We are pleased to introduce the interdisciplinary group of problem solvers participating in this year’s Field Stations research program. These professionals will contribute insights from environmental science, ecology, agriculture, conservation, engineering, policy, education, community engagement, design, and other fields to envision new solutions for a complex ecological concern.

Field Stations 2024: Nexus of Land and Water will address the problem of dust deposition on snow in the Southwest. Dust-on-Snow is a natural phenomenon that occurs when dust particles land on snow, darkening its surface and causing it to melt faster. The issue has become a major concern as the 24-year-long southwestern North American megadrought has created a feedback loop, increasing dust emissions and exacerbating the impacts of drought and water scarcity for downstream communities.

Problem solvers will develop applied research projects that address dust mobilization and align with the needs and values of the affected communities. Their proposals and findings will be presented at a symposium in Colorado in the fall.

While this project is centered around a specific geographic area, the issue of dust-on-snow is of global relevance. WII has partnered with the Mountain Studies Institute and their longstanding collaborators from the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies, New Mexico State University, the United States Department of Agriculture, Soil Health Services, and the Center for Earth Theology. These organizations have separately and collectively engaged in addressing the issue of dust-on-snow in the region for many years. Nexus of Land and Water builds on these groups’ ongoing collaborations and broadens the conversation through WII’s signature interdisciplinary and systems-focused approaches. At the Wright-Ingraham Institute, we are pioneering models of integrated research and learning that can best address complex dilemmas at the interfaces between natural and cultural systems.

Meet Our Interdisciplinary Problem Solvers

• Bill Brinton, Supervisor of the Mosca-Hooper Conservation District, Alamosa County, CO.
• Larry Brown, San Luis Valley Area Director & Agriculture Agent at CSU Extension.
• Lauren Czaplicki, Founder of Science by Design LLC DBA Fungal Solutions, with a Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering.
• Seth Denizen, Human Geographer and Landscape Architect. Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
• Saroj Dhital, Atmospheric Science Researcher and Postdoctoral Associate at the Jornada Experimental Range, NMSU.
• Sunny Dooley, Diné Hozhojii Hané (Diné Blessing Way Story) Storyteller, Poet, and Organizer of positive possibilities for true change. Creative Director/Producer of Wisdom Carriers.
• Mike Duniway, Research Ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Moab, UT.
• Beth Lamberson, professional in Non-profit, Grant Writing and Public Radio Management.
• Angie Mestas, Teacher from 6 generations of Farmers and Ranchers with a background in Agricultural Biology and Art.
• Travis Nauman, Research Soil Scientist with the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
• Len Necefer, Founder of NativesOutdoors, with a Ph.D. in Engineering & Public Policy.
• S. McKenzie Skiles, Snow Hydrologist, Associate Professor, and Director of the Snow Hydro Lab, at the University of Utah.
• Leslie Sobel, Multi-Media Artist addressing water and climate change.
• Linnea Spears-Lebrun, senior Restoration Ecologist and Project Manager.
• Madeline Wilson, Agricultural Production Systems Specialist for CSU Extension.
• Kristina Young, Research Ecologist (postdoctoral scholar) USDA-ARS Jornada Experimental Range, with a Ph.D. in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.

Selected through a competitive open call for participants, this group of Interdisciplinary Problem Solvers will join the project’s Core Team who have been working with the Institute over the past two years to formulate and structure and define the project’s approach, methodologies, and goals.

Meet Our Core Team:

• Jeff Derry, Director of the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies in Silverton, Colorado, and Director of the Colorado Dust-on-Snow program (“CODOS”).
• Kevin Lombard, Associate Professor and Superintendent at New Mexico State University Agricultural Science Center at Farmington.
• Patrick O’Neill, Agronomist and Soil Scientist at Soil Health Services, San Luis Valley, Colorado.
• Heidi Steltzer, Climate Scientist, Theologian, and Founder of the Center for Earth Theology in Cortez, Colorado.
• Nicholas Webb, Research Physical Scientist at the Jornada Experimental Range Research Unit at USDA Las Cruces.

The project is directed by Jake Kurzweil, Hydrologist, Associate Director of the Water Program at Mountain Studies Institute, and Frida Foberg, Field Stations Program Manager, Wright-Ingraham Institute.

We look forward to the solutions and collaborations that will emerge from this year’s Field Stations program. Follow us on social media and reach out to find out more about our work.

Field Stations 2024 is supported by a Design Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and supporting grants from Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Southwestern Water Conservation District.

New York – The Wright-Ingraham Institute (WII) is delighted to announce the appointment of Tal C. Beery as Executive Director. Tal brings over fifteen years of experience in the environmental, arts, and educational sectors, and a distinguished career in nonprofit leadership, development, and strategic planning. Tal will be instrumental in implementing WII’s strategic plan and raising funds to fulfill the Institute’s mission, which fosters integrated studies and multifaceted research to bear on our understanding of complex environmental, ecological, and cultural systems.

Tal is joining a talented staff that includes Dylan Gauthier and Frida Foberg. Having served as Managing Director over the past year, Dylan will move into a new role as Director of Research, supporting the Institute’s research wing, StudyTank, by guiding research priorities and goals. He will also continue to advise the Institute’s grantmaking initiatives. Frida will continue in her role as Program Manager of Field Studies, facilitating the Institute’s groundbreaking field study initiatives, including the 2024 program “Nexus of Land and Water: Southwest Initiative on Land Health and Water Resources.”

“Tal’s extensive experience in fundraising, nonprofit operations, and his passion for interdisciplinary education make him the perfect leader for the WII in our next phase of growth,” said Catherine Ingraham, President of the Board of Directors. “I am confident that under his leadership and with the continued dedication of Dylan, Frida, and our Board, the Institute will make significant strides in expanding our impact and ensuring our longevity.”

Prior to joining the WII, Tal served as Chief Development Officer and Interim Co-Executive Director at the Hurleyville Performing Arts Centre, managing a staff of twenty-two and significantly increasing the Centre’s budget over three years. As co-founder and managing director of Arts and Ecology Incorporated, Tal created experiential education programs for undergraduate students, and is a frequent public speaker on place-based adult learning. Additionally, Tal has served as a consultant to more than sixty New York City community groups and social service organizations, successfully delivering impact evaluations, strategic plans, and grant awards that exceeded twenty million dollars. Tal’s independent and collaborative works as an artist and curator have been exhibited in the Whitney Museum Biennial and the Brooklyn Museum, and he has lectured on art and social change at the Museum of Modern Art and numerous other venues.

“I’m deeply gratified by the opportunity to join this amazing team,” said Tal C. Beery. “The Wright-Ingraham Institute has been tackling – through interdisciplinary research and education – some of the most difficult questions facing us today, both locally and globally. This is truly an exciting time to contribute to the Institute’s future.”

For more information about the full team at the Wright-Ingraham Institute, please visit https://wright-ingraham.org/about/#our-team

About the Wright-Ingraham Institute
Today, more than ever, our understanding of interfaces between environmental and ecological systems in relation to human cultures requires integrated inquiry, diverse forms of knowledge, and new problem solving techniques. To begin meeting these challenges, the Wright-Ingraham Institute conducts and applies multifaceted research to diverse site-specific field study programs. Our goal is to model ways of understanding and interpreting complex systems that contribute to meaningful solutions in the service of society.

A reflection on Elizabeth Wright Ingraham by Patrick Sisson, “Elizabeth Wright Ingraham: Master of Architecture and Ecology,” this short bio-sketch originally appeared on Curbed (August 28, 2017).

Both an architect and advocate, she worked to preserve the landscape that served as her key inspiration.

Elizabeth Wright Ingraham is far from the only modern architect who has tried to escape the shadow of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work. But few of her contemporaries have dealt with such high expectations—she was the architect’s granddaughter—while also managing to carve out their own individual, expressive take on organic design.

“Architecture is the language of intervention,” she once said during an interview with NPR. “And as such, architects become builders of ideas.”

The mountainous landscape of Colorado Springs served as the raw material and rugged terrain where Wright Ingraham’s creative life flourished. She said that she was surrounded by incredible architecture all her life, and was born into a legacy of wonderfully designed buildings. But ever since deciding at age 14 that she was going to be an architect, Wright Ingraham worked to establish her own independent style. She would not only shape the landscape, but work to preserve and protect the environment through establishing educational and philanthropic organizations.

“She had huge admiration for her grandfather, and family connections with Taliesin persisted throughout her career and life,” says her daughter, Catherine Ingraham, an architecture professor at the Pratt Institute. “But she also had a desire to be, herself, original and independent as a designer and a person.”

Biography

It’s no exaggeration to say Elizabeth Wright Ingraham grew up alongside modern architecture. Raised in Oak Park, Illinois, the home of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style period, she was the daughter of fellow architect John Lloyd Wright. She studied at the Armour Institute, now the Illinois Institute of Technology, in Chicago, learning from Mies van der Rohe.

After serving as a draftsman for the Navy in World War II and studying at both Berkeley and Taliesin, she married Gordon Ingraham, a fellow apprentice. After racking up nearly 11,000 miles traveling the country, the couple settled in the artsy mountain town of Colorado Springs.

“There was a small, but interesting and vital, group of artists and architects in Colorado Springs at the time,” said her daughter, “and my parents were very interested in being architects in a small community where they could do good design, become involved in local initiatives, and still retain a relationship, through their work, with architectural ideas.”

Ingraham & Ingraham, Architects designed nearly 100 homes in and around Colorado Springs and helped establish a modernist vocabulary for an area that riffed off the Usonian ideals of site-specific design and attainable architecture. The couple divorced in 1974 and Wright Ingraham founded her own firm, Elizabeth Wright Ingraham
 and Associates, where she designed many of her most famous works. Like her grandfather, she excelled at reinvention, refining her vision and creating what was described as a type of “environmental architecture” suited for the Rocky Mountain landscape.

“I think her best architecture emerges from and connects with the terroir of its placement,” says her daughter. “So there is something of the ‘organic’ still present, but it has been modernized in a significant way in the later work.”

Buildings to know

Built later in her career, the Solaz House in Manitou Springs, Colorado, won a 1999 AIA Colorado design award and showed Wright Ingraham integrating the International Style concepts of her one-time teacher, Mies van der Rohe, with the mountains. Built for artist Dawn Wilde and her husband with cinderblock and concrete, the residence has an industrial feel, with empty steel eaves casting shadows on buffed concrete walls, a maintenance-free, marvelous, and economical facade Wright Ingraham felt was a great complement to the landscape.

Colorado Springs’ Vista Grande Community Church showcased the progressive, sustainable streak that ran through Wright Ingraham’s career. Almost postmodern in its look, with a seemingly color-blocked facade of red brick, blue glass, and white concrete, the house of worship is the first in the country to utilize an energy-efficient type of insulated concrete. A striking barrel vault with glass endcaps crowns the structure, which opened in 1987, offering clear views of nearby mountains.

Legacy and reputation today

Wright Ingraham practiced until she was 85—“the Wright genes tell you to keep on going,” said historic preservationist Elaine Freed—and while she left a rich legacy of more than 100 projects, architecture represents only a fraction of her overall impact. A successful businesswoman and preservationist, she founded the Wright-Ingraham Institute in 1970, an educational and environmental organization dedicated to studying land-use issues and promoting conservation, stewardship, and preservation of natural resources. A regular on the lecture and conference circuit, she also co-founded the Women’s Forum in Colorado, a networking group, and led a local peace march. Wright Ingraham advocated for citizen involvement and engagement. Like her grandfather, she drew inspiration from her surroundings. But she also felt it was her calling to change the landscape for the better.