Alum creates art to drive environmental impact
Betsy Damon ’63, whose large-scale park sculptures have globally inspired exploration and discussion of the mounting global water crisis, was awarded a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship. She will use the grant to design a functional water-cleaning sculpture.
“The intention is to find natural ways to prevent algae blooms, reduce pollutants,
and keep the water quality sufficiently healthy,” Damon says.
Damon is an internationally acclaimed artist who has been called a practical visionary and a humanist. Her work has been widely reviewed, exhibited, and taught. She is known for her performance works, like “7000 Year Old Woman” (1976), and her large-scale ecological designs, like “The Living Water Garden” (1998) in Chengdu, China. She has directed many collaborative public performance events, most notably in Chengdu and Lhasa. An art history major at Skidmore, Damon earned her MFA at Columbia University.
Currently, she is involved with various international exhibitions, museums, and activists in Ireland, Poland, Turkey, and China, and is exhibiting at Stony Brook University and the Van Abbemuseum in the Netherlands. Damon’s awards include the Bush Foundation, Heinz Foundation, NEA, UN Habitat, Waterfront Center Top Honor, five awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, and others.
For the past four decades, Damon’s work has focused on a central subject — water — which she reveals as the connective, creative, and collaborative medium behind all life. She promotes public consciousness of living water and invites us to place water itself as the foundation of all planning and design. Her work, which traverses the complexities of water from the molecular scale to the levels of ecosystems and societies, has been archived by Asia Art Archive.
