About

Curtis Cravens was born and raised in Buffalo, New York, where as a child he witnessed the demise of the once-thriving local steel industry. He was influenced by the city’s shifting economic fortunes, and noticed how a city’s fortunes can change  In contrast, he watched his parents rehabilitate of an abandoned 19th century farm in the countryside sixty miles southwest of Buffalo, and understood that with care and energy, even the most modest landscape can be transformed

Cravens received an MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico and then worked at Newsweek Magazine while pursuing a career as an experimental artist using found materials.  

In 1993, he began an immersive five-year project at an abandoned (and toxic) copper refinery on the Brooklyn-Queens border in New York City. Trespassing daily on the site, he built an archive of the factory, documenting all  eighty buildings of site while researching the long history of copper refining and smelting on the site  and the lives of the factory’s [workers over time.

After the factory project was complete, Cravens shifted to redeveloping deteriorated buildings and blighted land. Fifteen years  of scoping and rehabilitation work prepared him for a job at the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resiliency, where he supervised the construction of coastal protection projects in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in 2012. 

Through the lenses of art, architecture, and ecology, Cravens has spent the last twenty years reimagining possible land uses at a former dairy farm that he purchased in the Western Catskills. His lifelong connection to repairing urban and rural landscapes is the subject of his manuscript-in-progress, factoryfarm: a memoir.