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Solid Waste Management Facility

Biography: Michael Singer

Throughout the 1970's and 1980's Michael Singer's work opened new possibilities for outdoor sculpture and contributed to the definition of site specific art and the development of public places. His most recent work has been recognized as a solution to joining infrastructure and public works to aesthetic concerns and the communities that are served by that infrastructure. In 1993, The New York Times chose Singer's design of the 27th Avenue Waste Recycling and Transfer Station in Phoenix as one of the top ten design events of the year.

In recent years Singer has been involved in a variety of garden, landscape and outdoor environment and infrastructure projects in the United States and Europe. Singer completed a garden and sculptural element for a two acre site on the Wellesley College campus, Wellesley, Massachusetts in 1989. Singer was selected to lead a design team for an urban renewal, waterfront park at Long Wharf in New Haven, Connecticut, in conjunction with the New Haven Office of Downtown and Harbor Development. In Phoenix, Arizona he collaborated with artist Linnea Glatt in the site plan and architectural design of an $18 million recycling center for the Department of Public Works, and is now working with Arizona State University on an urban plan for an Eco-Industrial Park/ Enterprise Zone/ Salt River Restoration on the one mile square land surrounding the recycling center. In Stuttgart, West Germany Singer completed a one acre sculptural garden commemorating "Those Who Survived" as part of a new public park. In 1994 a sculptural floodwall and walkway that serves as a model riverine reclamation project designed by Singer for the Grand River East Bank in Grand Rapids, Michigan was completed. For the New Denver Airport Singer completed a large interior sculpture garden design and installation for Concourse C. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Singer developed a masterplan for the use and redesign of the outdoor gardens as part of a two year residency. Singer was selected with Behnisch & Partner to design and fabricate interior gardens for the IBN, a Dutch Environmental Research Center. The gardens serve as biofilters for air and water recovery for the facility. The facility was completed in 1998. The New England Science Center in Worchester selected Singer to lead a design team for an $16 million redevelopment of their sixty acre EcoTarium which includes animal habitat, landscape design, and new buildings. The project is currently under construction. The Canal Corridor Association and Chicago Parks Department selected Singer to design a new urban park on the Chicago River which interprets the history and impacts of canals on the city, as well as reclaims wildlife habitat and restores a wetland ecosystem. Currently he is leading a multidisciplinary team with the environmental group River Watch Network on the masterplan for Troja Island Basin in Prague, Czech Republic.

Michael Singer earned a BFA at Cornell University in 1967 and since 1971 has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His works are part of public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, among others. He has participated in a number of the most important exhibitions of the past thirty years including the Guggenheim's "Ten Young Artists Theodoron Award Show, Documenta, The Kunsthaus Zurich's "Mythos and Ritual", Sculpture in the Twentieth Century in Reihen, Switzerland, and MOMA's "Primitivism in the 20" Century. He had several one-person shows, most notably at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City.