Top, clockwise: Matthew Coolidge, Harrell Fletcher, Walter Hood

Hear directly from the artists about the processes, ideas, and obstacles that inform their work.

Walter Hood is an artist, designer, and educator based in Oakland, CA. Since 1992, he has been engaged in transformative landscape and architectural design commissions, urban design, and art installations. Hood is a Professor and holder of the David K. Woo Chair at the University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Other honors include the Goldman Sachs Design Fellowship for the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., the AIA Award for Collaborative Achievement, a USA Character Approved Honor by NBC Universal, and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Design. He was a selected winner of the 2010 Venice Biennale and a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome among several other awards. Many of Hood’s publications illuminate his unique approach to the design of urban spaces, and his monographs Urban Diaries and Blues & Jazz Landscape Improvisations won an ASLA Research Award in 1996.