Heaven and Earth 1: 2009
Heaven and Earth 2: 2010
Heaven and Earth 3: 2011
Heaven and Earth 4: 2012
Heaven and Earth 5: 2013
Heaven and Earth 6: 2014
Heaven and Earth 7: 2015
Heaven and Earth 8: 2016
Heaven and Earth 9: 2017

2016 Heaven & Earth VIII Artists:

• Ingrid Lahti
• Krista Lutz
• Starheadboy
• Rachael Juzeler
• Todd Lawson

Potential installation sites for 2017 and beyond.

Sponsored by:

Carkeek Park Advisory Council
Seattle Parks and Recreation
Associated Recreational Council
Office of Arts & Culture

Contact David Francis to help support this year's show and artists.

Problems or errors on this website?
Webmaster@CarkeekPark.org

Opening Saturday, July 23, 5:00 pm
Carkeek Park
Environmental Learning Center at the Gardens Meadow
Install Week: July 18 - 22

Guest-curated by Morgan McElfresh
Arts Instructor, Viewlands Elementary School
Curatorial Statement by Morgan McElfresh

Art Exhibit Returns to Carkeek Park —Press Release

Welcome to Wild Germination: Heaven & Earth VIII at Carkeek Park.

Since 2009, this exhibition has served as a kind of laboratory for experiments in environmental art displayed during the dry summer months in various sites at Carkeek Park in northwest Seattle, Washington. Through generous support of the Carkeek Park Advisory Council, granting organizations (4Culture, Seattle Arts and Culture), Seattle Parks, Associate Recreation Council, and local arts organizations, the Heaven and Earth series has distributed to date over $75,000 to more than 90 artists, many of which have gone on in their careers to obtain public art commissions on a national basis.

For 2016, the year of the monkey, the curator and organizers identified germination as a theme, a botanical term associated with various forms of seed sprouting and growth, including work that demonstrates a sense of ongoing sustainability or “renewable-ness”, either in terms of its materials, its engagement with community, or conceptual parameters. The added term wild is meant to offer permutations that may be experimental in nature, opposed to domestic germination, or indulge in oblique references to seed load, germination rate, and other factors involved in the science of creating annually occurring wild flower meadows.

The exhibition begins this year on Saturday, July 23 at 5:00 pm and is open daily, dawn till dusk.

While each of the artists create work that is capable of enduring throughout the summer, the unpredictable nature of an unsecured setting visited by an estimated 100,000 people combined with the vicissitudes of the environment (wind, rain, bioturbation, erosion, earthquake, etc.) create a dynamic and open-ended experience that we urge you to explore on repeat visits as the installations inevitably submit to alteration and change. As you hike the roughly three-mile trail connecting the artworks, you'll also bypass features like old-growth stumps with springboard notches, dead trees pecked into shapes by Pileated woodpeckers, and piles of ivy gathered by volunteer forest stewards and piled on log platforms: in the presence of the intentional art, we hope you’ll (re)discover the aesthetic appreciation of nature.

Thanks to all our volunteers and thank you for visiting. May the trail unfold before you; may the muses of Heaven and Earth accompany you on your journey.

Maps and information, as well as an archive of all eight years of the ongoing Heaven and Earth project, are available at this website. See the menu in the left column.

Questions: art@carkeekpark.org