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Relevance of Place: Walter Hood

Shannon Jackson interviews artist, designer, and MacArthur fellow, Walter Hood, on how his unique process reimagines the ethical and artistic possibilities of a landscape. In this episode, Hood recalls some of his earlier projects, reflecting upon how differing practices in the arts, in design, and in regional planning can be combined to redefine each other. Watch to hear him speculate further about community-engaged responses to landscape design and to hear his thoughts about the resonant forms of Frances Kéré’s Xylem.

Filmed in May 2022.

Walter Hood

Artist and landscape architect Walter Hood smiles with his head tilted.

Walter Hood is the creative director and founder of Hood Design Studio in Oakland, CA. He is also a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and lectures on professional and theoretical projects nationally and internationally. He is a recipient of the 2017 Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, 2019 Knight Public Spaces Fellowship, 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, 2019 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, and the 2021 recipient of the Architectural League’s President’s Medal award.

Shannon Jackson

Shannon Jackson holds the Hadidi Professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where she currently serves as Chair of the History of Art Department. Jackson is a scholar and educator of cross-media art practice and of socially-engaged art. A Guggenheim fellow and award-winning author, she has published several books and online platforms, including Back Stages (2022), Public Servants (2016), The Builders Association (2015), Social Works (2011) as well as In Terms of Performance and Media Art 21. Jackson serves on the boards of several arts organizations, including Oakland Museum of the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, and the Kramlich Art Foundation. As a guest program advisor to Tippet Rise, Jackson helped to create the Relevance of Place series of site-specific dialogues.

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