Stuckeman series continues with landscape architecture lecture and exhibition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School’s spring Lecture and Exhibit Series continues on March 27 with a visit from Alison Hirsch, associate professor at the University of Southern California (USC), landscape theorist, historian and designer.

Hirsh will present a Department of Landscape Architecture Bracken Lecture, titled “Landscape and the Working Country,” at 4:30 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and via Zoom, before opening an exhibition of her work in the Stuckeman Family Building’s Rouse Gallery titled “The Other California: land, loss, labor, liberated futures along phantom shores.”

Hirsch’s lecture will focus on the relations of the body and land or place. The talk will start with an overview of some 1960s activist design practices that have transformed conventional practice before evolving into a focused look at the manifold nature of physical work, both how the physical process of building together has been a vehicle for liberatory agendas and how labor on land has been exploited as a form of violence targeted at specific — often racialized — bodies.

Hirsch will discuss how her activist design and pedagogical practice has used lessons learned from earlier activist practitioners to find avenues for justice, repair and liberation. As the director of the Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program at USC, Hirsch established the Landscape Justice Initiative as a platform to address questions of environmental, spatial and climate justice at local and systemic scales.

Her exhibition, which will run through April 25 in the Rouse Gallery, tells the story of the Tulare Lake Basin, a hydrological system that defines a cultural history that is both unique and ubiquitous. The exhibit discusses a landscape that was once composed of land, water, multispecies life and humans who managed the land for survival and ceremony. The landscape’s rapid transformation by settler colonialism into a vehicle of capitalist enterprise eradicated ecological lifeways, remanufactured hydrology, toxified land, water and the laboring bodies forced to participate in the new order.

Before joining the faculty at USC, Hirsch taught landscape architecture theory and design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, University of Virginia and the University of Toronto. She was a recipient of the 2017-18 Prince Charitable Trusts/Rolland Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Hirsch’s research areas include cultural landscapes, working landscapes, spatial politics of landscape architecture, contested landscapes, activist design methods and landscape's intersections with performance and choreography.

Hirsch’s exhibition and book of the same name were awarded a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research and Development Grant in 2019 and the Landscape Architecture Foundation Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership for 2020-21.

All events in the Lecture and Exhibit Series are free and open to the public.