This panel will engage New York’s landscape at three distinct moments in history. Eric W. Sanderson, leader of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Mannahatta Project, will discuss Manhattan island in 1609; Matthew Coolidge, of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI), will speak about “Up River: Points of Interest from The Battery to Troy,” CLUI’s study of the “sculpted landscape” of today’s Hudson River; and Matthew Sharpe will read from his novel Jamestown, which is partially set in an imaginary future Manhattan. Moderated by Brian Sholis, editor of Artforum.com.

Landscape ecologist, conservation planner, and cartographer Eric Sanderson, PhD, is associate director of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Living Landscapes Program and director of the organization’s Mannahatta Project. He also directed the WCS’ Human Footprint project, a comprehensive attempt to measure man’s impact on the planet. He is based at the Bronx Zoo, and collaborates with more than two dozen researchers from the American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and the New York Botanical Garden, among other institutions.

Matthew Coolidge is the founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) in Los Angeles, a nonprofit art/research organization that employs a multimedia and multidisciplinary approach to increase and diffuse knowledge about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived. He serves as a project director, photographer, and curator for CLUI exhibitions, and has written several books published by CLUI. CLUI has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial. Coolidge lectures widely and is a faculty member in the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts. Coolidge received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 2004 and a Smithsonian Lucelia Artist Award in 2006.

Matthew Sharpe is the author of the novels Jamestown (Soft Skull, 2007; Harcourt, 2008), The Sleeping Father (Soft Skull, 2003, translated into nine languages), and Nothing Is Terrible (Villard, 2000), as well as the short-story collection Stories from the Tube (Villard, 1998). He has taught creative writing at Wesleyan University and Columbia University, in the Bard College MFA program, and elsewhere. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, Zoetrope, BOMB, McSweeney's,the Los Angeles Times, Art on Paper, and Teachers & Writers magazines.