Textures of Ecology, an Imagining America Happening
Join us for an afternoon of crafting with natural materials
When: Wednesday November 13, 3:00-4:30pm PST
Where: Wyatt Deck, UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden
This Imagining America Happening invites participants to draw inspiration from the natural world in their creative art-making practices. We will use natural and found materials to connect with and make visible, in new ways, the relations between place, land, and embodiment. How do our bodies extend beyond their skin? How does place become part of our touching, feeling self? How can we engage our multiple senses to see differently?
Co-sponsored by the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden, Arboretum Ambassadors will share information about the plants and materials gathered for our collective artmaking. We will begin with a grounding activity and orientation to the Arboretum/Wyatt Deck area, then create artworks using leaves, seeds, roots, bark, branches, petals, acorns, and natural materials like oak gall and mushroom ink. Finally, we will share back on our art pieces and reflect on the connection between art, ecology, and embodiment.
Check out the gallery of images and artwork from the happening below!
Participants engaged in a series of activities which included making haptic (drawing by touch) portraits of their own faces, which they then adorned with natural materials.
About Imagining America
The Imagining America consortium (IA) brings together scholars, artists, designers, humanists, and organizers to imagine, study, and enact a more just and liberatory ‘America’ and world. Working across institutional, disciplinary, and community divides, IA strengthens and promotes public scholarship, cultural organizing, and campus change that inspires collective imagination, knowledge-making, and civic action on pressing public issues. By dreaming and building together in public, IA creates the conditions to shift culture and transform inequitable institutional and societal structures.
Funding has been provided by California Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
