The Green Artists League (GAL) is an interdisciplinary artists' collective
that creates public art addressing the
global environmental crisis. GAL is a forum of contemporary artists exploring
art and ethics in an era of ecological degradation. GAL engages
the public through interactive art experiences and hopes to raise awareness
and inspire environmentally healthy behaviors and attitudes. Find
out more ->
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.
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 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 l 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 Plot plan
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.
GAL will be roaming the streets of Provincetown with an eco-intervention that highlights the consequences of waste and pollution on the New England environment. Our giant frog – mutated by water-born toxins with multiple flailing arms and legs – has awakened form winter hibernation and needs food.
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 .
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.
Want to learn more about Environmental Art, Alchemy, Articulture, GAL’s Art/Science experiments, opportunities to join in GAL events and more?
Sign up for GAL’s newsletter by contacting Erin at erin@greenartistsleague.org. For immediate gratification on what is happening in all things GAL. Join our rss feed at the lower right hand column of this page.
New Hampshire Sunday News (Manchester, NH) April 25, 2010
This eco-artist lives green
By JIM KOZUBEK
Special to the Sunday News
PORTSMOUTH
IT WAS LATE February, the winter light pale and snow remained in dirty patches. Tim Gaudreau emerged from a reconverted barn turned art studio on this old farmstead on Jones Avenue, carrying a pile of firewood, and smiling big. His biggest problem — he was running out of vegetables. ”By this time of year, it’s running out,” he announced. Gaudreau is a vegetarian, and he grows most of his own food in an extensive raised-bed garden in his backyard, which he stores to eat in the winter. Squash, onions, carrots, and a pumpkin was turned into a pumpkin bisque with roasted potatoes. Chickens squabble and shuffle in coops behind his studio, of which he uses to harvest eggs on a daily basis, but he doesn’t eat doesn’t eat them. “They’re pets,” he says. “They’re our friends.”
Exciting News!! GAL founder andCo-director Erin Stack is one of only 32 artists internationally who have been tapped to contribute to a magnificent green arts fundraising project!!
Supported in part by a grant from the Newburyport Cultural Council, GAL collage artist Pamela Perkins will conduct five weekday workshops during April school vacation. Students will work in teams to create four large Art-Pots which will later be planted and installed in a shared community garden. This is the beginning of GAL’s “Articulture #3”—a series of ongoing projects.
Called “Flower Power,” the workshop utilizes drawing, painting, decoupage and collage techniques. Participants will visually explore the world of “plant guilds,” permaculture and edible flowers, and upon completion, each pot will represent the horticultural science of the plants growing in them–how they’re working together to create and sustain a healthy environment.
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.
Boston
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.
