Art in the Garden: Journey Sticks

Step into the garden and explore the beauty of natural materials as you craft your own Journey Stick—a colorful, textural art piece inspired by the land and your unique creative story. Participants will work with sticks, twigs, yarn, and gathered offerings from nature to build a personal visual narrative, wrapping and assembling materials in ways that spark imagination and flow. Whether inspired by a walk through the garden, a memory from childhood, or the colors of the season, your finished piece can be proudly displayed on the wall, or to talk with you as a walking stick, as a constant visual reminder of your connection to place.

Your Facilitator: Wilhelmina Grant-Cooper

Wilhelmina Grant Cooper uses found objects and discards to redirect unwanted items from the landfill. Her artistry embraces the DIY method of creating useful items through recycling.

Find more of her work at @sistaahstudio on Instagram or on sistaah.org

Join us for Art in the Garden every Thursday!

Grounded in the garden, join us to critically and creatively engage in a diversity of artmaking techniques that open us up to deeper dialogue on place, our relationships to our lived environments, ecological concerns, and contemporary culture. Learn meditative and mindful drawing, printmaking and sculptural techniques, scientific observation with plant portraiture, nature-inspired intuitive artmaking and mixed media exploration, and other various practices from botanical and ecologically-focused contemporary artists to create works of art to nurture your relationship to the garden.

Immerse yourself in the learning garden, greenhouse, and across Riverbank State Park's green roof overlooking the Hudson River to create artwork that is rooted in place and in partnership with plants.

Workshops are rain or shine.

When inside the greenhouse and kitchen we will open our double-doors and windows to vent the space and encourage masking and social distancing when in more closed-in spaces.

Accessibility: Our kitchen/classroom space is wheelchair accessible. With prior planning, we can add a few small mats onto the pebbled ground of greenhouse to make a small wheel-chair accessible path. Our learning garden has grass paths, and the entrance is through a gate with a small, raised entrance. Our tables can be lowered/raised, and we have several backless benches or stools. Our kitchen is in regular use, and while we try to cook without peanuts, much of our cookware is shared and we cannot guarantee a nut-free environment. We have a first aid kit, and the closest AED is in another building several yards away. Drinking water is made available in refillable pitchers.

Our closest bathrooms are a building away, about a one-minute walk. A gender neutral bathroom is also available, and this is accessible by key which you can request from staff. We are not a scent-free zone, and because herbalism classes take place here, cannot guarantee that the site will be clear of any essential oil smells. If you have needs not addressed here, please reach out to Mallory Craig at mcraig@thehort.org.