https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oasis-in-the-woods-an-arts-wellness-festival-tickets-638393942467?aff=eprofsaved
Escape to a serene oasis in the woods and immerse yourself in a weekend of art, music, and wellness activities that will rejuvenate you.
Come enjoy the Summer Solstice energy at Juniper's Garden, surrounded by Nature's beauty. We will have healthy foods and beverages, and you will meet the artists leading you on a relaxing experience with a walk through their nature-based installations.
Oasis In The Woods: An Arts & Wellness Festival is an immersive intergenerational experience where art and Nature intertwine to bring you beautiful and thought-provoking nature-based art installations, wellness experiences, and more.
Six BIPOC artists-healers from DC, Maryland, New York, and Illinois will be in residence at Junipers Garden in Brandywine, MD, for the week leading up to the festival. During their residency, they will build nature-based art installations and wellness experiences inspired by Nature, the land, and the vision of creating a more just and sustainable ecosystem in the face of climate change.
The culmination of the residency will be a two-day festival where guests will have the opportunity to experience these art installations and wellness experiences, contribute to the land through community art projects, and enjoy good food, live music, and community.
"GRANDMOTHER'S CIRCLE"
Those That Help Us Find Our Way
This project will serve as a living experiment for sustainable practices and an incubator for personal and collective transformation. I have in mind a topic I have addressed in my curatorial practice, calling curators and installation artists to create temporary installations to examine the state of our environment. In addition, I am unraveling common patterns of activism aimed at rebuilding community and remaking place, addressing physical and psychological dimensions of environmental justice.
"The Land," a reconceiving of a 2013 Retreat, where faculty from the Visual Arts Development Project beat the drum and did a call from the four directions, North, East, South, and West, to come and host a gathering of like minds. To discuss what Environment Justice looks like.
Caryl Henry Alexander in 2022 invited me to attend the
Black Dirt Farm Collective. We designed the idea of hosting environmental installation artists to the collective to do short-term artists in residency projects. These investigations will be tied to the work we have done as a collective and a training ground for progress.
Despite African American farmers' historical oppression and abuse in years past, Gail Taylor has chosen to write her own narrative to inspire a brighter future for agriculture. The Three-Part Harmony Farm, run by Gail in Washington, D.C., aims to exemplify what newer generations of Black farmers can accomplish. In addition, she aligned herself with like-minded individuals to form the Black Dirt Farm Collective, which strives to redefine Black people's relationship with farming and agriculture.
Auburn CA, 2013 an element of Grandmother's Circle
My personal growth is essential; the list of projects I've been involved with over the years has impacted the artists and installation artists with whom I've curated their work and not my own. In this fellowship, I want to explore or have an idea, to design and build out four installations that will happen at four locations as markers. And to build artists in residency that will leave me time to play in these spaces. My idea is to examine the history and "acts of culture" within such a universal framework. To reinterpret past and present through the intricated and compelling …. forging cultural myths for the future. Black ideology and content of the history of the mainstream, and predominately white, art world equally assimilated into the experience and vision of actual play, unrestricted and unconstructed.
My biggest takeaway from this experience is to have a concentrated time to explore and plan out ritual reenactment and the restorative powers of each communal participation and to conceptualize a physical movement through space, time, and spiritual passage.
I am interested in developing a "Community Land Trusts and Art Placemaking” to expand the MAP Gallery of Myth, Stories, and Living Traditions in the acquisition of land ownership to capture the value of a public investment for long-term community benefit. Instead of leasing or renting gallery spaces for exhibitions, the gallery would become landowners.
VADP, The Land Retreat, Auburn CA @ 2013
VADP, The Land Retreat, Auburn CA @ 2013
Prince George County, @ 2010
Cole County, IL AIR EIU @ 2013
I am working as a consultant to organizations where we can shape the cultural equity and diversity statements and employ them based on BIPOC realities, and not conformities—using intersectionality in my art practice and doing this type of alternative exhibition work that doesn’t fit into every day or gallery world of for-profit galleries. Most of these projects are self-investments because I feel so strongly that giving artists and installation artists a platform to speak their truths.
My gallery practice seeks to develop a culture of appreciation, where the organization takes time to make sure that artists’ work and efforts are appreciated; develop a learning organization, where it is expected that everyone will make mistakes and those mistakes offer learning opportunities; create an environment where people can recognize that errors sometimes lead to positive results; separate the person from the mistake; when offering feedback, always speak to the things that went well before offering criticism; ask people to provide specific suggestions for how to do things differently when offering criticism.
