Nora Lawrence
Executive Director of Storm King Art Center, a 500-acre outdoor museum in New York’s Hudson Valley focused on monumental sculpture and site-specific commissions. She previously served as Storm King’s Artistic Director and Chief Curator, collaborating with major contemporary artists on commissions and exhibitions, and moderated the Aspen Ideas Festival session “Ancient Futures: From Mud to Machine.”
Adobe and Robotics Recast Ancient Craft as Future Infrastructure
At the Aspen Ideas Festival, artists Beatriz Cortez and Ronald Rael argue that ancient technologies should be treated not as primitive artifacts but as active systems of intelligence. Through Cortez’s work with migration, steel, plants, and Indigenous temporalities, and Rael’s experiments with adobe, robotics, and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, they make the case that innovation depends less on leaving ancestral knowledge behind than on bringing it into contact with contemporary tools.
Ancient Material Knowledge Is a Blueprint for Future Technology
Artists Beatriz Cortez and Ronald Rael argue that ancient material knowledge should be treated not as artifact but as technology still capable of shaping the future. In a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival, they make the case through steel, adobe, volcanic ash, border wall fragments, seeds, caves, and robots: older forms of intelligence can work with contemporary tools rather than be displaced by them. Their shared target is the assumption that innovation means leaving ancestral knowledge behind.