PLANT

Title: Rochester Roots: Dig In!
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center, PLANT Reading Room

Description: It is time to develop innovative approaches to building healthy lives and healthy communities. Homegrown food is one key. In this workshop, Jan McDonald, Director of Rochester Roots will give you an exciting look at an innovative urban agriculture and educational program for youth that is teaching people how to do just that. Watch a video about the Rochester Roots Urban Agriculture project as told and animated by students who participate in the project. This workshop is for anyone who’s interested in understanding the benefits of growing their own seasonal organic produce, improving the health of the community, the environment, and themselves.
Start Time: 1pm
Date: August 23
End Time: 3pm

Title: Bicycle Tour of Brownfields and Polluted Sites in Downtown Rochester
Location: Departs from Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Description: July 19 Bicycle Tour of Brownfields and Polluted Sites in Downtown Rochester
Guide: Mark Gregor, Manager, Department of Environmental Quality, City of Rochester

Start Time: 1pm
Date: July 19
End Time: 3pm

Title: Bicycle Tour of Edible Gardens
Location: Departs from Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Start Time: 1pm
Date: June 28
End Time: 3pm
Description: Where can Rochestarians find good food, community fun, great smells, and exercise all rolled up in one urban experience? Edible inner-city gardens of course! Join avid amateur gardeners, Colleen Buzzard and Hucky Land, for a bicycle tour of some of Rochester’s community garden treats. $1 / free for members Departs from RoCo, Sunday, June 28 @ 1pm.

Title: Land Art Performance: A talk about Performance/ Earthworks
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Start Time: 1pm
Date: June 14th
End Time: 2pm
Description: Land Art Performance
A talk about Performance/ Earthworks with Rochester artist James Holland. Fault lines traditionally subdivide the art world landscape into either/ or determinations about medium and practice. In this talk James Holland will share some of his views about artists whose work he feels effectively straddles categories, especially those of so-called ‘earthwork’ and ‘performance.’ Issues of documentation, relating to ephemeral artistic practice, will be an important element of the overall discussion, and documents of artist’s own work will be used as a touchstone in this regard.

Title: Rochester City Living
Start Time: 1pm
Date: 2009-05-31
End Time: 2pm
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Description: City living offers affordability, accessibility, and excitement, but city living is also a great way to do your part for ecology. Huh, you say? How do our most intensively developed areas—and living in them—aid environmental protection? There are many reasons why City Living Is Green. We will discuss them in detail with Evan Lowenstein, Coordinator Landmark Society Of Western New York.

Due to illness, this event has been cancelled. New date to be announced. 
Title: Mapping for a Healthy & Happy Rochester with RRCDC
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Date: May 17
Start Time: 1pm
End Time: 3pm
Description: Join us in creating a video map built from recent and historic maps of Rochester’s downtown. In our efforts to envision a Healthy & Happy Rochester the RRCDC has been inviting nationally and internationally renowned experts and authors to speak to our community through the Reshaping Rochester lecture series. The message has been consistent: Rochester has everything we need to develop and sustain a healthy and vibrant future if we organize our efforts and take decisive actions. Come view some focus areas, current and historic vision plans and then participate in building our next effort: video documentation of our city.

For the past five years the Rochester Regional Community Design Center (RRCDC) has been facilitating and participating in local and regional community design and education. Among our activities we develop vision plan documents to recommend and coordinate ways forward that begin with engaged citizens, neighborhood groups and other stakeholders. Our first project is the now celebrated ArtWalk. Building on this success, one of our most ambitious efforts thus far has been developing a comprehensive vision plan for the future of Downtown Rochester (largely the area inside and around the inner loop). To do this we rely on a number of participants who volunteer their time, services, expertise and experience for the shared purpose of developing a Healthy & Happy Rochester.

Healthy & Happy Cities, our current signboard exhibit picturing communities in North America that have adopted or developed LEED certified communities, is a phrase adapted from Sustainable Urbanism, a way to envision and experience comprehensive community design.

RRCDC website
Reshaping Rochester Audio Streams

Cordwood Wall

Title: Cordwood Construction: A reawakening of our building roots.
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Start Time: 1pm
End Time: 3pm
Date: May 3
Description: Peter Turkow, Co-Founder of Rochester Green Living will present on this centuries old construction method that has had a resurgence in interest and practice throughout the world since the late 70’s. The simplicity (children are very encouraged in the construction process), efficiency, aesthetic beauty, cost and environmental benefits of this method of construction will be shown through a power point presentation, diagrams and a physical test wall to see what you can do with wood that most people burn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwood_construction

Cordwood Construction Photo Album

Title: UrbaCulture: Rochester Food Sovereignty
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Start Time: 1pm
Date: April 19
End Time: 2:30pm
Description: Join Chris Hartman, co-founder and co-manager of the South Wedge Farmers Market and the Westside Farmers Market, founder and president of The Good Food Collective, and active urban agriculture organizer will discuss food systems development and the social and economic capital of GOOD FOOD!  Participants will also learn to make a self-watering container garden great for urban spaces-boot strapped, low budget, and easy to build!  Everyone takes one home!

Artists' Talk

in between at RoCo April 4 - May 17

Title: Artists’ Talk by exhibiting artists Ricky Sears & Malin Abrahamsson
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Start Time: 1pm
Date: April 4th
End Time: 2pm
Description: Join Artists Ricky Sears and Malin Abrahamsson and Director of Planning at the City of Rochester, Chuck Thomas, for a discussion of the artists’ work and its relationship to specific aspects of Rochester’s landscape. The artist’s current work was significantly influenced the unused parcels of residential land (and the 6″x6″ barriers that surround them). Sears and Abrahamsson encountered these upon arriving in Rochester. This complex yet not often discussed aspect of the Rochester’s landscape will form a starting point for the discussion of their recent work.

As the local expert on abandoned and vacant properties, Chuck Thomas will further inform the discussion with facts and details relating to the unused parcels of residential land in Rochester.

The exhibition in between presents paintings and sculptures by Brooklyn based artists Malin Abrahamsson and Ricky Sears. The works in this exhibition are influenced by the artists’ first encounters with Rochester NY’s landscape. They relate to construction, demolition and the passage of time within complicated urban spaces. A common theme running through this ‘outsider’s portrait’ are the 6”x6” posts that encircle unused and abandoned parcels of urban land in Rochester. In between navigates emptiness and identifies potential in the often ignored corners of our city.

in between runs in conjunction with the PLANT reading room and Sunday coffee hours. PLANT is organized in collaboration with George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and The Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of The Annenberg Foundation.

Fallen Fruit Tree Adoption at Machine Project Gallery in L.A.

Janet Owen Driggs

Sunday Coffee Hour in the PLANT reading room

Title: Agri(c)ulture: What’s Growing in LA?
Location: Rochester Contemporary Art Center
Date: March 22
Start Time: 1pm
End Time: 2pm
Description:
Los Angeles is frequently billed as a place where culture grows small in the shadow of a flourishing entertainment industry. However, with its increasing focus on cultivating sustainable civic, social and public spaces through the action of growing food, L.A. culture is not just burgeoning, but positively flowering.
L.A.-based writer artist and curator Janet Owen Driggs will present projects that are growing (or have recently grown) in L.A, including Not A Cornfield, Farmlab Fallen Fruit, Islands of LA and Edible Estates

Janet Owen Driggs’ recent publications include texts for ArtUS, RiM magazine, the Hammer Museum, Art Review, and the anthology Kolibri. Most recently she has edited History, Site, Document, a book about Not A Cornfield, an art project that took place in Downtown Los Angeles, 2005-6.

Owen Driggs has curated and organized events with, among other institutions, MOCA, Los Angeles; the Santa Monica Museum of Art; and the Hong Kong Art Center. As an artist she has exhibited most recently in Los Angeles, Arizona, and Mexico City. Before transitioning to collaborative and participatory practice she exhibited for over a decade as an individual artist, with projects appearing in solo and group exhibitions at venues including: Beaux Arts, Delfina Studios, and the Camden Art Center (UK), Shoshanna Wayne and Flowers West (US), Sandberg Institute (Netherlands), Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica (Brazil), and ArtPool (Sweden).

Owen Driggs is currently a member of Adjunct Faculty at the USC School of Fine Arts and Studio Writer at Metabolic Studio, a direct charitable activity of the Annenberg Foundation.