Stacy Levy

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title: "Stacy Levy" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["1960-births", "20th-century-american-sculptors", "land-artists", "living-people", "pew-fellows-in-the-arts", "21st-century-american-sculptors", "yale-university-alumni", "temple-university-alumni", "artists-from-philadelphia", "sculptors-from-pennsylvania", "21st-century-american-women-sculptors", "20th-century-american-women-sculptors"] description: "American environmental artist" topic_path: "arts" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stacy_Levy" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

::summary American environmental artist ::

::data[format=table title="Infobox artist"]

Field	Value
name	Stacy Levy
image	Stacy_Levy_Standing_in_Missing_Waters.jpg
caption	Levy, standing in Missing Waters, 2020
birth_date
birth_place	Philadelphia, PA
death_date
resting_place_coordinates
field	Sculpture
alma_mater	Yale University, Tyler School of Art at Temple University
movement	Environmental art
awards	Pew Fellowships in the Arts, Henry Meigs Environmental Leadership Award
website
::

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Stacy Levy (born 1960) is an American sculptor who works with ecological natural patterns and processes, often using water and water flows as a medium. Many of her works address environmental problems at the same time that they make the functioning of the environment visible. Her studio is based in rural Pennsylvania, but she works on projects around the world.

Early life and education

Levy grew up near Fairmont Park in Philadelphia and studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture. She spent time in the 1980s working as an urban forester, managing urban forests for companies, parks and private individuals.

She graduated from Yale University with a BA in Sculpture, studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and graduated from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University with a MFA in Sculpture.

Career

| video1 = "Calendar of rain started when somebody made a comment that it always rains on the weekends", Science History Institute (2013) |video2 = A Rain Garden for Springside School (2010) |video5=David Rumsey Map Center Conference on Cartography (2023)}}

Stacy Levy uses the language of landscape and art to tell the ecological story of a site, drawing on both art and science. Her projects reveal the sometime hidden natural world in the urban environment. Stacy's work integrates art with site design to create memorable places alive with nature and sensation. Her projects distill the essence of nature and reveal its processes to the user. Stacy works closely with building architects, landscape architects, engineers, horticulturalists and soil scientists to create artworks that allow natural systems like the infiltration of rainwater, to function and thrive. Through a lyrical approach to natural science, Levy blends an understanding of sustainable design and ecological concepts and harnesses the ephemeral changes of weather and light with the lasting presence of sculpture.

From rivers to runoff, Levy has explored the many facets of water: urban watersheds, storm water, hydrologic patterns and water treatment. Her installation "Calendar of Rain" creates a year-long record of precipitation, collected daily in shimmering glass jars. Her project "Tide Poles" for the City of Yonkers' waterfront incorporates the use of LED technology to visually manifest the ebb and flow of the Hudson River tide. Her projects "Tide Field" and "River Rooms" at Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia offer visitors new ways to become more aware of and engage with changes in the river.

Levy has completed numerous rainwater pieces including a watershed rain terrace for Penn State University's new Arboretum, and a rain garden for Springside School with the Philadelphia Water Department and the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. She has public commissions in New York, Seattle, Philadelphia, Tampa, Toronto and Niigata, Japan.

Artistic works

Missing Waters, 2025

Santa Fe, NM

Levy worked with local artists and students from New Mexico School for the Arts to create a large-scale transitory chalk and water map painted on surfaces throughout the Santa Fe Railyard echoing the path of lost rivers.

Waters from the tributaries of this Philadelphia River were collected, put in vials, and placed on the wall in a living water map detailing the path of the Schuylkill. --

Diatom Lace pavers, 2023

New York, New York

A new public esplanade featuring a paver arrangement called Diatom Pavers. The pavers are embossed with images of diatoms that live in the East River. Levy worked Judy Yaquin Li from NOAA Fisheries. The installation has 5,000 Diatom Lace pavers in clusters along the pedestrian path. The project won a 2025 Honor Award from The New York Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects

Collected Watershed, 2020

Chesapeake Bay, Baltimore County, Maryland

Levy worked with Towson University professors and students collecting over 1,000 gallons of water from all the waterways in the area. She filled over eight thousand recycled glass jars, laying them out to build a 3D watershed map with water from the actual waterway in the jar, "so you can walk through the watershed like a giant."

Tide Fields, 2018

Schuylkill River

This project showcased the six-foot tidal fluctuations with a series of current-driven buoys. The rising and falling tide reveals and conceals the buoys, drawing attention to the ebbs and flows of the river and creating "a liquid map of the Delaware watershed".

Rain Ravine, 2016

Frick Environmental Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

In this Living Building Challenge Project, Levy worked with architects, landscape architects, and engineers to build a system where all the rainwater from the roof of the building ran through the artwork.

Spiral Wetland, 2013

Lake Fayetteville, Fayetteville, AR

Spiral Wetland is an eco-art project supported by the Walton ArtCenter as part of the Artosphere Festival in Fayetteville, Arkansas on Lake Fayetteville.

Spiral Wetland is made with native soft rush, Juncus effusus, growing in a closed-cell foam mat anchored to the lake's floor. The plants help remove excess nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus from the lake water, and the mat adds shade for fish habitat. Inspired by Spiral Jetty (1970), Robert Smithson's famous earthwork sited in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, this spiral is a working earthwork floating on the surface of the lake.

Tide Flowers, 2012 & 2023

Hudson River Park, Piers 34 and 25, New York, NY (on hold) and Domino Park, Brooklyn NY

33 units 9' wide Marine vinyl, steel, polycarbonate plastic, foam.

The Hudson River, brushing against the concrete and glass of the urban fabric, rises up and down twice a day with the eternal clock of the tides. This tidal activity connects us to the ocean, to the moon and to a daily schedule that is nature's own.

Tide Flowers will register the tidal movement with a simple visual presence of brilliantly-colored flowers blooming at high tide and closing at low tide. Tide Flowers is made up of thirty-three flower units, each with six petals, attached to selected wooden piles on two piers. Twenty-five flowers will be placed in a field-like formation on selected pilings at the end of pier 25, visible from both the path and the new park. Eight additional tide flowers will be attached to pilings closer to the pathway to give park users a hint of the larger field of flowers beyond.

River Eyelash, 2005

Three Rivers Arts Festival, Pittsburgh, PA

3,000 painted buoys radiate out from the bulkhead of the Point State Park, like an eyelash for the city. The eyelash continuously changes formation in response to wind direction, speed of the currents and boat wakes.

Kept Out, 2009-2010

, Philadelphia, PA. Part of Edible Landscapes, curated by Amy Lipton

Kept Out consists of a pair of deer exclosures, the fenced areas to keep deer out: one built near the artist's studio in a woodland in Pennsylvania's Ridge and Valley region and the other at the woodlands edge of Schuylkill Center for Environmental and Education in the Piedmont ecosystem. Both sites face a great deal of deer pressure.

AMD&Art Project, 1995 -2005.

Vintondale, Vintondale, PA

Collaboration with Julie Bargmann, Landscape Architect. Robert Deason, Hydrogeologist and T. Allan Comp Historian

Acid mine drainage pollutes hundreds of miles of streams in Pennsylvania. At Mine Number Six in Vintondale, in the coal mining region of south central Pennsylvania, artists, landscape architects, scientists and historians collaborated on ways to treat AMD while interpreting the coal mining history and the passive treatment processes. This project creates a public park and water treatment facility.

Watermap, 2003

Friends' Central School, Wynnewood, PA

Tributaries of the Delaware and Schuylkill Rivers are deeply sandblasted into bluestone paved terrace. When it rains, the rainwater flows into the runnels of the tributaries and then into deeply inscribed Delaware River, creating a watershed in miniature.

Cloud Stones, 2004

Mineral Springs Park, Seattle, WA

The highly polished black stone domes reflect the sky and the clouds formations. Text sandblasted around the domes tells of the types of weather which these cloud formations bring. The white domes have more of evening presence, and their text tells of the moon and stars. As the light fades at dusk, the white domes remain bright while the dark domes sink into the shadows.

Lotic Meander, 2007

Ontario Science Centre's Project Art

"Lotic Meander" is a serpentine walkway that resembles a dried riverbed, located outside the Ontario Science Centre's Great Hall. Modelled on the meanderings of the Humber River, the snakelike stream is 91.4 metres long and winds along a path that takes up most of the Solar Patio. The piece is made from 116 granite slabs from India, and 8 nearly perfect hemispherical or hemiellipsoidal black domes carved from boulders imported from China. The highly polished domes are similar, in appearance, to the domes used to house surveillance cameras.

Along some of the curves of the path there are also nicely polished smooth round glass pebbles, in variously coloured translucent glass.

"Lotic" in the title refers to the ecosystems of different magnitudes of flowing water in nature.

Example works

| title = | align = | footer = | style = | state = | height = | width = | perrow = | mode = | whitebg = | noborder = | captionstyle = |File:TIDE_FIELD_by_Stacy_Levy.jpg |Tide Field |File:Topo Swale by Stacy Levy.jpg |Topo Swale | File: Spiral Wetland by Stacy Levy, Fayetteville, Arkansas.jpeg | Spiral Wetland | class1= | alt1= | File: Stacy Levy Tide Flowers.jpg | Tide Flowers at the Hudson River Park | class2= | alt2= | File: Stacy Levy - River Eyelash - Three Rivers Arts Festival - Pittsburgh PA - 2005.jpg | River Eyelash | class3= | alt3= | File: Kept-out.jpg |Kept Out | class4= | alt4= | File: Stacy Levy - AMD-Art - Project in Vintondale.jpg |AMD-Art - Project in Vintondale | class5= | alt5= | File: Stacy Levy - Watermap - Friends' Central School.jpg |Watermap - Friends' Central School | class6= | alt6= | File: Stacy Levy - Cloud stones - Mineral Springs Park - Seattle Arts Council - Seattle WA.jpg |Cloud stones - Mineral Springs Park | class7= | alt7= | File: Lotic Meander, by Stacy Levy.jpg |Lotic Meander |File:Schuylkill Collected by stacy levy (detail).jpg |Schuylkill Collected |File:Topo Map by Stacy Levy.jpg |Topo Map | class8= | alt8=

Awards

• 1992 Pew Fellowships in the Arts
• 1999 Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia
• 2001 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation grant
• 2001, Excellence in Estuary Award, Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, Inc.
• 2010, 2010 Year in Review Award, Americans for the Arts Public Art Network, for "Ridge and Valley"
• 2015 Artist-in-Residence at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation.
• 2015, DC Water Green Infrastructure Challenge Award with Urban Rain Design and Nitsch Engineering
• 2018 Henry Meigs Environmental Leadership Award, Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education
• 2019, Woman of Environment Arts, Penn Futures
• 2024, Water Warriors Award from the Lewis Pugh Foundation

References

References

1. "Stacy Levy".
2. Boone, Aunye. (2022-07-28). "Water Watch: A Conversation with Environmental Artist Stacy Levy".
3. (June 9, 2011). "Stacy Levy: Interpreting the Connections of Nature and the Built Environment through Art".
4. "Stacy Levy - Earthworks - Art - City of Kent, Washington". City of Kent, Washington.
5. (October 18, 2017). "Collaborating with Nature & Science: The Eco-Art of Stacy Levy".
6. "The Artists Leading the Conversation on Climate Change".
7. Dionisio, Jennifer. (2013). "Calendar of Rain". [[Chemical Heritage Foundation]].
8. (December 30, 2007). "Redevelopment in Yonkers Spurs Public Art". The New York Times.
9. (August 22, 2018). "Art to see in Philly now: Floating on the Schuylkill and on display at the airport". The Philadelphia Inquirer.
10. "Art@Bartram's Connecting the public to the Schuylkill River.".
11. (June 27, 2018). "Environmental artist aims to bring people closer to time and tide on the Schuylkill". WHYY.
12. "O.T.W (On the Water) The Schuylkill River".
13. "Ridge and Valley at the Penn State Arboretum".
14. (2013). "Sustainability in America's cities: creating the green metropolis". Island Press.
15. (October 28, 2009). "Schools and Stormwater: Part Two".
16. (May 11, 2017). "Tracing the Waterways Beneath the Sidewalks of New York". The New York Times.
17. (16 February 2018). "Rain is My Client".
18. (October 25, 2018). "Thursday Spotlight: The Wizard of Inlet Park, Stacy Levy". GreenPointers.com.
19. (June 1, 2017). "Discovering Seattle parks: a local's guide". Mountaineers Books.
20. "Mineral Springs Park".
21. "Stacy Levy Tampa Wind, 2009".
22. (2010). "Creating memory: a guide to outdoor public sculpture in Toronto". Becker Associates in association with the City Institute at York University.
23. "Seeing Water: Stacy Levy and Eve Mosher in Conversation September 26, 2017".
24. Tresp, Lauren. (2025-04-08). "Missing Waters Reimagines Santa Fe's Forgotten Waterways".
25. (2025-09-08). "The Works on Water Triennial Puts Commitment Over Spectacle".
26. Saraniero, Nicole. (2023-12-22). "New East Midtown Greenway Opens in NYC".
27. (2024-03-25). "Global Studies Faculty Facilitates Public Art in NYC".
28. (2025-04-12). "East Midtown Greenway".
29. (2020-04-01). "April "Year of the Woman" Feature: Stacy Levy".
30. (2025-11-12). "Tide Field".
31. (2021-02-24). "How better access to Philly’s two rivers could open up spaces of welcome".
32. (May 9, 2013). "Artist Stacy Levy's 'Spiral Wetland' in place at Lake Fayetteville". Fayetteville Flyer.
33. "Tide Flowers".
34. (June 15, 2017). "Swim pretty: aquatic spectacles and the performance of race, gender, and nature". SIU Press.
35. (September 14, 2010). "From art to landscape: unleashing creativity in garden design". Timber Press.
36. (May 22, 2013). "Beyond the Surface: Environmental Art in Action".
37. "STACY LEVY and JULIE BARGMANN AMD&ART PROJECT IN VINTONDALE, PA 2005.".
38. "Stacy Levy".
39. Goddard, Peter. (2007-03-04). "Rokeby lightens up with Science Centre sculpture". thestar.com.
40. "Ontario Science Centre: Project: Art". Ontariosciencecentre.ca.
41. Warkentin, John. (2010). "Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto". Becker Associates in association with the City Institute at York University.
42. "2008 Annual Convention: Sessions: Presenter Bios: Stacy Levy". Artsusa.org.
43. (30 November 2016). "Stacy Levy".
44. (2001). "Congratulations to the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary's 2001 Excellence in the Estuary Award recipients who were recognized on September 25, 2001". Estuary News: Newsletter of the Delaware Estuary.
45. (June 24, 2010). "2010 Public Art Year in Review Announced".
46. "Artists-in-Residence".
47. (2018). "Green Infrastructure Design Challenge".
48. (October 15, 2018). "Art as Environmental Leadership: Stacy Levy to receive the Meigs award".
49. "Women in Conservation Award Winners".
50. (2024-07-26). "River Warriors".

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