Programs In Progress! Eco-Art Projects, Professional Development, and More. . .
Written by Rachel Wohlander
September 19, 2017

Harvest time is in full swing, and so is Terra Cultura’s residency at the Barn 8 art space at Leichtag Commons! We’ve been busy taking every opportunity to design and implement programming, testing out our hands-on, eco-arts curriculum ideas within a supportive and diverse community.

Just remembering how much fun we had at Family Day a couple weeks ago!

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Family Friendly Eco-Arts Project

Coastal Roots Farm hosted its last Family Day on the Farm of the season on September 10, and the Terra Cultura crafts table was a popular attraction. Well over 100 participants of all ages joined us in creating painted leaf mobile sculptures to adorn gardens and bedrooms with festive fall colors. Kids and parents playfully painted, while learning about creative ways to reconsider “trash”—discussing ways to recycle, re-purpose, compost, or in this case make art, with items we might otherwise throw away. One family had lot’s of questions about how to compost on a tiny patch of dirt outside their apartment, and we were happy for the chance to brainstorm small-scale composting possibilities with them. Families also had fun identifying the leaves we had collected locally, pressed, and dried, for them to paint, including, sycamore, eucalyptus, oak, grape, ginko and deer brush. A group of visitors to the farm from The Friendship Circle seemed to especially enjoy the art project, and made some elaborate and inspired leaf paintings. Like a mandala constructed painstakingly and lovingly from tiny grains of sand, the ephemeral nature of these leaf art mobiles made them even more beautiful.

Professional Development Workshop

@racheljulia bringing some creativity and play into our lives at The Hive!

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Our next program for Leichtag Commons was a professional development workshop that Terra Cultura developed and facilitated for Leichtag Foundation staff, and the staff of the organizations housed in their co-working space, The Hive. The workshop, which took place last Friday at Barn 8, was entitled Creative Collaboration/Playful Ideation. In light of harvest time, and new beginnings, the workshop explored ways to collaborate and generate new ideas in unconventional ways, in our personal and professional lives. The Terra Cultura Co-Founders pulled from our past careers in artistic fields and our personal creative practices to lead a series of exercises and prompts that had workshop attendees creatively collaborating on their feet and on the fly, weaving some wacky and wonderful performance compositions. We were very impressed with how willingly everyone dove in to play with us, and how skillfully they performed. One participant joked, as his group choreographed a graceful staged collapse, “modern dance is mostly just falling down.” Workshop participants, in setting creative goals for themselves, expressed excitement and motivation to test out some of the ideas that the workshop sparked for them.

A Call For Artists!

Terra Cultura, in collaboration with local artists, is in the midst of a public art project that will be featured at the Sukkot Harvest Festival on October 8th. The project weaves together symbols of Sukkot and the harvest, using multiple mediums, and we can’t wait for you to feast your eyes upon it! If you are interested in being a participating artist, it’s not too late to get involved if you contact us this week! Email us at info@terracultura.org.

We have many more exciting events and programs coming up soon (like this one!!), so stay in touch! Thanks for being a part of it all.

Written by Rachel Wohlander

Rachel Wohlander is a co-founder, and the executive director of culture and education at Terra Cultura. She is an interdisciplinary artist and educator with a background in performing arts and creative writing.

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