s a toxic chemical.
So I’m creating a passage for people, but also a passage for rainwater to hit this buffer. It’s a planted artwork, and it is creating more roots in the ground, more places for water to be absorbed. It’s a very beautiful pattern to walk into, because you’re more and more surrounded by the vegetation the deeper into the spiral you go, and you get into a kind of semi-enclosed space at the end of the spiral.
I was very interested in the whole idea of doing a walking meditation. And working with a predominantly Catholic college, there is a very long tradition of a walking meditation and walking labyrinths and ways of thinking and bringing yourself back into your spiritual self by having motion through the site.
How are you engaging students?
I’ve met with many classes on my visits. We’re going to actually be making a full-scale map, a kind of landscape drawing to show where some of the water is flowing in different parts of the campus. That’s one of the projects we’ll be doing with various classes and groups of students.
Students will be planting when we get down to the installation part of this, so there’ll be lots of planting and mulching. I have found the projects that are planted only get better and better over time. It’s a wonderful thing to sort of leave as a legacy, because it’s growing, just like the students are growing. And it’s changing, just like change happens everywhere.
What lessons do you hope people take away from it?
It’s the idea that you have to share the landscape with other species besides your own. It’s a good lesson for people to start thinking about.
Art can’t always change the situation, but it could remind you that you might need to re-look at this situation.
What does it mean to be a public artist?
I do a lot of large-scale pieces out in public. There are a lot of conflicting opinions about what should be out there, what’s art, whether it should be on the street, is it dangerous? Can someone trip on it? How are we going to feel about this in 20 years? Are you offending anybody?
So there are lots and lots of voices that you’re hearing when you’re making public art. I realized that nature is my client. The CFO is human, usually. But the CEO, in my book, is nature. If you want to do work about nature, you have to listen to nature first and find out what nature needs.
My second client is the neighborhood or the community. They need to be listened to also.
Your pieces are large-scale. How do you model it beforehand?
It goes from sketch to digital to actual prototyping on the ground, and it’s very important to try something out in the space.
I use a lot of materials from other disciplines, particularly surveying, to mark the soil, grass, concrete or asphalt. So I’ll mark it out and think about it, look at it from different angles. I travel with hose and plastic chain, and I lay that out on the ground and flag it with surveyor flags.
You’re both Jewish and Quaker. How does that impact your work?
When I first heard of tikkun olam, I was pretty thrilled there was this idea of mending the earth. I believe that responsibility to a larger ideal is critical and alive in me.
I went to Quaker school for 13 years. There was a sense that art was a great thing to do as a hobby but not as a full-time job. I had to wrestle with the idea that you can be an artist and also be doing environmental action. I had to play to my strengths of design and place-making.
Award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh will deliver the 2025 Humanities Symposium keynote address about migration in the age of climate change. Free and open to the public, the lecture takes place Thursday, Mar. 13, at 6:30 p.m. at McGuire Hall, 4501 N. Charles Street on Loyola’s campus. For information, visit loyola.edu/symposium.
Anna Lippe is a Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer.
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