About this Event
What has rooted in you this year? What are you still calling in?
As the growing season settles into quiet, we’ll gather in the greenhouse to honor all the plants that bloomed, seeded, and those that continue to offer their textures, colors, and stories, even after a season of growth.
In this hands-on workshop, you’ll create a natural and upcycled table centerpiece by creating your own gratitude candle vessel using dried and suspended botanicals sourced from the garden, as well as your own intentions, as a small tabletop archive of this year's growth.
Together, we’ll explore how plants can anchor our gratitude rituals: how a sprig of rosemary can hold memory, how marigold petals can evoke protection, how seeds can symbolize future possibility.
By the end, you’ll have a finished centerpiece and gratitude candle vessel to bring home—an altar of sorts for your table, filled with the quiet beauty of botanical materials and the warmth of your intention.
Your Facilitator: Junell Banks
Junell Banks is a creative visionary from Harlem, who blends her passions for creative direction, youth empowerment, and self-love advocacy. Through her multifaceted initiatives, she embodies a commitment to inspiring those around her to embrace their authentic selves with creativity and confidence.
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 [email protected].
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Greenhouse and Education Center at Denny Farrell Riverbank State Park, 679 Riverside Dr, New York, United States
USD 0.00
