PLANT

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.

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

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.

Title: Rochester Roots - Annual Dinner
Start Time: 5:30pm
Date: 2008-09-13
Location: The Downtown United Presbyterian Church

Description: Join Rochester Roots for a dinner of delicious local food and an inspiring evening presentation. We will inform you of local progress in the development of our own urban agriculture project and our plans for the future. Guest Speaker: Bleu Cease, Director, Rochester Contemporary Art Center           http://www.rochesterroots.org/

Title: A Labor History Bike Tour     guide: Jon Garlock
a New History Tour
Date: 2008-09-14
Start Time: 3:00pm
End Time: 5:00pm
Location: departs from Rochester Contemporary Art Center, 137 East Avenue

Description: After a brief orientation the tour will leave RoCo at 3 pm and visit downtown sites celebrating the history of Rochester’s workers — their jobs, their issues, and their unions. Stops include the convention center,where famous orators spoke; the aqueduct, which launched the city’s economy;the first labor lyceum site; the centers of grain milling and the production of cigarettes, clothing, shoes and cameras; the headquarters of the central labor bodies; the sites of the union-run Labor Chest, an anti-chain store campaign, the first demonstration of the 1946 General Strike, and more. The tour will conclude with Q&A at RoCo with Jon Garlock, co-author of the Rochester Labor History Map/Guide, and All these Years of Effort, free copies of which will be available.

Photos from other past New History Tours