The end of this week marks a three-month civic partnership in Wichita based on my Winter Walking sound piece. Thanks to the initiative of curator Ksenya Gurshtein, and a collaboration with Amanda Alessi, director of the Great Plains Nature Center, Winter Walking has been available to the public through QR codes on signage along walking paths through all four of the Wichita “wild habitat” parks: Chisholm Creek Park at GPNC, Oak Park, Swanson Park, and Pawnee Prairie Park.

It still felt mostly like autumn when we installed the signs in November, with no snow yet on the ground. KMUW, our local NPR affiliate station, generously ran a series of two dozen spots promoting the project and kicked us off to a good start when the project officially opened December 1. GPNC hosted all project information on their website and with it linked to my Soundcloud, I could see exactly how many people were beginning to walk and listen along.

The Wichita Art Museum joined in the partnership and hosted an evening featuring the project in December. Our other two stellar partners were CityArts, who hosted my exhibition, Go For a Walk and Listen, of prints related to the Winter Walking sound piece, and Envision Gallery, a space that primarily serves the blind and vision-impaired community. They played Winter Walking indoors and set up a wide variety of engagement activities–large-scale maps of the parks inviting text responses, gel plate printmaking, nature mandala collages, and more.

At CityArts, I added a participatory component, asking people to share their experiential knowledge of climate change–their own noticings as they walk–as well as their future imaginings. By the end of the show, dozens of people had contributed responses to tack up on the wall.

January and February brought heavy snows and some bitter cold days, but people continued to walk and listen. The Kansas Reflector newspaper ran a long essay about the project, written by Ksenya, and word has continued to spread. Already more than 1000 people have listened to the sound piece!

I am thrilled to have offered an engagement with contemporary art outside of a museum setting, reaching a very broad audience, and I am grateful to all of our community partners who came on board the project and who each found ways to promote it to their unique constituencies.