Wild Earth at O+ in Kingston

Join us in Forsyth Park on Saturday, Oct 7 for two super-cool Wild Earth workshops at O+ Festival in Kingston!

11am, Saturday – Eat Your Sidewalk

Ever wonder what a dandelion tastes like? Curious about how eating can reshape the world? Then come and Eat Your Sidewalk! Matthew Friday will lead a foraging workshop for children to identify local edible and medicinal plants. Using these companion species we will create a few delicious snacks that challenge our usual practices of eating, and awaken a new sense of place.

Learning to identify and work with the plants in our urban ecosystems helps us regain lost skills and invent new ones that take us beyond a passive consumer approach. When we eat a dandelion growing on our street, what has happened to it now happens to us. Our health and its health are linked. Its concerns and ours meet and we can no longer separate our fates.

12:45pm, Saturday – Earth Art: Making Jewelry with Natural Materials

Join us to celebrate the bounty of art materials found in nature! We will forage for materials and use them along with additional natural materials such as seeds, beads and flowers to make necklaces and bracelets.

We’ll also have some of our staff in uptown Kingston in Peace Park on Saturday from 10am-5pm! Stop by and say hey!!

Matthew Friday

Matthew is Graduate Director and Associate Professor of Critical Studies for the Art Department at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is an active member of the ecosystem research and design collective SPURSE, whose projects range from large-scale, sustainable, urban design to community consultation and organizing. As part of SPURSE, Matthew Friday has exhibited in a number of venues including MassMOCA, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Grand Arts and the BMW Guggenheim LAB. This past year SPURSE released the critically acclaimed Eat Your Sidewalk cookbook, an extended meditation on how we can connect to our environment and what it means to rethink how we cook and eat as a pleasurable and ecologically resilient action.

Mary Jane Nusbaum

Mary Jane is a Program Coordinator for Wild Earth Wilderness School, a visual artist and a NYS certified art teacher. As a child growing up in Central New York, she spent every season outdoors, skiing, swimming, hiking, canoeing, and every summer went back-woods camping in the Adirondacks with her ambitious parents and four siblings. Mary Jane has traveled extensively and has a love of world cultures and the natural world. She loves working with diverse groups of people and turning them on to the magic of the wilderness that surrounds us. Mary Jane has been happily putting down roots and raising her family in the Hudson Valley for the past 16 years.