Caryl Henry Alexander- Curator "Oasis in the Woods " Long Beach

 August 23rd - August 25th, 2024, Loiter Galleries, Long Beach, California. 

Visual Arts Development Project welcomes curator Caryl Henry Alexander as she presents and explores her installation from "Nzinga Nature Tour Oasis 2023", the topic of "Land Art" or "Earth Art" in a three-day installation.  

Caryl Henry was born in Highland Park, New Jersey, in 1955. She has been a practicing artist her whole life and has exhibited widely in galleries and museums in the US and abroad. 

Her practice focuses on social and environmental justice, women's rights, and cultural equity. She is a proud founding member of several artists and women's grassroots advocacy groups in the Bay Area. 

Her education is a mélange of traditional art schools, residencies, and collaborations with artists in communities internationally. She is a 1980s adapter of non-traditional arts education projects, including community public art, artists in the schools, and as a curator of storytelling art exhibitions. Caryl has also taught in art schools and universities and is today a mentor to many of her former students.

For the last two decades, Ms. Henry Alexander has focused on visually communicating our not-so-natural environment's catastrophic changes and its joys and sorrows. Today, her work is collaborative and leans into community, a sustainable world, and joy! 

Environmental art encompasses historical approaches to nature in art and more recent ecological and politically motivated works. It has evolved away from formal concerns, such as monumental earthworks using earth as a sculptural material, towards a deeper relationship to systems, processes, and phenomena related to social concerns.

Integrated social and ecological approaches developed as an ethical, restorative stance emerged in the 1990s. Over the past ten years, environmental art has become a focal point of exhibitions worldwide as climate change's social and cultural aspects come to the forefront.

What is Deep Play?

Play allows one to encounter risky or potentially life-threatening experiences, develop survival skills, and conquer fear.

This type of play is defined by play behavior that can also be considered risky or adventurous.  Deep play can happen alongside any of the other types of play – Creative play, communication play, dramatic play, exploratory play, fantasy play, locomotor play, imaginative play, mastery play, object play, recapitulative play, role play, rough and tumble play, social play, symbolic play, and socio-dramatic play. 

Learn more about the 16 play types in our blog post, “What are the Playwork Principles and Play Types?”

J. Andrea Porras / Yaya is a Queer, two-Spirit Curator

 

J. Andrea Porras / Yaya is a Queer, two-Spirit curator, producer, intersectional artist, and practitioner; with over 30 years of experience in performance, organizing, facilitation, grant making, grant reviewing, philanthropy, and mentoring. Porras curates’ visual exhibitions, creates site specific installations, ritual performance, teatro y flor y canto movimiento. 

Porras earned their B.A. from California State University Sacramento's Theater Dance and Cultural Anthropology Departments, where they specialized in Black, Indigenous, and Chicano Theater. They focused on acting, improv movement, playwriting, producing, and video documenting. 

They studied, taught, performed, and participated in Inter-Tribal ceremonies as Caribbean Danza Mexika traditional dancers predominantly connecting and building in Northern California across the Southwest and later in Cuba, Mexico, Africa, and New York.

Arts Administration: 

Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission. They served as the city's Arts Education coordinator and later Co-founded, Directed, and Facilitated a Roots, Altars, and Movement course at World Arts Space. 

Arts Grant Specialist for the California Arts Council, where they managed a portfolio totaling approximately $9 million in funding per year. 

I am an agent for BIPOC communities as a member of the Caltrans Office of Race and Equity, Native American Liaison Branch Headquarters. 

University of Davis Education Opportunity Program recruited them as student teachers/peer mentors in Ethnic Studies, Acting, Chicano Theater, Cultural Anthropology, and African African-Caribbean dance. 

Philanthropic focus: 

They have offered intersectional multimedia art between edutainment and story sharing, storytelling ceremonies through solo and collaborations for over 25 years. 

Porras co-founded Movimiento Molcajete (1997) Contemporary Indigenous Teatro Co. & MA Series Arts (2018), a 501c3 non-profit MA Series Arts nonprofit 2018: dedicated to supporting performance, research & practice by women y queers of color, honoring the full spectrum of cultural and gender identities.

Action manager, community, and art gallery curator at Taller Arte del Nuevo. TANA is based in the rural community of Woodland, CA.

Oasis in the Woods 2024 "Land Art" or "Earth Art"

 Loiter Galleries, 425 Promenade North, Long Beach, California- Monica Fleming and Vinny Picardi. 

 "Land Art" or "Earth Art" involves creating art directly within the landscape, sculpting the land, or using natural materials like rocks and twigs to build structures. It is an ongoing cultural and sustainable experiment that serves as a platform for artists and the community to foster personal and collective transformation.

This exhibition will feature images and elements from Junipers Garden's Oasis in the Woods Environmental Installation, including photographs and maps from the 2013 "The Land" installation." As part of this project, artists will create "Land Art" or "Earth Art" within the gallery using materials from the landscape, resulting in unique installations.

Theme: 

Earth art, also called Land art or Earthworks, is an American movement that uses the natural landscape to create site-specific structures, art forms, and sculptures. The movement was an outgrowth of Conceptualism and Minimalism: the beginnings of the environmental movement and the rampant commoditization of American art in the late 1960s influenced ideas and works that were, to varying degrees, divorced from the art market. In addition to the monumentality and simplicity of Minimalist objects, the artists were drawn to the humble everyday materials, the participatory "social sculptures" that stressed performance and creativity in any environment.

SELECTED ARTISTS IN THE COLLECTION

Caryl Henry Alexander- Visual/Environmental Installation Artist

Alpha Bruton- Visual/Installation Artist

L.A. Happy Hyder- Photograph

Jennifer Andrea "YAYA" Porras- Multi-disciplinary Art Practice

Our 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 do we rebuild our communities to be stronger and recreate sustainable places to live?" Importantly, this conversation addresses environmental justice, social and psychological dimensions, and impact.

• From August 21st to 23rd, 2024, Installation begins. 
• On Friday, August 23,  6-9 pm, Opening Ceremony, the Gathering  
• On Saturday, August 24th, from 1pm to 6pm, stories of their experiences and how their installations came together, exploring the elements of air/earth/fire/water. 
• On Sunday, August 25th, from 2pm to 6pm, Salon and Closing Ceremony 

● The environmental and social impact of the project.

We consider the topics of air, earth, fire, and water. Our project directly explores the idea and focuses on the social impact of deep play and risk-taking play that serves to overcome fears and develop confidence as we explore this work. 

Exploration of natural air/earth/fire/water or imagined environments versus the urban built environment and strategy play involve long-term planning to achieve a goal of temporary installation to design and develop infrastructure in placemaking. What does this mean? What are we saying?

○ The public engagement component is free and open to the public. 

Guest Curators:

Caryl Henry Alexander,   

For more than 40 years, Caryl has worked as a powermaker in 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 printmaking, papermaking, textiles, installations, and sculptures. Her media are traditional and experimental, often incorporating recycled or found objects and natural plant matter. 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 one. 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.

Alpha Bruton, 

Chief Curator Phantom Gallery Chicago Network, the Phantom Galleries are temporary exhibitions in nontraditional settings. The mission of PGCN is to promote the visual arts community, encourage personal growth and excellence in artists, and support cultural activities through exhibits, workshops, galleries, art centers, and artist residency projects. Before relocating to Chicago from Sacramento, California, she co-founded the Visual Arts Development Project (VADP), an art service organization that develops projects as living experiments for sustainable practices and as an incubator for personal and collective transformation. The Visual Arts Development Project is a community-based art organization that provides resources, workshops, and venues for children, adults, and emerging artists to showcase and express their art.

Jennifer Andrea "YAYA" Porras- Holds a BFA in Theater/Dance Arts from CSU- Sacramento. 

During her studies in the American Southwest, she was a cultural ambassador, arts educator, and performing artist in China, Mexico, Africa, and Cuba. A multi-tale ted 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 curated by master altar makers drawing on personal history. Envisioned to evoke the transformative value of historical and contemporary cultural tradition, MAP Gallery uses myth, stories, and imagination to give voice to the universality of cultural traditions.

 L. A. Happy Hyder, executive director of Lesbians in the Visual Arts, has been an arts activist and fine art photographer in the Bay Area for over thirty years. 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. 

She is an artist using the camera as her tool and the negative as her 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), I have been ecstatic as I have become physically and visually immersed in this vibrant area. I claim the pictorialist photographers' 1950s Life Magazine as 1950s; 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.

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