Eco-Social Realism Exhibition Opens This Fall Across Five Philadelphia-Area Venues, Bringing Art About the Environment Into Active Conversation
Exhibition includes new and recent work from Carolina Caycedo, Keg de Souza, Lize Mogel, Karyn Olivier, José Ortiz-Pagán, Li Sumpter, and Rosten Woo, among others
PHILADELPHIA, PA (August 3, 2026) — This fall, Eco-Social Realism will open across five Philadelphia-area venues and in various exhibition formats, underscoring a thesis on art about the environment: that its multi-modal implications require a multi-modal exhibition format. Art about the environment is often research-intensive, made by artists who spend years studying a watershed, a food system, or an extreme weather event. Curated by Daniel Tucker and including new and recent work from Carolina Caycedo, Keg de Souza, Lize Mogel, Karyn Olivier, José Ortiz-Pagán, Li Sumpter, and Rosten Woo, the exhibition emerged from an ongoing series of talks, events, and public engagements in Philadelphia, built to bring people into conversation with art about the environment.
"Environmental art is meant to acknowledge our shared experience and expand our vision of our community and our world," said Daniel Tucker, curator of Eco-Social Realism. "It's research-intensive, and it really comes to life in community as people grapple with big questions together. That's why we built the Eco-Social Series in the first place — as a series of talks, events, and engagements meant to put people in conversation with each other around this work, long before we thought about an exhibition. Eco-Social Realism is that series, realized."
The Eco-Social Series is a public program founded in 2023 by curator Daniel Tucker and co-sponsored by RAIR (Philadelphia's Recycled Artist in Residency program led by artist and Creative Director Billy Dufala), Green Sun, and Making Worlds Books. Built on the premise that art responding to ecological crisis loses its force in a conventional exhibition setting, for the last 3 years the series has brought artists, designers, and researchers working on bioregional and infrastructural questions — food systems, land use, extreme weather — into a standing community of talks and engagements rather than a single showcase, putting research-intensive projects into public conversation long before they were ever exhibited.
The Eco-Social Series had early roots in Philadelphia’s Fishtown and Kensington neighborhoods — a stretch that has long drawn artists and makers to its industrial buildings and low-slung row houses, and that is now in the middle of rapid change, with new development arriving alongside the working studios, community gardens, and mural-covered walls that have defined the neighborhood for decades. Activations taking place here as part of the exhibition include:
- TILT Institute will unveil four newly commissioned artworks produced in partnership with Mural Arts Philadelphia, accompanied by an exhibition of work from artist José Ortiz-Pagán, Li Sumpter, Lori Waselchuk, and Ricky Yanas & Grimaldi Baez. The partnership draws on Philadelphia's standing as the mural capital of the country: Mural Arts Philadelphia has produced more than 4,000 murals since its founding in 1984, work that has made public art a part of daily life across the city's neighborhoods, and that gives these newly commissioned pieces a tradition — and an audience — already built into the streets around them.
- A short walk away, Big Ramp, a local contemporary art gallery, will show work by Cynthia Hooper, Sarah Kanouse, and Sean Starowitz.
- Nearby at Ulises, the artist book shop, will host a screening of videos on November 14th at 5pm.
The same premise carries the exhibition outward from Philadelphia, into a wider network of galleries and academic institutions across the region that share the same commitment to environmental art as a subject for ongoing, public inquiry rather than a single display:
- At Street Road Artists Space in Chester County the Biomaterials Working Group joins Sebastien Derenoncourt, Samuel Sarosh Horowitz, and Kaitlin Pomerantz.
- At Haverford College's Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery Keg de Souza, Sarah Kavage, Lize Mogel, Kristen Neville Taylor, Laurie Palmer, and Rosten Woo take up questions of land, labor, and infrastructure, with a sound performance and lecture by Australia-based de Souza at the college's VCAM building in late October.
- And at the Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art in Glassboro, New Jersey, Paper Buck, Carolina Caycedo, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Alicia Grullón, Aislinn Pentecost-Farren, and Karyn Olivier close out the exhibition's footprint.
Public programming threads through the run: a 1.1-mile walking tour of original Philadelphia mural sites led by Jane Golden and Joan Reilly; an artist panel at TILT Institute; a bike ride of historic watersheds in Germantown with The WaterShed; a screening featuring Laurie Palmer, Lize Mogel, David Scott Kessler, and Brian Holmes & Jeremy Bolen, moderated by the Haverford environmental studies visiting professor Dylan Gauthier, and a closing program at Facing Bench, the new space in Old City run by artist Tess Wei.
Eco-Social Realism is supported by RAIR, Green Sun, and Making Worlds Books, along with each presenting venue: Mural Arts Philadelphia (TILT Institute), the Street Road team and community, Collective Futures (Big Ramp), Haverford College's John B. Hurford '60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Tuttle Creative Residencies Program, with faculty collaboration from Dylan Gauthier (Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery), and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art).
At a glance:
- TILT Institute (Philadelphia — Fishtown/Kensington): Sept 10 – Nov 21, opening Sept 10, 6–9pm
- Big Ramp (Philadelphia — Kensington): Oct 10 – Nov 14, opening Oct 10, 5–8pm
- Street Road Artists Space (Cochranville, PA): Sept 19 – Dec 19, opening Sept 19, 1–5pm
- Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College (Haverford, PA): Oct 23 – Dec 12, opening Oct 23, 5–7pm
- Rowan University Museum of Contemporary Art (Glassboro, NJ): Nov 2 – Dec 19, opening Nov 5, 5–7pm
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