2023 Summer Solstice Oasis in The Woods:
An Art & Wellness Festival
Friday, June 16, 2023, 6-9 pm
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/oasis-in-the-woods-an-arts-wellness-festival-tickets-638393942467
“2023 Summer Solstice: The Land” is a living creative, and cultural experiment with sustainable practice at its center. It is an incubator for the artist’s and community’s personal and collective transformation.
For one week, June 12-16, 2023, artists of diverse disciplines and ages will converge at Juniper’s Garden for a week-long residency. Their collective goal is to build generational bridges while working with ideas and materials that emanate from the land to create installations that answer the question, “How we will rebuild our communities to be stronger and recreate sustainable places to live.” Importantly, this conversation addresses environmental justice's physical and psychological dimensions and impact. The residency will occur in Maryland’s Prince George's County, the Southernmost region, and its remaining rural tier.
On Friday, June 16, 2023, 6-9 pm, as part of the 2023 Summer Solstice Oasis in The Woods: An Art & Wellness Festival at Juniper’s Garden, the artists will host an open house where they will be present to offer free and open to the public gallery walks. In addition, they will be contributing stories of their experiences with the South County ecosystem and the process by which their installations came together.
2023 ARTIST/CURATORS/FACULTY
FACILITATOR/HOST: Samaria Marley
Samaria is a farmer, herbalist, and co-owner of Junipers Garden. She has worked in agriculture and food justice in the DC metro region for over ten years. Her innovative and visionary approach has helped to usher in accessible models of food access and community-centered care. She developed the first low-cost CSA model, C.R.I.S.P., in DC in 2016. Then went on to manage The Farm at Kelly Miller in NE DC for four years. She is also the co-founder of the DC Mutual Aid Apothecary, a mutual aid organization that connects people to herbal medicine, education, and community.
She began her herbalism journey in 2015 and has studied with Wild Ginger Herbal Center, Well of Indigenous Wisdom, and the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism. She is also a 2022 Braiding Seeds Fellow. Samaria and her partner Blain recently opened Junipers Garden, a small-scale vegetable and medicinal herb farm in Brandywine, MD, whose mission is to provide a space for black and brown people to be on land, reclaim their ancestral healing and farming practices, traditions, and seeds and gain access to valuable knowledge and resources. The farm hosts seasonal events, herbalism workshops, retreats, and natural building workshops.
Curators:
For more than 40 years, Caryl Henry Alexander’s work has harnessed the power of creative collaboration with multi-generational, multicultural, and interfaith communities to conceive, design, and implement community art projects in diverse public settings around the globe. In the studio, Caryl's work includes painting, printmaking, papermaking, textiles, installations, and sculpture. Her media are traditional and experimental, often incorporating recycled or found objects and natural plant materials.
Out in the community, she combines her roles as a visual artist, teaching artist, curator, researcher, lecturer, writer, and social activist to support communities in clarifying their shared goals and turning their ideas into action. Her long-term focus is on culture, environment, and nature. She has exhibited throughout the US and abroad. Her media are traditional and experimental, often incorporating recycled or found objects and natural plant materials.
Chief Curator Phantom Gallery Chicago Network, the Phantom Galleries, are temporary exhibitions in nontraditional gallery settings. The mission of the (PGCN) is to promote the betterment of the visual arts community through the arts, promote personal achievement in striving for excellence and continual growth as an artist, and promote cultural activities in exhibits, workshops; galleries exhibitions; art centers; artists in residence projects. She is the Co-founder of the Visual Arts Development Project (VADP), formed in 1996. It is an art service organization - that develops projects as living experiments for sustainable practices and an incubator for personal and collective transformation. Visual Arts Development Project is a community-based art organization that provides children, adults, and emerging artists with resources, workshops, and venues to show and express their art form. https://vartsdevelopmentproject.blogspot.com
Jennifer Andrea "YAYA" Porras- Holds a B.A. in Theater/Dance Arts from CSU- Sacramento.
During her studies and the American Southwest, she was a cultural ambassador, arts educator, and performing artist in China, Mexico, Africa, and Cuba. A multi-talented artist who has received Fellowships from Teatro Campesino, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), was a youth mentor and video documenter for the Center for African Peace Conflict Resolution. Curator of the International Society of Altar Making artist constructs temporary installations which are curated by master altar makers drawing on personal history: Envisioned to evoke the transformative value of historical and contemporary cultural traditions, MAP's Gallery uses the power of myth, stories, and imagination to give voice to the universality of cultural traditions.
Happy/L. A Hyder – Photographer executive director of Lesbians in the Visual Arts has been an arts activist and fine art photographer in the Bay Area for more than three decades. She taught herself photography with a Hasselblad camera in 1971 (the same year she learned to belly dance) and has been developing her craft ever since. https://www.edgewater-gallery.com/happyla-hyder-1/
I am an artist using the camera as my tool and the negative as my canvas. Loving the intricacies of architecture, I seek the same in nature. Every day since spring 2016 (my first in Mendocino following 47 years in San Francisco) finds me ecstatic as I became physically and visually immersed in this vibrant area. I claim the pictorialist photographers of 1950s' Life Magazine as mentors; their crisp, sometimes stark, B&W images began my love of photography, informing my budding vision and, to this day, making me exact in my choice of image to take and to print.
Gabrielle Gilliam, g.gilliam024@gmail.com
Gigi is a holistic wellness educator, experienced curator, 200-hour certified vinyasa yoga teacher, social justice advocate, and an eternal student of life. She uses the principles of yoga, mindfulness attitudes, and natural wisdom as catalysts for ease, empowerment, and liberation. With a strong belief that holding space for collective reflection, imagination, and transformation is the key to meaningful change, Gigi regards her work as spiritual activism. Her teaching style honors the beauty and nuance of the human experience while encouraging individual power and curiosity along the way.
"Vinyasa" is a Place for Collective Reflection, Imagination, and Transformation
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