Beakuency: Bird-Friendly Farms in Hudson Valley! is a community-engaged art project developed with Cornell Cooperative Extension of Columbia and Greene Counties. It offers hands-on workshops and a free art zine to highlight local agricultural conservation and explore coexistence. Invasive plants are used as teaching materials in the workshops and to create illustrations for this zine. The materials are collected through local land management practices aimed at restoring ecological balance, which also benefits bird populations.
Two pigment workshops were held, one in Accra and one in Hudson, NY. Participants experienced every stage of making lake pigment, except for the final grinding stage in a mortar.
From participants:
I loved your workshop this weekend!! It was such a beautiful yet practical introduction to paint making, and I'm very excited to apply the new skills in my studio soon.
I went to such a great workshop today on making paint from invasive plants with @mayukof through @ccecgc !! I now have a sense of the process and can’t wait to experiment with making pigments.
I also had a presentation table to share the results from my experiments.
If you're interested, there will be two more workshops in the fall!
This project is made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant Program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of The Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature and administered by CREATE Council on the Arts.