Violence on Land and Body

Jordan Weber is a New York-based regenerative land sculptor and activist who works at the intersection of social justice and environmental apartheid through grassroots collaboration in industrially polluted places such as St. Louis, Detroit, Boston, Des Moines, and the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. In 2020, the Walker Art Center commissioned Weber to create an urban phytoremediation farm in North Minneapolis as a counter tactic to industrial violence upon biodiverse lands and racially diverse communities. His work All Our Liberations–which took inspiration from Japanese Zen gardens and created a space for community learning, reflection, and healing–was exhibited through the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in 2021. This year, the triennial civic exhibition Counterpublic engaged Weber to develop Defensive Landscape, a site-specific regenerative earthwork in St. Louis’s Peace Park, which will permanently house a community-engaged rainwater garden and gathering space, offering a critical intervention into the generational health implications of the intertwined crises of captivity and ecological apartheid.

Weber has received notable awards and honors including the 2023 Guggenheim Award and 2022 United States Artist Award, and he was named a 2021 Harvard LOEB Fellow. He was recently appointed as the inaugural Yale University Artist in Residence to build an environmental-humanities focused project at Horse Island for the Black and Indigenous student body. His work was also featured in this year’s Architecture Biennale in Venice.