Ashley Kyber

Ashley Kyber is a “placemaking alchemist” trained as a permaculture-wielding, site-specific public artist and landscape architect. Kyber’s performative landscape installations reference oral traditions and environmental concerns while addressing wider social dynamics of post-industrial land/community redevelopment. Education: Clemson University (BLA & MS in Horticulture) & Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA). Awards:  World Studio Foundation’s Honda Environmental Design Award & TLA’s Andy Warhol Prize. Noted as Kingston Sculpture Bienniale’s emerging artist by McAuthar Scholar, Judy Pfaff. Commissions: Nath Sculpture Park at West Virginia University’s Art Museum, St Louis Metro Transit’s Public Art-in-Action, Tulsa Living Arts, The South Carolina Botanical Garden, Park Pride, Atlanta, and ART26201. Collaborations include projects with seven Indigenous Tribal Councils with native architect Lynn Paxson. Kyber thanks Grace Lee Boggs, Author of Living for Change, for her inspiration. Boggs introduced Kyber to Smithsonian Folkways Awardee and Nobuko Miyamoto and sent Kyber to be trained in Permaculture by Author and Activist Starhawk. The resulting Griot Garden and Harvest Dance Celebration anchors one of the first urban edible forest projects thriving, 25 years later, as a neighborhood development corporation. Kyber served as Assistant/Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Iowa State University and West Virginia University where she was the Creative Director of the WVU Community Design Team. She is currently Rivers of Steel Arts Creative Leadership Coordinator, serving communities in the MonValley to re-envision their neighborhoods, downtowns, and green spaces with public art, regenerative food systems, and creative economies for a more vibrant, environmentally, and socially conscious future.

Photo by Conrad Hamather