WORKSHOPS COMBINE CREATIVITY WITH COMMUNITY AND ACTIVISM
A small group of community members assembled Wednesday morning in a studio space deep within the Longmont Museum at long, wooden tables — some solitary, others alongside family members or friends — and quietly got to work.
They were continuing to build ceramic sculptures, on which they’d started previously. Slabs and scraps of brown clay lay among carvers, needles and other tools students had chosen to give their pieces texture and personality.
But this was no ordinary ceramics class. Participants in Wednesday’s class, which kicked off the final week of a threeweek-long workshop series, will have their work displayed at the AGRI+CULTURE art exhibit next summer. The exhibit will pair Boulder County farmers with artists from around the region and country to share stories about our interconnection with the land on which we live.
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and the Longmont Museum will co-host AGRI+CULTURE on June 8-11, 2023, along with Ollin Farms, the Milk & Honey Farm at the Boulder Jewish Community Center, and the Boulder County Agricultural Heritage Center.
For Margarita Cabrera, the instructor of the ceramics workshops and a participating artist in AGRI+CULTURE, art is about more than simply making sculptures out of clay — it’s also about building community and creating change.
“Art has the power to reflect, and it also has the power to transform,” Cabrera said. “We’re creating communities, we’re creating relationships, we’re creating consciousness. It’s not about the final product — it’s about the process, our conversations, and bringing people together.”
By featuring her students’ work in the art exhibit, Cabrera hopes to elevate the voices of community members who have a personal connection with issues like soil regeneration, pollination and food accessibility. She is partnering with Ollin Farms, a local farm co-owned by her cousin, Kena Guttridge Cordero, to offer her ceramics workshops to the public.
In Cabrera’s workshops, which have attracted diverse participants from different countries, cultures and languages, students were given
instructions to build a “story box” out of clay. Each box, roughly the size of a loaf of bread, is supposed to tell a story about its creator and their connection with the land.
Once students are done building their story boxes, the pieces will be fired in the kilns at the University of Colorado Boulder. From there, they’ll become the handles of 3-foot-long wooden spoons.
The inspiration for the spoons, Cabrera explained, comes from a parable about dinner guests who discover they have to eat using extra-long spoons. The guests who try to feed themselves find that it’s impossible to eat from the spoons, but the guests who collaborate discover that they can feed each other from across the table.
After the spoons are assembled, they will be used in a feast, and Cabrera hopes that meal will be a chance to bring more people together to talk about food access and sustainability.
“Who comes to the table is important,” Cabrera said. “Other community members … need to be also relaying their stories and taking part in those conversations about food accessibility.” Christina Edstrom, a participant in Wednesday’s workshop, said this project has felt meaningful to her because of her family’s history in agriculture and food production.
“My dad actually worked for the sugar factory,” said Edstrom. “Rather than utilizing our land to create things that are making us sick, (I’m) trying to promote the use of our lands to promote the health of our community.”
For other participants, such as Jasmine Sampson, the main draws of the workshop have been the community aspect, the joy of playing with clay and the chance to be creative.
The class “has been eyeopening,” Sampson said. “Meeting different people and watching different people create art — (we’ve been) building a community with like minds. I don’t see this daily.”