-
Presentation:
sTo Len will present an artist talk on his interdisciplinary practice that embodies an "in the field” ethos that deconstructs the job of an artist with a collaborative, holistic, and community-minded approach that blends civic stewardship with playful and poetic investigations.
Teaching Artist: sTo Len, @stoishere, www.stoishere.com
sTo Len is a genre fluid artist with interests in printmaking, installation, sound, video and performance. His printmaking work updates traditional techniques into an experimental collaboration with nature and a site of discourse on environmentalism and art activism. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len's work has included printmaking with polluted waterways, performance events at Superfund sites, pirate radio broadcasting, coastal clean ups, virtual 3D scans, book publishing and archival video remixes. Len has collaborated with historians, environmentalists, municipal agencies and the general public through open call submission projects, co-curatorial actions, interventions, and residencies. sTo Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics. Len was the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment facility in Alexandria, VA and is a member of Works on Water, a group of artists and activists working with and about water in the face of climate change and environmental justice concerns. He is currently the Artist in Residence at the NY Department of Sanitation.
-
Workshop:
Learn the process of making charcoal drawings sticks, ink and crayons. Attendees are prompted to use line, texture and text to tell a story with a personal message about their relationship with plants minerals and animals. We will consider the history of cave art and the use of sustainable art materials in our personal art practice. Attendees will leave with their own set of hand made drawing materials. All skill levels welcome.
Teaching Artist: Roberta Ziemba, @ziembastudioarts
Roberta Ziemba has been a teaching artist in NYC and the Hudson Valley for the past 25 years. Her artwork includes sustainable making with foraged natural and manmade found materials.
-
Lecture/ workshop:
Participants will learn about the importance of pollinators to our lives and simple ways that we can help them. One simple way to help pollinators is to provide clean, healthy habitat. Participants will learn about the unsung super pollinators, the gentle solitary bees, and make a solitary bee habitat to take home. Bee part of the solution!
Teaching Artist: Hudson Valley Bee Habitat, @hvbees, www.hvbeehabitat.org
Founded in 2106 when we asked that very question, the Hudson Valley Bee Habitat is an arts-forward, women-led, creative pollinator conservation organization based in Kingston, NY. We are leveraging our expertise as artists and educators to inspire creative conservation of pollinators. Our public bee habitat sculptures provide clean and safe habitat for solitary, native bees. By co-designing and creating pollinator gardens with our community, we nurture beauty, sustenance, and care in our community.
-
Workshop:
Welcome to Trash Printing with Aurora Brush! We'll be making multiple layer monotype prints using found objects and trash as stencils. The class will include experimenting with how trash can be used in printmaking to achieve new and interesting textures and outcomes, while reusing and reducing what might otherwise have been thrown away!
Teaching Artist:
Aurora Brush, @aurorahbrush
Aurora is an artist, printmaker, book collector and dog enthusiast who enjoys reading comics and taking long walks in old graveyards. Aurora is the founder, producer and editor of Cosmic Dog House Press, an independent publishing business located in Kingston. Cosmic Dog House offers risograph printing for local creatives and organizations looking to produce vibrant prints, zines, books and more! In addition to their publishing business, Aurora also works as a teacher, dog walker, tarot deck creator and illustrator.
-
Lecture:
Join local Mycologist/Naturalist Luke Sarrantonio for a journey through time, as we explore the many ways Fungi and the natural world have inspired and sparked creative expression. Followed by a discussion on how we can partner with Fungi for a more sustainable future. Bring all your mushroom questions!
Teaching Artist: Luke Sarrantonio, @mycophilicorganism
Luke grew up in Rosendale and spent much of his childhood exploring the local landscape, but it was not until college at SUNY ESF that he truly discovered Fungi. Fungi are mostly absent from school curriculums and unless your family has a tradition of mushroom foraging, you likely also missed out on this extremely fascinating Kingdom/Queendom of life. Luke has been working to fill this gap through accessible programming around the topics of Mycology and Ecology.
-
Workshop:
The Deep Listening workshop offers a brief introduction to the practice of Deep Listening, the heightened awareness of sound and sounding. This workshop will pay special attention to our body's connection and response to our planet's environments. Workshop exercises include energy/body awareness, listening and sounding meditation and dream awareness. Musical experience is not necessary, all are welcome to explore.
Teaching Artist: Lisa B Kelley, @lisa.b.kelley
Lisa Barnard Kelley is an experimental vocalist, improviser and transdisciplinary artist residing in Kingston, NY. Steeped in traditional theater, Deep Listening practice, vocal and performance studies, Lisa’s performances and writing explore womanhood, grief and loss, dreams and the confluence of self in nature and the cosmos.
-
Workshop:
Local artist-miniaturist Sergey Jivetin will be hand-engraving seeds with illustrations based on narratives about plants and their deep connection with farmers, seed savers, naturalists and enthusiast gardeners who nurture and preserve them. If you would like to share your personal story of such a relationship between plants and people, bring a relevant seed and Sergey will illustrate your individual story into it.
Teaching Artist: Sergey Jivetin, @sjivetin
With an extensive background in metalsmithing, jewelry design, and engineering, Sergey Jivetin uses the skill set of a master craftsman to transform ordinary materials into potent conveyors of meaning. His practice introduces miniature elements into unexpected settings to examine humanity's convoluted relationship with nature. The disappearance of Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, one of the greatest ecological disasters of the 20th century, heightened Jivetin's sensitivity to the preciousness of natural resources and their management.
Since coming to the United States in 1994, his practice has expanded from wearable pieces of jewelry to include experimental flatware, scientific and medical apparatus, sculptural objects and site-specific installations. He is the recipient of numerous accolades including fellowships from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Peter S. Reed Foundation and New York Foundation for the Arts. Jivetin’s work is in the permanent collections of many public and private entities, such as the Smithsonian Institution, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Art and Design and Dallas Museum of Art.
-
Workshop:
Join artist Michael Asbill for a charcoal making workshop. We will forage a variety of woody plants which we will carbonize using DIY gasifier stoves. Not only will we test the resulting char as drawing medium and ground pigment, we will explore the role of carbon as sculpture material and dream into its eco art potential.
Teaching Artist: Michael Asbill, @michaelasbill
Michael Asbill is an assistant professor in the Sculpture program at SUNY New Paltz. His research involves a deep rooting and interfacing within highly local environmental and social systems. His work, produced mostly in collaboration with others, holds space, opens channels, and constructs platforms for creative action. Long-term, ongoing projects include Processing Collapse, which examines the relationship between extinction and carbon within the framework of the dying North American ash forest, and Tree Speed Future Feed, an experiential research project with Andrea Frank, that short-circuits rigid patterns of observation in favor of slow, intuitive ecological entanglements.
-
Workshop:
Learn about the American Indian tradition of preserving seeds for generations to come. In this workshop, participants will be taught how to sculpt seed balls in the shape of an heirloom fruit or vegetable of their choice. Toss it on a bare patch of earth on communal land to beautify it and create a nourishing garden for pollinators and people. Seed balls do not require planting. Rain will disintegrate the clay and the ingredients inside will help the plant sprout.
Teaching Artist: Karen Jaimes , @Kj_ceramics
Karen Jaimes is a Salvadoran-American artist-activist-educator who forms clay into sculpture to address socio-political issues. She focuses on themes of immigration, exploitation, and indigenous ideology to raise awareness and create a positive impact on the world. By adopting indigenous practices, we might stand a chance at saving our planet.
-
Workshop:
Using accessible non-toxic materials participants will learn how to make a Gel mixture for casting simple objects. This material can be used for a small series of castings and can also be reheated and repoured to make a new mold. With a shelf life of several weeks when this material is ready to be retired it can be composted. This is a budget friendly alternative to casting materials like Alginate and Silicone for anyone who would like to explore mold making. This versitle material has a low environmental impact while producing castings with comprable detail to other flexible mold materials.
Teaching Artist: Kelly McGrath, @kelly.a.mcgrath
Kelly McGrath has been a practicing artist since 2007 and Art educator since 2009. She utilizes wax, paper, plaster, wood, clay and found materials in her process driven work. She is currently also the technician for the SUNY New Paltz Sculpture Department and a SUNY Sustainability Fellow. In her role as technician she researches methods and materials focused on promoting sustainable art practices. As an educator she loves connecting artists of all ages and stages with methods that are accessible, interesting and inspiring.
-
Workshop:
This is an opportunity to create the vessel where you collect dreams, hopes and intentions until the time to develop them arrives. And what better way to create the vessel than by recycling your trash!! Participants will create their own catchall by decoupaging candy wrappers and magazine cutouts on recycled plastic bottles.
Teaching Artist: Isabel Cotarelo, @isabelcotarelo.art
Isabel Cotarelo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been showing her work in the Hudson Valley since moving to Kingston in 2017.
Education
1994-1996 NYU - NY, NY M.A.Counseling
1978-1982 Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Prilidiano Pueyrredon - Buenos Aires Argentina - MFA
1974-1978 Escuela Nacional de bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano - Buenos Aires, Argentina
Grants & Awards
1982 - Exxon Corporation Fellowship
2020 - Warwick Center for the Arts - Honorable Mention
-
Workshop:
Fashion is the 3rd polluter in the world. Fast fashion, designed & created.cheaply by 3rd world countries with petroleum based fabrics, fitting only a small demographic of people; have created this. Sustainable clothing, using natural fibers or fortified with synthetics, don't fit the business model. This leaves so many people with no wear/where to turn. This is one solution for that issue. Bring your gently used clothing, any type of fabrications you want to rework into an article of clothing that works and fits you, now, exactly as you are. And have fun doing it.
Teaching Artist: PJ Flanagan
PJ is an alumnus of the Fashion Institute of Technology, with most of her tenure on Madison Ave. as designer & design director for sleepwear, robes, lingerie firms and private label. Leaving NYC, she created her own high-end line of hand painted silk pieces, that sold to Saks, Barneys, Etoile, etc. In 2017, she received her BFA in printmaking at SUNY New Paltz. She now lives in a 1879 farmhouse, utilizing found materials, fabrics, printmaking, etc. in her art practice inspired by her 3 acre woods.
-
Workshop:
Join Maxine Leu for a Kitchen Printmaking workshop. This workshop will encourage people to think about our connection to our environment. Participants will be introduced to planographic printing techniques based on the principle of water and oil repelling each other. We will use stuff found in the kitchen to make printmaking.
Teaching Artist: Maxine Leu, @maxineleu
Maxine Leu is an interdisciplinary artist, art educator, and environmentalist from Taiwan. Her work focuses on the environment, communication, and identity. Leu has been promoting several workshops about upcycling and recycling that have been inspired by concerns over global warming, waste production, and other environmental issues.
Crisalidas by Isabel Cotarelo
When Gnomes Need to Clean Their Homes by Maxine Leu
-
“Crisalidas” by Isabel Cotarelo (left image)
The need to modify the contiguous space and the objects in it has always emanated as an irresistible force throughout my life. The organic forms in my work that evoke organisms, cells, synapses, or viruses, are visceral and respond to primal emotions, fears of the unknown, and ambiguity. At the same time, these forms deliver a suspended force of dynamic hope intent on expansion.
The pieces in this new configuration of the original installation take on a journey of growth, development, and protected re-birth of a material as a metaphor for our own evolution through the multiple layers of contradicting feelings, fears and hope aiming to forge a positive outcome.
“When Gnomes Need to Clean Their Homes” by Maxine Leu (right image )
When Gnomes Need to Clean Their Homes is a nomadic installation that reminds people of the environmental problem of pollution caused by overconsumption and disregard for the environment. The mysterious litter-picking garden gnomes that I’ve created from repurposed materials pop-up randomly in public areas to clean up the streets and then they disappear. While each has a unique personality and posture, they are all activists, janitors, volunteers, and immigrants. No one knows where these mini-environmentalists come from and go to, but they leave the land clean for us.