Thank you to Professor Ruth Lo and The University of Houston, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture + Design@UHGCoAD for hosting Commonstudio for a recent guest lecture! It was an absolute pleasure sharing our work and engaging with such a thoughtful group of students and faculty.
Over the past two summers, Commonstudio founders Daniel and Kim have been busy developing and facilitating OVERLOOK(ed), an interdisciplinary field school, research initiative, and public exhibition exploring the ecological and cultural significance of Spontaneous Urban Plants (SUP)—the resilient species that quietly inhabit the cracks, edges, vacant lots, infrastructure corridors, and forgotten spaces of our cities.
The Mobile Urbarium’s inaugural installation occurred on 7.8.26 at Fuller’s Overlook in Waverly, PA. This small event brought a small group of students, jurors, and donors into a wooded area of the Fuller’s Overlook property at dusk.
In partnership with the University of Oregon College of Design and the Fuller Initiative for Productive Landscapes, students and collaborators spent two immersive field seasons working across Eugene, Portland, Philadelphia, and Scranton before convening at Fuller’s Overlook in northeastern Pennsylvania. Through quadrat sampling, botanical collection, photography, geolocation, and community science platforms such as iNaturalist, participants documented recurring urban habitat types while asking a deceptively simple question: What might these overlooked plants teach us about the future of cities?
The project intentionally blurred the boundaries between science, design, and artistic practice. Field collections became high-resolution digital herbarium scans, microscopic imagery, architectural models, functional trait studies, graphics, films, and social media narratives that translated ecological research to a broader public audience. Alongside this work, students participated in a series of workshops led by invited artists, designers, and musicians whose practices similarly reveal hidden dimensions of landscape. Firat Erdim introduced Walking Harps, handcrafted instruments that transformed wind into sound and encouraged participants to experience the landscape through movement and atmosphere. Ellie Irons led her acclaimed Feral Hues workshop, producing watercolors from spontaneous urban vegetation collected on site. Composer Paula Matthusen's Umbrella Etudes explored memory and place through experimental FM radio transmission, while visits to OLIN, Knot Studio, Snøhetta, the Gowanus Canal, Freshkills Park, Floyd Bennett Field, Governors Island, and an urban sketching workshop with Richard Alomar expanded the conversation through contemporary landscape practice, ecological restoration, and careful observation.
The field school culminated in the public debut of the Mobile Urbarium, a traveling exhibition synthesizing research, design, and storytelling into an immersive, multi-sensory experience. Monumental digital herbarium projections, architectural models, field recordings, and interpretive graphics invited visitors to reconsider the ecological agency of the plants that so often escape our notice. More importantly, the exhibition served as a platform for dialogue, bringing together students, artists, scientists, designers, and the public around questions of ecological resilience, maintenance, beauty, and belonging.
OVERLOOK(ed) is not simply about “weeds”. It is an ongoing investigation into how acts of attention can reshape our understanding of urban landscapes. At a moment when cities face accelerating ecological and climatic change, spontaneous vegetation offers more than botanical curiosity, it provides a living record of adaptation, disturbance, and possibility. Through the Global Urbarium project, The Commonstudio continues to document these emerging ecologies while developing new ways to communicate their value through exhibitions, publications, field schools, and public engagement. The work is ultimately less about discovering new landscapes than about learning to see the remarkable ones that have been growing around us all along.
For more on this work, feel free to download/view a curated PDF Slide Deck that provides more detail on the ideas and process driving the project. Also feel free to check out the Post Wild Pod, a podcast series exploring the complexities and contradictions of so-called “Novel Ecosystems” in the contested era of the “Antropocene”. Commonstudio co-founder Daniel Phillips along with student co-hosts engage in long-form conversation with leading practitioners and researchers across a range of disciplines.
Thanks to all the Students, Colleagues, and Invited Jurors who brought this to life in the Summer of 2026!
FABRICATION:
Robert Lepiz
COORDINATOR:
Nancy Silvers
DEVELOPED AND FACILITATED BY:
Daniel Phillips (PhD, Assistant Professor @ UofO)
Kim Karlsrud (MFA, Visiting Assistant Professsor @ UofO)
INVITED JURORS:
Firat Erdim- Artist + Architect
Iowa State Univ.
Paula Matthusen- Experimental Composer,
Wesleyan University
Ellie Irons- Artist and educator,
NATURE Lab (Troy, NY)
Pia von Barby– Landscape Architect + researcher
OLIN (Philadelphia, PA)
STUDENT PARTICIPANTS:
Sara Fernandes– MARC candidate
Leo Frampton- MLA candidate
Cora Messer- BFA candidate
Michael Mitchell- MLA candidate
Josephine Paik- BLA candidate
Taylor Ward- BFA (Art & Tech)
Thrilled to share that Mesquite Migration is part of Forest Hope Through Innovation, an interdisciplinary art-forest-science experience exploring how creativity, research, and community action can shape a sustainable future for the forests we rely on.
Mesquite Migration: https://www.thecommonstudio.com/migration
Forest Hope Through Innovation
March 1 – August 2, 2026
Tuesday through Sunday
10 am – 4 pm
World Forestry Center, Discovery Museum
4033 SW Canyon Road, Portland, OR 97221
Included with Museum Admission
For more information, please visit https://worldforestry.org/hopethroughinnovation/
Tell Me About Your Sleep is an evolving archive that navigates the delicate balance between creative practice and maternal experience, featuring the voices of 22 North American mother artists and scholars since its inception in 2022.
Building on the Tell Me About Your Sleep publication, this exhibition highlights the artists’ experiences of “mothering”—the act of becoming and being a mother—through social, cultural, and political frameworks. This socially engaged art project aims to elevate and legitimize the perspectives of mother artists within contemporary discourse.
The collective’s first theme, “sleep,” is explored through a range of lenses, reflecting how the sleep of mothers and children becomes deeply intertwined—sometimes resulting in exhaustion or disorientation, other times producing surreal and transformative states. Through installation, video, photography, and text-based archives, the exhibition examines how caregiving, creative work, and labor intersect. It will culminate in a roundtable discussion featuring mother artists and scholars currently working in Korea.
Exhibition Run: Monday, June 2 to Friday, 8 from 1 PM to 6 PM
Co-curation: Joohee Yoon (ContempoLocal)
Hosted by: 범일운수종점Tiger1
Design: Xinalu Yi
Sponsored by School of Art & Design, University of Arkansas, College of Arts & Letters, California State University, Sacramento
Artist Mothers: Gali Greenspan, Kim Karlsrud, Elizabeth Donadio, Beki Basch, Katherine Tzu-Lan Mann, Wanda Raimundi Ortiz, and Erin Mckenna, janet e. danridge, Minkyung, Rachel Debuque and Rey Jeong
Mothersscholar Writers: Vardayani Ratti, Fernanda Araujo Maciel, Erica Orcutt, Alex Morrison, Tasha Souza, and
Joanna Nunez
Roundtable: This Work Smells Like Mother
• Friday, June 6 from 4 PM to 5 PM
• 범일운수종점Tiger1, 1F, 22 Geumha-ro 29-gil (near Geumcheon-gu Office Station)
• Panelists: Rachel Debuque & Rey Jeong, Juhee Youn (ContempoLocal, Co-curator), Minkyung (Artist), Seulbi Lee (Critic) + 2 open seats for on-site audience participation
• Children and families are welcome!
We are thrilled to be a part of the Climate Gardening, the 4th Los Angeles Urban Soil Symposium, presented by TreePeople and Accelerate Resilience LA!
COMMONStudio will be presenting work and a participatory art installation in collaboration with Ken Mori Projects.
Mesquite Mile, Lubbock Texas
Happily announcing the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has approved Texas Tech University (TTU) for the Mesquite Mile, a public art project located in Lubbock, TX. Our goal is to foster ecological resilience and an enduring sense of place through socially engaged placemaking.
Mesquite Mile Team: Erin Charpentier, Kim Karlsrud, Travis Neel, Daniel Phillips, and Leehu Loon (Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture).
Flourishing Los Angeles: Activists reclaim urban spaces through guerrilla gardening written by Brandelyn Clark for the Cronkite News.
In February 2024, Commonstudio’s Kim Karlsrud had a unique opportunity to attend the Women’s Tree Climbing workshop, founded by the amazing Melissa LeVangie Ingersoll and Bear LeVangie. A thought-provoking NYT article “New Englands Trees are sick. They Need More Tree Doctors.” inspired a successful scholarship application. This three day event was conducted in the town of Wimberly, TX on a 126-acre hideaway on the scenic Blanco River. The site offered amazing trees, stargazing and sweeping views of the Blanco River. The workshop was attended by a range of seasoned arborists, urban foresters, and municipal employees.
In June, we completed Interlude, a month long family residency in Hudson, NY, along with artist Brandon Ng and his family. During this time, we engaged with local artists and enjoyed Art Omi, DIA Beacon, MASS Moca, and explored new project concepts and opportunities related to the material and narrative potential of soil.
We are happy to report that we have begun a new chapter of our academic life with a recent transition to the University of Oregon!
Daniel will join the Department of Landscape Architecture as an Assistant Professor on the Tenure Track, while Kim will be a visiting assistant professor in the College of Design. We look forward to new collaborative partnerships and projects alone the west coast and beyond.
In August 2024, Commonstudio participated in a group show at CYNK Studios (Ypsilanti Michigan), along with Sally Clegg, Erin McKenna, Abhishek Narula. The show’s theme centered around the function and meaning of fountains, and the piece is titled “ Fulfillment (Field Study No. 2)”. The piece consists of 10lbs of replenished chocolate rocks, resupplied as consumed.
