Haemee is inviting the Newark community to help shape The City in Notes, a more-than-100-foot mural inspired by the music and legacy of Newark jazz icons . At the upcoming workshop, participants will listen to Woody Shaw’s The Moontrane and translate their emotional responses into color, contributing directly to a mural that will become part of NJPAC’s new Cooperman Family Arts Education and Community Center in 2027.
The event “Ecologies in Motion: Nature, Movement and the More-Than-Human City ” explores how we can activate, care for, and thrive alongside living urban landscapes.
RULA faculty Anette Freytag presents her work with AIR Collaborative and her perspective on plants in the city amongst Detroit community leaders, artists, and urban designers
Program
Urban nature is often treated as somewhere else: a park, forest, or preserve that people must leave their neighborhoods to reach. Even when cities add green space, the emphasis is often on what the landscape looks like rather than the relationships, experiences, and forms of life it makes possible. What changes when forests, meadows, native plants, and habitat are woven into everyday urban life? Once these living environments exist, how do we move with them, learn from them, renew within them, create inside them, care for them, and allow other forms of life to flourish?
Ecologies in Motion brings together artists, foresters, designers, and community members to rethink urban nature, and ask how cities can be designed for a more-than-human community of people, pollinators, birds, plants, soil, and more.
The program begins with a site-responsive dance performance by Wayne State University students directed by Biba Bell, with live music by Matthew Daher, within the pocket forest and living landscape of Kintsugi Village. Following the performance, five speakers will explore the relationship between the design of living environments and the ways we experience them. Together, they will explore what becomes possible when nature is woven into everyday city life — when people are invited not simply to observe green spaces, but to move through them, interact with them, and help care for them. Attendees will leave with a new understanding of their surroundings and how they can participate in shaping them.
Ecologies in Motion is part of Living Loop, a Brightside Collective initiative during Detroit Month of Design.
When
Monday, September 14, 2026
4:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Where
Kintsugi Village Detroit, USA
2020 14th St
Detroit, MI 48216
Date of lecture: November 11, 2026
This year I completed three public art installations in Maplewood, New Brunswick, and Hackensack, each with its own scope, challenges, and rewards. When your artwork becomes work, how do you manage it as an artist? Let’s take a post-mortem look at the process from staying organized and working with arts organizations to engaging the community, and navigating the triumphs and pitfalls along the way.
Kate Eggleston is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Her studio practice serves as a dialogue between her personal experiences and a broader exploration of themes such as motherhood, Jewish culture, and folk tales, while working across paper, sculpture, and fiber. She has attended artist residencies including Liquitex, the Elf School of the Arts, and Guttenberg Arts. She has exhibited primarily in the tri-state area including at the Montclair Art Museum, Artworks Trenton, TerraCycle, SMUSH Gallery, and the New Jersey State Museum. She earned a BA in Visual Art, with a double major in Education, from Ramapo College in 2005. Beyond her studio practice, she has over 20 years of experience teaching artists of all ages and skill levels across a variety of mediums. She currently works as a Production Manager at StoneDog Studios, a woman-owned set and prop studio. She lives in central New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and dogs.
Date of lecture: November 4, 2026
Students are often positioned as recipients of knowledge, yet they actively produce, interpret, and transmit it through their research and design work. This became unmistakable as I moved through my own research. What began as a simple question about the decline of vernacular homes in Ghana quickly deepened into an inquiry about how indigenous knowledge systems are recognized, valued, and transmitted within design.
The long-standing marginalization of indigenous knowledge has reshaped communities’ ways of life, not only through Eurocentric ideologies, but also through the ways students and practitioners engage with these knowledge systems. This devaluation of the vernacular can begin in the classroom, where ways of building that deviate from perceived norms are often dismissed. We learn from professors, conduct research, interpret information, and produce work that enters a broader circulation of ideas, carrying consequences beyond the classroom. My thesis became a catalyst for examining this process, overturning many of my assumptions and revealing how knowledge is practiced, contested, and remembered.
Conversations with local builders revealed that adobe construction was far more labor-intensive than I assumed, while cement was often preferred for its modern appearance. These perspectives complicated my initial understanding of material decline and the disappearance of vernacular forms. They shifted the focus of my thesis from an investigation of materials toward a deeper questioning of knowledge itself: Who defines and values knowledge, and what happens when design frameworks determine what counts as legitimate?
These questions eventually intersected with Anita Bakshi’s work on landscape architecture pedagogy, not because our subjects aligned, but because both inquiries examined how knowledge is produced, transmitted, recognized, and taught. This epistemological connection created an unexpected opportunity for collaboration, pushing me to rethink my thesis and identify which perspectives were meaningful to contribute. The collaboration ultimately brought together two viewpoints: my perspective as a student and researcher and Anita’s as an educator and researcher, forming a dialogue between them.
I am not offering my experience as a formula for publication. Rather, I am urging fellow students to take their questions seriously, follow where they lead, pay attention to how those questions emerge through the work, and remain open to reinterpretation and collaboration. Essentially, consider what your research may become once the original project is finished.
Martha Afflu is a recent graduate of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers University, where she completed her BSLA and later her Master of Landscape Architecture. Her research focuses on colonial legacies, vernacular architecture, and Indigenous building knowledge systems, particularly within the Ashanti region of Ghana. Grounded in both disciplinary inquiry and her identity as a Ghanaian American with ethnic roots in the region, her graduate thesis examines how Western design frameworks often privilege modern materials, efficiency, and aesthetics while overlooking cultural resilience, ecological adaptation, and heritage continuity. Her work highlights the continuity of vernacular systems and practices not only as material traditions but also as ways of relating to land, labor, and cultural memory.
Date of lecture: October 21, 2026
“While the environmental and ecological benefits of creating a forest are obvious, the social benefits are underexplored. The RU Tree Planting Festival explored how to foster a culture of stewardship in a fun and interactive way, utilizing community participation to leverage social cohesion, environmental education, and connection to nature. While planting trees and creating a forest is very beneficial, it is important not to lose sight of celebrating the connection between those trees and the people who stand to benefit from them. This lecture will discuss the process and execution of creating the RU Tree Planting Festival, which brought 500 + people to campus to plant 3,000 trees.”
Josh Kover is a Landscape Architecture graduate student studying in the Urban Forestry Lab at Rutgers University. His master’s thesis is on the design and social influences of urban forest climate resiliency. Josh is an ISA-certified Arborist and was the owner of New Gen Garden: a sustainable landscaping and landscape design company. At Rutgers, he works with the University Landscape Architect to create a resilient, beautiful, and educational urban forest on campus. His work at Rutgers, IP & O and within the Urban Forestry Program allowed him to create and organize the RU Tree Planting Festival in April of 2026, where 550 people helped plant almost 3000 trees on the Rutgers campus.
Date of lecture: October 14, 2026
The Embankment is the massive stone section of the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Harsimus Branch running parallel to 6th Street in Jersey City. The Embankment comprises six segments extending from Brunswick Street to Marin Boulevard on the east. This historic fabric, a remnant of the Industrial Revolution, is about to be adaptively repurposed as a linear park. Since its abandonment in 1999 there has been little or no access and a Novel Urban Forest has developed. Adapted to the dry rocky soils the existing vegetative assemblage is providing the foundation for the planning initiative. Rather than create a new planting plan, we chose to prioritize the mix of native and non-native species that have proven viable within the urban site.
A “light touch” is guiding the design of the Harsimus Branch from beginning to end. Design decisions, informed by Secretary of the Interior Standards, will preserve the historic integrity of the Embankment while concepts of 4th Nature target the improvement of ecosystem services. The ecosystem services have been characterized by a team from Rutgers University, School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. The Embankment Preservation Coalition formed in 1998 as a working group that evolved from meetings of more than a hundred neighbors who were concerned about a proposal to demolish the Harsimus Branch Embankment and develop the site. After many legal battles the property has been transferred to the City of Jersey City and the Coalition’s design team has developed Conceptual Open Space Plans.
Sean A. Gallagher is a Principal and the Director of Sustainable Design at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, as well as adjunct faculty at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His past work includes the United States Olympic and Paralympic Museum, the U.S. Massena Land Port of Entry, and Microsoft’s “The Square” project. Most recently, Sean led the biofiltration system design for CanalCafé, which received the prestigious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation at the 2025 Venice Biennale. He also served as Design Director for the David Rubenstein Forum in Chicago, which was named the 2022 Best Tall Tower Worldwide by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH).
Frank Gallagher, Ph.D. For over forty years Frank has explored the connection between people and landscape through both land management and academic research. Serving as Chief of Interpretive Services, Administrator and Assistant Director of the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry, offered practical experience in an array of land management issues. After teaching courses in biology, evolution and environmental science for ten years at Upsala College, Frank joined the faculty at Rutgers The State University part time in 1994 and full time in 2012. With over 60 publications in both scientific journals and venues of general interests, Frank strongly believes in the value of written communication and has published topics ranging from phytostabilization of contaminated soils to the ethics of ecosystem function monetization.
Date of lecture: October 7, 2026
This talk traces recent hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts in the Caribbean to demonstrate how disaster recovery has become a highly contested and political terrain. I reflect on my ongoing work in the eastern Caribbean, and a growing regional body of critical disaster scholarship, to demonstrate how disaster recovery efforts intersect with issues around race, coloniality and land-based struggles. I situate regional discourses on climate change and climate justice within a broader politico-cultural context that foregrounds the current climate crisis as an extension of a colonial past that continues to shape the region’s subordinate position in an uneven world system. A situation that illustrates how the Caribbean’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity. I close by offering insights into island ‘survivalism’ within a context of growing global climate uncertainty and ongoing post/colonial struggles. In resituating mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene from the purview of the Caribbean, I hope to raise critical questions regarding the political, historical, and onto-epistemic assumptions/logics that undergird contemporary debates around the global climate crisis and its attendant solutions. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition, to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.
Kevon Rhiney is an Associate Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow for the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies. Current research explores the intersection of climate change, development, and justice, focusing on how historically marginalized communities in the Caribbean and Central America navigate climate-linked socio-ecological shocks. Dr. Rhiney received his doctorate in geography at the University of the West Indies and pursued his postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford under a British Commonwealth Fellowship. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and currently serves as a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report.
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This lecture is in-person only.
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Through a Memorandum of Understanding with the New Jersey School of Conservation (SOC), located within Stokes State Forest, the Rutgers University School of Environmental and Biological Sciences has agreed to cooperate on both scientific research and environmental education initiatives. SOC received a grant from the New Jersey Department of Education, the Climate Change Learning Collaborative and is serving as a hub for k-12 teacher training. This past August four students from the Department of Landscape Architecture helped facilitate a two-day workshop at SOC. Pictured above are Chris Antar, Anna Grookett, Aiko Kordan and Irem Kara. The students presented their projects from their Environmental Planning Studio, as examples of how to think through the process of resilient planning and design. They then led planning charets for climate related issues at the SOC in the afternoon.
Date of lecture: September 9, 2026
The Rutgers Public Design Internship Program placed eleven students at workplaces around the country to contribute to public design projects and community engagement. The purpose of the internship is not simply to give students opportunities to practice design; the intention is to expand what they understand ‘design’ to mean through real public work and community engagement.
Placements ranged from American Samoa to Puerto Rico, Atlanta, Newark, New Brunswick, NYC, and Philadelphia. Students worked in a wide range of professional settings, including design offices, such as Marvel Designs and NYC Parks, Trust for Public Land offices, a large public park, and a municipal parks and recreation department. We will also hear about an LAF Case Study for a Queens nature reserve.
Across these varied settings, students encountered aspects of landscape architecture that extended well beyond producing drawings. Through working with communities, clients, public agencies, and design professionals, they developed a broader understanding of what design skills entail—and how design can be used to listen, engage, collaborate, and respond to complex public needs. More than just something that you make, design is something you do with people, places, and communities.
Students reflect on how their understanding of design and their own emerging professional identities changed through this work. The internships offered not simply an opportunity to practice drawing and design, but transformative learning experiences in which students discovered new ways of seeing, thinking, collaborating, and making a difference through landscape architecture.
As part of coLAB Arts’ Art City 2026, Haemee Han will present The Plush Line, a new public art installation that reimagines the familiar fence as a place of gathering, play, and exchange. Constructed as a series of oversized soft fence segments, the installation invites visitors to sit, lean, hug, and interact with an object that is traditionally associated with separation. Supported by funding through the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA) A.R.T. – Phase II Grant Program, the project also invites New Brunswick residents to contribute short audio recordings that will become embedded within the installation, creating a collective portrait of the city through its voices, stories, and everyday memories.
Han will develop the project throughout the summer and early fall, with an Artist Talk + Project Preview on August 7 at 4:00 PM at coLAB Arts Studio (6 Kirkpatrick Street, New Brunswick). The installation will be completed in late September ahead of the Art City Festival on October 18. Community participation is now open, and residents are invited to share a short recording in any language as part of the project.
The Plush Line is an upcoming public art installation by artist Haemee Han presented as part of
coLAB Arts’ Art City Festival on October 18.
A giant plush fence will be filled with the voices of the New Brunswick community, and we’d love yours to be part of it.