Name: Art & AgriCulture: Gilded Harvest
Start: 2025-12-18T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-12-18T19:00:00-05:00
Location: The Greenhouse and Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park

Illuminating the beauty of food, fields, and seasonal abundance
About this Event

Celebrate the richness of the harvest season by turning the colors, shapes, and textures of food and agriculture into luminous works of art. In Gilded Harvest, we’ll explore gold leaf in highlighting our imagery of foods and landscapes that sustain us. Whether you’re gilding a drawing of a winter squash, adding shine to a collage of corn husks and soil textures, or adorning a shadow box filled with agricultural forms, you’ll learn how to use metallic accents to deepen dimensionality and honor the inherent beauty of cultivated land. This workshop invites you to create a radiant artwork that reflects the nourishment and abundance this season brings.

Nadia Bongo is a teaching artist and translator whose writing and/or photographs have appeared in African Voices, Litro online, Solstice, The Citron Review, Blue Mesa Review, and elsewhere. Her first co-directed short poetry film, supported by a Brooklyn Public Library program, has been selected by festivals. In the fall, she was the September 2025 Teaching Artist in Residence for the Washington Square Park Conservancy and her co-created poetic video is on view at a gallery in Philadelphia. Find her at https://www.nadiabongo.com/

Photo Courtesey of artist Nadia Bongo. Find more about Nadia's work at https://www.nadiabongo.com/

Join us for Art & AgriCulture every Thursday!
“Another thing we lost is culture. . . look at the word agriculture. We lost that connection. And so now it’s going back to the culture of agriculture. Why do we grow the food that we do?” - Karen Washington

Why do we grow the foods we do? How is culture tied to our local foodways and agricultural systems? What stories of nourishment are you hungry to tell? What creative acts are you being called to digest? In this weekly series, explore various techniques and practices introduced by visiting artists who will lead us in expressing our relationship to food, agriculture, and the histories and stories that shape how we connect with our foodways.

Through various artmaking techniques like bookmaking, printmaking, collage, sculpture, natural-pigment making and painting, alternative photography processes, participants will create artwork that begins to answer the question: Where is the culture in our agricultural system?

This is a free drop-in program. Come to every class to build on your skill or come to one or two that you are available for. Explore your relationship to food and agriculture and the ways our food systems can connect us more deeply to our local ecosystems and communities.
Event Photos

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 [email protected].