the arts on the farms workshop

The Arts on Farms and in Farm-Based Education

• What do the arts have to offer farms and farms the arts?• Pairing-up to share how arts function at our farms or schools• Images and DISCUSSION of arts-on-farms initiatives• OPEN SPACE TECHNOLOGY to reflect on themes and issues• Brainstorming the incorporation of the arts at YOUR farm

• Art

Drawings by Jeff Stratford, workshop cameraman!

To be continued… BLOG *

Activity!

What do the arts have to offer farms and farms the arts?

Take a few minutes to write.

How do the arts function at your home farm or school, or at farms or programs you’ve visited?

Partner up: one partner can address the question above while the other listens and then responds with questions.

Then switch and repeat. Feel free to talk, to take notes and/or to draw diagrams or illustrations in the course of your conversation.

One thing you learned from your partner that you didn’t already know?

• Visual Art, Education and Public Programs, Bronx, NY, Wave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center (1990-present)

• Arts Program, Chautauqua Series and Permaculture and Ecological Design, Sonoma County, CA, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) (1994-present)

• Shute Farm Studio, Somerset, South of England, Green Farm (2000)• Crofting Connection, The UK, the Highlands & the Islands, Soil Association Scotland and

Scottish Crofting Federation (2003-2005)• Focus on Farmers, Dartmoor and Exmoor, England, Aune Head Arts, Beaford Arts, Greenwell,

Runnage, Frenchbeer and Warren Farms (2003-2005)• The Art Farm Project, Devon, England, Rocombe Art Farm (2003-present)• The Garden, Los Angeles, CA, South Central Farm (2003-2008)• Memorial to One of the Largest Urban Farms in America (South Central Community Garden,

at 41st and Alameda Streets, Los Angeles, 1994-2006), Los Angeles, CA, Andrea Bower (2008) • Victory Gardens 2007+, 2008+, 2009+, San Francisco, CA, Futurefarmers and the city of SF• Benefit performances, Oakland, CA, Local musicians, Mo’ Better Food Program of The

Familyhood Connection, Inc. (~2008)• Neighborhood Harvest, Oakland, CA, Rock Paper Scissors Collective (RPS), Community Bridge

Video, City Slicker Farms (2008)• Five Senses Dinner Series, Farm Camp, Pocantico Hills, NY, Stone Barns (2008)• The Greenhorns, Serve Your Country Food, The Greenhorns Guide for Beginning Farmers,

from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters, The Greenhorns (2007-present)

SLIDESHOW (You may want to take notes in your Arts & Farms table as we discuss)

Note: This is a sample of what I see to be the intersection of the arts and farming, one of many groupings that might have served to spur discussion. I have hands-on experience with most of the initiatives covered in the slideshow. In terms of bias, I have gone to school and worked at schools in the areas covered—in England, New York, and the San Francisco Bay Area. (At the same time, these are very active areas by anyone’s standards or points of reference.) When I have not stepped foot on the farm, site or association location presented in the slide show, I have made an effort to talk to people who have, to read up on the literature and to obtain images for presentation. When I have extensive experience either as a visitor, friend or educator at a particular farm, I try not to go too overboard with pictures from my personal photo albums… but I do! This is what I have to share. I hope you enjoy and I can’t wait to hear more about your experiences in the arts on farms.

Visual Art, Education and Public Programs Bronx, NYWave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center (1990-present)

Sunroom Project, Visual Art Program, Wave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center

Family Art Project, Education and Community Program, Wave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center

School Partnership Program, Education and Community Program, Wave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center

http://www.barebooks.com/

School Partnership Program, Education and Community Program, Wave Hill: Public Garden and Cultural Center

Arts Program, Chautauqua Series and Permaculture and Ecological Design Sonoma County, CA Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC) (1994-present)

Landscape Painting, Chautauqua Revue, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC)

Biodiversity and Permaculture on film, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC)

Shute Farm StudioSomerset, South of England Green Farm (2000)

Accessible Educational Centre for the Arts, Shute Farm Studio, Green Farm

Crofting ConnectionThe UK, the Highlands & the Islands Soil Association Scotland and Scottish Crofting Federation (2003-2005)

Crofting Connection, The UK, the Highlands & the Islands, Soil Association Scotland and Scottish Crofting Federation

Focus on Farmers Dartmoor and Exmoor, England Aune Head Arts, Beaford Arts, Greenwell, Runnage, Frenchbeer and Warren Farms (2003-2005)

Focus on Farmers, Aune Head Arts, Beaford Arts, Greenwell, Runnage, Frenchbeer and Warren Farms

The Art Farm Project Devon, England Rocombe Art Farm (2003-present)

The Art Farm Project, Devon, England, Rocombe Art Farm

NOT A FARM, BUT A WEBSITE

V

V

V

The Garden Los Angeles, CA South Central Farm(2003-2008)

The Garden, Los Angeles, CA, South Central Farm

Memorial to One of the Largest Urban Farms in America (South Central Community Garden, at 41st and Alameda Streets, Los Angeles, 1994-2006 Los Angeles, CAAndrea Bower (2008)

Graphite and color pencil on paper, 94 l/2" × 60"

For a political piece that works, look at Andrea Bowers's powerfully designed (and

lengthily titled) "Memorial to One of the Largest Urban Farms in America (South Central Community Garden, at 41st and

Alameda Streets, Los Angeles, 1994-2006)," from 2008. It is a large drawing in

graphite and colored pencil on paper showing a vast area of South-Central L.A. in an intricately rendered monochrome

topographical map with the blocks of the community garden vigorously shaded in green. In the lower right-hand corner is a reproduction of a Los Angeles Times story

about the garden's destruction. –

Changing Times, Changing Notions: 'Progress' at the Whitney by Francis

Morrone for the New York Sun, August 14, 2008

…positioned eight feet vertically on the wall, just inches above the floor. Opposite in approach to a public attraction, it requires the viewer to crouch down over the bottom right corner of the piece to read the reproduction of a 2006 Los Angeles Times article. The text chronicles the arrest of activists protesting the destruction—by a developer intending to sell it to a corporation—of a community garden, and one protester’s desperate attempt to stall the bulldozer by clogging the machine’s exhaust pipe with a vegetable. The work epitomizes the contemporary contradictions in the modern concept of progress that are so difficult to reconcile: development in the face of environmental destruction, and corporate wealth privileged over the self-sufficiency of the poor. Bowers’ piece beautifully lays this out in a stark abstraction in which the Google-earth view of the small farm plotted within the immensity of the city creates a graphic equal sign, one that does not add up to stability or equality.

Progress by Jen Schwarting for The Brooklyn Rail October 2008 :

Victory Gardens 2007+, 2008+, 2009+San Francisco, CAFuturefarmers and the city of SF

http://www.futurefarmers.com/victorygardens/

Benefit performancesOakland, CALocal musicians, Mo’ Better Food Program of The Familyhood Connection, Inc. (~2008)

Fundraising, Mo’ Better Food

Neighborhood Harvest Oakland, CA Rock Paper Scissors Collective (RPS), Community Bridge Video, City Slicker Farms (2008)

+ backyard gardenersand

&=

“Neighborhood Harvest” shown at “Food Justice Show”

$ = San Francisco Foundation, Oakland City Council and City of Oakland Cultural Funding Program

Five Senses Dinner Series, Farm Camp Pocantico Hills, NY Stone Barns (2008)

Five Senses Dinner Series, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

Farm Camp, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

http://www.barebooks.com/

i.e. for reflection and processing…


The Greenhorns, Serve Your Country Food,The Greenhorns Guide for Beginning FarmersFrom the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream WatersThe Greenhorns (2007-present)

Brooke Budner, The Greenhorns

Many activities may be drawn out of Ovid and farms, or gardens.—

When I read a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses with Oakland middle schoolers in the spring of 2003, we talked about repetition and variation, voice and tone. We walked through note-taking and life drawing exercises in response to the garden's growth and decay, eventually writing and illustrating myths of our own. The opening of seventh grade student Rebecca Morton's story illustrates the complementary impact of literature and nature on a young imagination:

Here sits a child in a room full of stars. Not a room as you or I would think of one, but there is no other name for it. Anyway, the boy thinks of it as a room and that is what counts. The stars are real stars.

Now, slowly, the stars disperse and something else fills the room. There are no words to fully describe this thing. It is everything and nothing at once, all the matter in the universe and some that isn't anymore.

The boy is barely four, small. That is, he would be if he was a human. In our years, he is as many centuries old and too big to comprehend or really even see.

Other examples ofart-farm initiatives or the arts on farms????????????

What are some of the ways in which the arts and farms came together in the slideshow and other examples shared?

What do the arts have to offer farms and what do farms have to offer the arts?

The next few slides present some possibilities of the significance for the arts on farms. I will post them as you are thinking, for your reference in case you get stuck.

”…as designers we have tools and knowledge to create functional, sustainable solutions for a better social, economic, political environment. The organizational skills that come along with being a designer in terms of planning are such a resource. It is time NOW to put them to good use and offer our skills to groups that are working HARD towards a better world.”

– Amy Franceschini, artist, farmer, activist

“Almost two years after its founding in a basement in Berkeley, California, The

Greenhorns has matured from an idea for a recruitment film into a widespread

national community. We are now happily rooted on my first commercial farm, Smithereen, on rented land in the Hudson Valley of New York. In the autumn

of 2007, we officially began seeking out mentors and characters for a film, traveling the country with a confident intuitive sense of an emerging

movement of young farmers and a series of borrowed cameras and generous cinematographers.”

What do the arts have to offer farms and what do farms have to offer the arts?

?????

Does anyone have any questions that they think could lead to deeper discussion about the ways in which the arts enhance farm-based education?

OPEN SPACE TECHNOLOGY (OST)

Whoever comes is the right people.

Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

Whenever it starts is the right time.

When it's over, it's over.

The “Law of Two Feet” or mobility

- Infusion of new life or perspective into farm or environmental education and culture on the one hand and into the art world(s) on the other

- Connection to cultural heritage- Rural/ urban dialogue - Activation or involvement of (more of) the senses - Modes of valuing other life- Design—chicken tractor design, tool and machine design,

webdesign, food packaging design, book design, branding- Production and development of ‘art’ materials - paint, yarn- Moviemaking and journalism—for getting the words and

images out, for articulation, reflection and impact on policy- Fundraising events, events in general- Gallery, performance space - Music, reading, workshop venue - Temporary or long-term residence/ studio space

Considering our discussions and all we have covered today, how could your farm education program be

enhanced using i.e. artist residencies, interventions, art

shows, the arts?

To Get the Blog Rolling

1.Do you have a specific question about the arts as they are presently functioning in your farm or classroom? Please formulate and share this question using A Made Place blog (which I will email inviting you to join immediately following this workshop).

www.amadeplace.com


2.Could you put your conception of the

relationship between the arts and farms in the form of a line drawing, possibly a diagram but maybe just a picture (and either scan or photograph and upload this image to A Made Place blog)?


Please post an image of an artistic practice being carried out on a farm or in some relation to the land…or an image of the product of such practice, possibly a photograph taken, maybe a painting, a needlepoint, pottery, etc. These images may challenge traditional or contemporary understandings of what art is or can be.

3.

ARt Activity: MyThs of OriGin

How did the piglet get its curly tail? Its mom curled it with a curling iron!


ACTIVITY MATERIALSchoices

Egg, water and earth pigment constitute egg tempera paintwhich is for painting with sable brushes on wood

-

Walnut ink is for writing or painting on paper with quill pens, bamboo pens and bamboo brushes

In the future, you could make it or

buy it!

If you find or follow a good how-to step-by-step for making walnut ink, post it to >>>>

A Made Place blog: www.amadeplace.com

Or post a picture of your own batch!

http://www.amadeplace.com/

A note on traditional preparation of grounds for egg tempera painting

Egg tempera must be painted on a rigid support (as opposed to a flexible support like unmounted paper or stretched canvas), otherwise it will flake and crack off. Egg tempera is often painted on a board of masonite or wood, which is first sealed using natural glue and then prepared with gesso. Traditional gesso is a chalk ground itself made with natural glue. A piece of canvas or linen is often glued to the board before the gesso is applied. So, it goes: wood panel, rabbit skin glue, rabbit skin glue, canvas, rabbit skin glue, rabbit skin glue and then 5-10 layers of gesso. There are great recipes for this kind of preparation all over the internet. It can be time consuming and takes some practice. You may be creative and you may cut corners or discover alternatives.

An alternative (simpler, quicker, less materials intensive) ground for painting with egg tempera:

*

This is how I prepared the wood we are painting on today.

1. Collect some wooden wine boxes from your local wine store (the wood is untreated and relatively straight).

2. Buy some rabbit skin glue from your local art store. It comes dry, you may have to soak it overnight, depending on the brand. You can also order it here: www.sinopia.com. 3. Buy a 2 inch brush from your local hardware store. Break the boxes down, you may need a hammer for this. Don’t forget to remove all staples or nails (or else hammer them in).

What do the arts have to offer farms and farms the arts? Take a few minutes to reconsider your initial response and then formulate your response now. Would anyone like to share and compare her initial and closing response to this question, our through-line?