CALL CONNECTS - July 2025
Entre El Aire y El Agua
Amid the Air & Water
Celebration & Water Parade
Photo Credit: Rebecca Lucher
On July 19th, artist Niceli Portugal held a celebratory event for CALL's Cloudburst/WaterWays initiative. We spent the day at the Queens Museum, making art and costumes for a culminating parade, which included an Aztec water ceremony. The parade led us around the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and back into the Queens Museum's New York City Watershed Relief Map, a fitting finale to contemplate the interconnections of our most precious natural resource.
This event was instigated at a workshop held in late June at the Corona Public Library. At the workshop, participants created water-related assemblages used at the Queens Museum. They included notes about our relationship with water and shared the meaning of water in various languages.
This workshop is part of a multidisciplinary art initiative responding to the phenomenon of cloudbursts, a sudden, intense rainfall event impacting Corona. This project seeks to deepen residents' personal and collective connection to water as a source of life, migration, memory, danger, and renewal. It explores water not only as an environmental concern, but as an emotional, ancestral, and cultural presence in their lives.
Niceli Portugal is a multidisciplinary artist and educator from the Peruvian Andes whose work addresses immigration and sustainability.
Honoring the Ancestors: A Tibbetts Brook Tribute
Join Artist Dennis RedMoon Darkeem at the
JBOLC Farmer's Market!
September 27th & October 10th, 10 am - 3 pm
Dennis will guide us through writing and art-making prompts to create pages to design a stamp that will be used for a collective Zine honoring our ancestors, water connections, and the history of Tibbetts Brook. Participants will also use upcycled materials in the art-making process
Page from Mary Miss’s sketchbook – Greenwood Pond: Double Site
Finding Mary Miss Interview Featured in LANDEZINE
Published on July 16, 2025 --- This article features a conversation between Zoë Tank, a designer, writer, and recent architecture graduate from Pratt Institute, whose work engages in philosophy, land-based practices, and alternative spatial thinking, and Mary Miss, CALL Founder and Artistic Director. They discuss movement, scale, reciprocity, and the inception of City as Living Laboratory.
LANDEZINE is an internationally renowned landscape architecture website. Since 2009, they have aimed to recognize the most interesting and progressive practices in the field of architecture. VISIT THEIR WEBSITE.
A CALL FOR THE FUTURE:
Several weeks ago now CALL was hit with the abrupt termination of our grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This has meant an immediate loss of nearly $250,000. We appealed and won back some of these funds, but are left with a daunting gap.
CALL's loss of funding weakens and may break the chain of connection, knowledge, and creative ingenuity that makes our work meaningful and impactful. With this year's funding terminated, our 2026 funding will also be in jeopardy. But we do not believe the answer is to turn away. With your help, we can make a new pathway and territory for CALL, and for the communities we work with. We must mobilize our collaborators and supporters to proceed with this vital work.
An important first step has been made: we are pleased to announce that Agnes Gund has made a $50,000 Leadership Gift for this year and another for the following year. Our urgent goal is to raise $50,000 to match this year's donation by the end of August. There are still a few days left to give!
You can help us bridge this gap and ensure our work continues to thrive and fulfill our commitments to the communities where we are currently focused --- Milwaukee; the Bronx; and Corona, Queens. We have pioneering work planned to start this summer in Corona with two gifted artists: Niceli Portugal and Emilio Martinez Poppe. The artists will engage the community around growing risks of cloudbursts (increasingly hazardous rainfalls).
We remain determined in the face of these capricious cancellations because we know there is so much more to be done, especially in the face of a warming planet.
We hope you will be part of the future with us.
Your efforts help ensure that CALL is able to continue to use the power of art and science to promote understanding of critical environmental challenges in local communities and spur action for sustainable solutions!
Grab a copy of the Pedestrian Observations map!
The Pedestrian Observations: Mapping Manhattan Chinatown's Public Realm pocket-sized resource map are still available!
In this pamphlet, you'll find an illustrated map by artists and designers Myles Zhang and Stephan Fan, along with extensive information and questions about the uses of public and private space.
We're more than happy to send a copy your way, just fill out the form through the button below.