Project Page

DWH Project Funding

$242,000

Known Leveraged Funding

$0

Project Description

The Walter Anderson Museum of Art (the Museum) proposes Wide Horizons, an interdisciplinary place-based educational initiative for regional middle school students (Grades 6-8) blending science, history, geography, and self-expression to target contemporary and future environmental challenges in the Gulf of Mexico. In partnership with the Pascagoula River Audubon Center (PRAC) and The University of Southern Mississippi’s Marine Education Center (MEC), the Museum will lead two years of activities for participating students from across the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Activities include: daylong immersive field days to partnering sites and surrounding environments, accompanied by student journaling, art making, data-gathering, and peer-to-peer dialogue and problem-solving. Following these immersive field days, the Museum will facilitate community-engaged climate action projects co-created between participating students and visiting artists that communicate data-driven and creative solutions to environmental issues of regional and local importance. Wide Horizons is inspired by the artworks, writings, and philosophies of Walter Inglis Anderson (1903-1965), the Gulf’s cultural patron saint and a believer in the paradigm-shifting potentials of experiential education and exploration. Anderson’s legacy provides a blueprint for connecting ecological and societal cause-and-effect with the agency of the individual to direct civic and environmental action. His expansive understanding of the Gulf of Mexico as a locus for indigenous ways of knowing and identity, colonial and technological contestation, citizen-science, and narrative change empower communities to address complex social and environmental factors through observation and meaning-making, echoing John Dewey’s assertion that, “To be intelligent we must ‘stop, look, and listen’” when designing for community impact.