Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in this World
The Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco proudly presents the exhibition Only Birds Sing the Music of Heaven in this World curated by artist Harrell Fletcher. The exhibition explores the relationship between art and agriculture from a variety of perspectives including historical and current day agricultural imagery, alternative farming projects, and the representation of farm labor. The exhibition will include work by John Borruso, John Cerney, Farm School, Amy Franceschini with Futurefarmers, Eliza Gregory, Sadie Harmon, The National Chavez Center, Pie Ranch, Natasha Wheat with Project Grow, Jen Delos Reyes, Wayne Thiebaud, William T. Wiley, and Bernard Zakheim. Credit: MOCFA
Foxfire Revisited
Portland State University students from our documentary class are in the middle of finishing up their contemporary Foxfire project in which they are investigating their communities by interviewing nine local workers and documenting their findings through a podcast series and publication. The final series will be posted to iTunes very soon!
Grocery Stories: Gloria’s Secret Cafe
A podcast featruing Gloria Vargas of Gloria’s Secret Cafe in Beaverton, Oregon will be featured in the Raleigh Hills New Seasons Market in early March. Gloria grew up in Central America and the United States. After moving to Oregon in the late seventies, and at the demand of her friends, neighbors, and local businesses, she began to cook the tamales and latin food that she was raised on in El Salvador. She has a devoted following of regulars who have discovered her culinary secrets and then, there’s the occasional newcomers, like us, who are already thinking about when we’ll return to dine with her.
Grocery Stories: Hood River Organic
We recently launched Grocery Stories, an ongoing storytelling project in collaboration with New Seasons Market. The first podcast episode featured Dan Thall, a local mushroom grower from Hood River, Oregon, and was installed in the mushroom display case in the Produce Department of the Concordia New Seasons in December 2011. This is an ongoing collaboration—look for more Grocery Stories soon!
Documentary, Storytelling, and the Folk Tradition
This winter we will be teaching a course called Documentary, Storytelling, and the Folk Tradition through Chiron Studies at Portland State University. The class will focus on Foxfire, a famous book series created in 1966 by a group of students and their teacher at the Rabun Gap-Nacoochee School in Georgia. The books were based on students’ interviews with local people and were concerned with preserving Appalachian folk traditions. We will examine the documentary techniques and oral history methods used by Foxfire and create our own collaborative project based on the Foxfire approach.
What Came Before?
Farm School: What Came Before? was a six week intensive in which students researched the landscape surrounding their outdoor classroom and its forgotten histories. Weekly classes took the form of group walks, readings and discussions, shared meals, and fruit picking. By the end of the six weeks, the class had collectively researched and imagined what it was like on the Wealth Underground Farm property for the past 150 years.
