Crop Circles and Remediation Field

GAL is very grateful to the New England Grass Roots Fund for the generous grant of $1500 to support the Alchemical Garden in 2011. These funds will help GAL to go forward this year with “Crop Circle and Remediation Field” our  living art installation and soil remediation project.

Rubedo (Red) Permaculture Tree Guild

Become a co-creator in our community articulture project by joining our Alchemical Garden Work Party  this Sunday, May 22nd from 12:00 – 3:00 .We will be sculpting serpentine mulch pathways and sprucing up the garden. Wear work clothes and, if you can, bring along a wheelbarrow, pitchfork or metal rake. GAL will provide light refreshments, eco and permaculture tips and levity.

As part of the Clipper City Rail Trail Birthday celebration, GAL will offer the rail trail celebrants the opportunity to “sow seeds for our sustainable future”  through planting black Kabuli garbanzo beans, and soy beans in the Alchemical Garden. These legumes will nourish the depleted soil and provide an edible crop for the community.

The Alchemical Garden is located at the south entrance of the Clipper City Rail Trail, 40 Parker Street Newburyport, MA 01950 and straddles the Haley’s Bike Spur.

Waiting in line for junk food.

The ubiquitous plastic bottle in our landfills, watersheds, and elsewhere are  the quintessential signifier of frivolous consumer waste and environmental pollution. Frogs are an important indicator species for crisis-level environmental degradation. The present epidemic of malformed, hermaphroditic and sterile frogs  is the harbinger of  zoological disaster.

GAL infiltrated Provincetown during the Provincetown Green Arts Festival with an ecovention spot lighting this dire consequence of waste and pollution on the New England environment. Our indigenous frog – mutated by water-born toxins with multiple flailing arms and legs –  awakened from winter hibernation and roamed the streets of Provincetown in seach of food. The frog’s aqueous habitat and biology has been so compromised by toxins from industrial, agricultural,and consumer waste , our amphibian must now rely solely on plastics for nutrients.

Our tragic  hero engaged passers-by as she moved through the the streets and into stores, restaurants and bars begging for sustenance in the form of plastic bottles.For being willing to screw the bottles into her skin, the frog gave her perpetrators the gift of a card with a suggested “Savage Ritual” that hopefully would inspire animal empathy in the participant.

The Alchemical Garden site February 2010

GAL is turning a desolate  field of weeds into a visually compelling garden that will educate and engage the community for years to come. Located on a 160′ x 25′ site near the south entrance  of  Newburyport’s Clipper City Rail Trail, the Alchemical Garden is a richly layered evolving art and horticulture experience  that is accessible on many different levels to the public.

Alchemical Garden is designed to become a model for a sustainable, interactive public garden through the use of symbiotic, low maintenance plantings and recycled materials.

The ancient discipline of Alchemy marries art and science and is famously known for transforming a common material into gold.  The Alchemical Garden will lead the community to transform on a number of levels :

Alchemical Garden with Spring Wheat "Crop Circles" June, 2011

BUILD COMMUNITY:  The Garden creates a gathering space for individuals to form a more intimate relationship with their community.  The space is designed with visual features and seating areas to compel passers-by to pause, reflect, and have a multi-sensory interactive experience ( sight, smell, touch, taste, smell) with the garden and the community.

NOURISH/HEAL:  The garden will nourish its visitors –  both literally and figuratively.  Pesticide free edible fruit will be nourishing to human and animal guests.  Also, the trees and plants have been selected specifically to ensure they work together to purify the toxins in the soil and to sustain themselves and a rich habitat for local fauna over time.

EDUCATE: Signage and sculptural features in the garden will highlight Newburyport’s history of innovation and will link the area’s past with its present. The garden will act as a living laboratory, by cleaning up the soil through the use of hyper-accumulating plants and engaging local students and members of the community in soil testing and monitoring the remediation of toxins. GAL will use the Alchemical Garden as a center for workshops and other events that will educate the public about soil contamination, remediation, ecosystems  and permaculture.

INSPIRE: The Alchemical Garden focuses on the web of relationships between people and the natural world. Signage in the garden will inform  and engage visitors to act in the interest of the community’s future. In addition to the construction of the art park, the Alchemical Garden project will contribute to the community in innovative ways though: educational workshops and interactive art performances that will seek to awaken each individual’s own capacity for imagination and action and to become more engaged stewards of the environment.

The Alchemical Garden is a multi-year project, with completion anticipated in 2013. GAL is grateful to the New England Foundation for the Arts for supporting our mission and  launching the first phase of the garden with a $20,000 grant. To fund our full proposal, we need an additional 136K over the next 24 months. To finish this first phase we have a 2011 fund-raising “target” of securing an additional $36,000 in private donations. GAL believes that no donation is too small and encourages anyone and everyone who believes this will be a valuable addition to both the rail trail and the city’s green mission to be a co-creator. GAL is grateful to the Urban Arts Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art for acting as our fiscal sponsor so that donation can be tax-deductible.

“Funded in part by the Fund for the Arts, a public art program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.”

To make a tax deductable donation to the Alchmical Garden project click here . For The Green Artists League to receive the donation, Alchemical Garden/Green Artists League must be put in the Designation Field on the Urban Arts/Network for Good website.

Our tragic hero will  engage passers-by and crowds as he moves through the festival begging for sustenance in the form of plastic bottles. Ubiquitous plastic bottles act as the signifier of frivolous consumer waste and environmental pollution, while our indigenous frog, an important indicator species for crisis-level environmental degradation is the harbinger of  zoological disaster. For more information on “Appearances” and the Provincetown Green Arts Festival go to Provincetown Conservation Trust.

New Eden Organic Community Gardens Plot Plan

In the spring of 2008, The Green Artists League became one of the first participants in The New Eden Collaborative – the central environmental mission of the First Parish Church of Newbury.

High Rise Nesting Co-op boxes and Radient City Hen House

First Parish’s goal of bring together individuals and environmental groups to develop sustainable community through organic community gardens, organic chicken co-op, and organic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and community events was fertile ground for GAL’s first Articulture project.

The participatory art projects at New Eden is the first of GAL’s  3  ”Articulture” community art projects.

GAL inspired projects at the New Eden Collaborative from 2009-2011 include:

• 2009-2010 New Eden Organic Community Garden Plot created by GAL artist/architect  Stephenie Strogney and myself. The garden was designed to break the utilitarian grid of traditional community gardens to cultivate the contemplative and relational aspects of gardening and community. Plots were clustered into “neighborhoods” and paths were configured as to require the walk to turn several times to get to the other side of the garden as a way to increase awareness of  time and place.

• 2009 “Measure Up”  brings relational aesthetics to the garden. In this participatory community action New Eden Community gardeners in their introductory meeting  were asked to work together to define,  measure and plot out the community garden based on  GAL design. As gardeners worked together to define each other’s spaces individual skills and personalities became apparent with in the collaborative process and quickened the nascent community.

• 2009-present “New Eden Mural” A 35′ mural at First Parish Church, Newbury with imagery created from New Eden Collaborative members’ vision of what makes a sustainable community.
  

  New Eden Sustainable Community Mural in Progress

• 2010-present  ”Radiant City”  GAL artist Erin Stack is working with  Chicago based artist Andrew Barco and the New Eden Chicken Co-op share holders to build ”utopian chicken architecture”  out of reclaimed materials as playful practive of animal empathy. For 2011, GAL will be painting an “inspiring” mural inside the coop for the chickens and expanding the chicken yard .
• 2010-present “Conversation Shelter”  GAL artist Stephenie Strogney, GAL intern Cathy Stephens, and my self worked with Cindy Schartman,  Ben Twombly and other New Eden Collaborative members to design and construct a public trellised sitting area with in the private garden plot of one of the New Eden Gardeners. “Conversation Shelter” is an opportunity for dialogue on  issues of community and private space.
• 2011 “Waste Folly” an artful compost container constructed from reclaimed materials is planned for the upcoming growing season.

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On May 3rd 2010, the City of Newburyport  received a grant from the Fund for the Arts at the New England Foundation for the Arts in support of the Alchemical Garden –an art park and edible public garden being installed on the southern gateway to the Clipper City Rail Trail by the Green Artists League (GAL). This prestigious award of $20,000 is the result of a request submitted by the City and co-written by the Planning Office and GAL. Letters of support were sent by both Transition Newburyport and the Coastal Trails Coalition.

Part science, part art, Alchemical Garden will remediate the remaining toxins in the soil while honoring the long legacy of agricultural and  industrial history at the site—from farm and brick factory,  to rail corridor and 20^th century industry–to the products and services of the more than 100 businesses currently residing in the Industrial parks surrounding the garden.

“We are looking at the Alchemical Garden as a gift by the community for the community,” said GAL artist, Erin Stack. “GAL is dedicated to co-creating public art which inspires, stirs the imagination and is inclusive, educational, and sustainable.” Using the principles of permaculture, an innovative and “green” gardening method, plantings will require minimal maintenance once established. The art and architectural features will be created mostly from living plant material, recycled materials and benign, non-hazardous, industrial waste.

“The Green Artists League is uniquely positioned to design and install this innovative, interactive, and grant-funded garden on the Rail Trail,” said Geordie Vining, Senior Project Manager for the Newburyport Planning Office. “I am not aware of anyone else who can integrate landscaping, sculpture, education, and outreach in this way.  The G.A.L. has an interesting track record with the New Eden Garden collaborative in Newbury and the community garden at the Griffin House for Aged Men, and they are committed to fund-raising and maintenance.  I think their energy will add a lot to the Clipper City Rail Trail and the community.”

The Alchemical Garden is a multi-year project, with completion anticipated in 2012, with a 2010 fund-raising “target” of securing an additional $36,000 in private donations. GAL believes that no donation is too small and encourages anyone and everyone who believes this will be a valuable addition to both the rail trail and the city’s green mission to be a co-creator. GAL is grateful to the Urban Arts Institute at the Massachusetts College of Art for acting as our fiscal sponsor so that donation can be tax-deductible.

“Funded in part by the Fund for the Arts, a public art program of the New England Foundation for the Arts.”

m curtis globalization poster copyright m curtis

Michelle Curtis,  a freshmen at Stonehill College was inspired by GAL visiting artists interative Air your Dirty Laundry.”GAL recently recieved a note from her: “I am a graphic design major at Stonehill and I wanted to share with you  an environmental poster that i did for my graphic design class because you were the inspiration for it. We had to pick an organization that would have supported us if the poster were actually produced by a company. I chose The Green Artists League to support my poster about recycling. The main point of the poster was to show the viewers that there are more than one way to recycle. We are able to recycle trash into art. Please see the attached poster that i did for my class. Thank you for your inspiration.

Boston

ON August 22, the Green Artists League participated in Acteon’s Wake, A Bike Ride and Site-Specific Performance Event across Boston, curated by Andrew Barco and Ion Colon. Participating Artists included Maria Molteni, Siri Gossman, Allison Vanouse, Patrick Wallace, Green Artists League, Ben Smart

The Green Artists League performance was a perverse revision of the children’s fairy tale the Frog Prince. The audience became an integral part of the performance as they were entreated to help save the cursed and malformed Frog Prince by kissing him. A “Fairy Godmother” rewarded the audience’s act of compassion by attaching grotesque, plastic prostheses to those who took pity on the wretched Frog Prince. The hope of salvation via the frog’s embrace turned into contamination as a graphic representation of how our poisoned waterways are now affecting water flora and fauna, but human infants as well.

As a postscript to the performance, The Frog Prince removes her frog head and talks about the endocrine inhibitors caused by BPA’s in plastics, hormones in the waters human medications that travel through urine, agricultural run off that are flooding our water wrecking havoc with fish, amphibians, and now humans.