The Green Studio is a project of SporaStudios LLC founded by artists Mark Cooley and Elizabeth Hall. Since 2010, George Mason University has hosted an incarnation of the Green Studio on its Fairfax campus where it has functioned as a permaculture garden and outdoor studio & lab space dedicated to hosting ecological art and design projects by students from across the arts and sciences.
The concept of an externalized art studio challenges conventional approaches to landscapes as master-planned perpetually finished products. The Green Studio also challenges the notion of the art studio as a place where artists retreat from the world, while repositioning the artist within the contingencies of a living space with its art materials embedded in a functional ecosystem. The goal of work in the Green Studio is not to create in spite of the world, but rather in relation to it. In this sense, traditional art and design concerns of creating aesthetic relationships (whether on the canvas or in the landscape) are reshaped to include ecological and social relationships and thereby expanding the possibilities for artist engagement in taking on some of the most pressing issues of our time.
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