Environmental artist Patrick Dougherty will present "Primitive Ways in an Accelerated World" at 4 p.m. Sept. 7 in the Architecture Building, room 100, on the Ball State University campus.

The lecture, sponsored by Ball State's College of Architecture and Planning, Department of Landscape Architecture and Minnetrista, is part of an ongoing collaboration to bring greater awareness of environmental issues to the community through the creation of art installations focusing on all-natural materials.

An installation of environmental art created by Ball State landscape architecture students and open to the public will be on exhibit at Minnetrista Sept. 19 – Oct. 12. 

Dougherty, a North Carolina native, began building sculptures out of sticks in the early 1980s.

"I believe one's childhood shapes his or her choice of materials as an artist," Dougherty said of his artwork. "For me, it was exploring the underbrush of my hometown in North Carolina."

His large-scale, on-site, temporary sculptures have graced the grounds of venues as varied as the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., to the Copenhagen Botanical Gardens in Denmark.

"Using the shafts of a branch one way, and the finer tops another, I developed a decade of work that I have come to think of as shelters of transition," Dougherty said. 

For more information on Dougherty and his work, visit www.stickwork.net. For more information on the program or exhibit, contact the Department of Landscape Architecture at (765) 285-1971 or Minnetrista at (765) 282-4848.