The 2016 Great ARTdoors Festival

Our 2016 Festival on October 15 was the perfect time to join our Event Co-Chairs, Wanda Hopkins and Leckie Stack, and escape for a day to our 600-acre creative sanctuary and enjoy the art, artists, and autumn scenery while helping to support the center’s residency program and nature preserve. Combining world-class art and the great outdoors, the Great ARTdoors Festival offers tours of the artist-in-residence studios, art installations and demonstrations, mule & carriage rides to visit our new sheep and historic gristmill, an invitational show & sale of pottery and hand-made wares, U-Do-Raku (glaze your own pottery to keep), artist talks, native plant sale and activities for children of all ages. We've got plenty of live music in store, and we're serving up fresh local food, featuring an old-fashioned pig roast.

This is the only time during the year when full access is granted to our protected creative sanctuary and artist studios. The 600-acre property, lovingly cared for by Hambidge since 1934, is home to seven miles of hiking trails, waterfalls, wildflowers, a swimming hole, and a number of historic structures including a working 67 year-old water-powered gristmill. All proceeds go towards the creative residency program and nature preserve.

Festival Highlights

Open Studio Tour & Talks with our distinguished artists-in-residence from California, Kentucky, Georgia, New York, France, Venezuela, and India

Art Installations presented by Amandine Drouet, Lucha Rodriguez, Laura Bell, Jeremiah Jossim, and Pandra Williams

A Participatory Art Installation for kids of all ages by Esteban Patiño

The PlantBot ArtLab, by Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki, featuring interactive art activities that blend natural science, robotics, and environmental literacy

A Canjo & Other Homemade Instruments Workshop presented by Allen Peterson with an afternoon stage performance for all instrument creators

U-Do-Raku – choose a pot, glaze it yourself and have it fired to take home

Foxfire Presentation & Craft Demonstrations in celebration of its 50th anniversary, featuring broom maker Carole Morse.

Live Music including the exotic sounds of Rasika Ajotikar, the bluesy folk songs of Jake Xerxes Fussell, and traditional mountain bluegrass by Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys

An Old-Fashioned Pig Roast serving up our own Bar-B-Q alongside smoked Springer Mountain Farms Chicken and local tasty provisions

Native Plant Sale by Beech Hollow Wildflower Farm

Pandra Williams and Susan Cipcic will be making Bees, Butterflies and Blooms stick puppets with kids, as well as creating a Time Capsule with both kids and adults

Invitational Pottery & Handmade Objects Show & Sale featuring Hambidge Fellows and artists from across the region

Gorgeous Hand-Crafted Jewelry by Lainey Papageorge Jewelry Designs

Snake Handling and reptile & amphibian education by the Orianne Society

Award-Winning Honey Tasting and Bee Education by Katie Wall and Karen Sanders

Pottery Demonstrations in the Antinori Pottery Studio featuring Judy Horton and Laurence Holden

Activities for All Ages with mule & wagon rides, grits grinding, sheep meeting, baby chick greeting, a bouncy house, face painting by Macon Faces, and art-making for everyone!

Artists

Rasika Ajotikar (in residence)
Laura Bell
Marc Brotherton (in residence)
Amandine Drouet (in residence)
Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki
Jake Xerxes Fussell
Cynthia Gregory (in residence)
Laurence Holden
Jeremiah Jossim
Esteban Patiño
Allen Peterson
Oliver Rice & the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys
Lucha Rodriguez (in residence)
Pandra Williams and Susan Cipcic

Project & Artist Descriptions

Rasika Ajotikar
Ms. Rasika Ajotikar is a PhD candidate and a Felix scholar in the Music department at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research focuses on women’s protest music as part of the feminist and anti-caste movement in west India. Rasika holds an M.A in Anthropology (2013) and a B.A in Philosophy (2010) from University of Pune, India. She studied North Indian Classical vocal music for a number of years and has a bachelor’s degree (2010) in the same. Rasika is a performer and experiments with several Indian singing styles. Her interests lie broadly in the areas of music and gender, women and music-making, music and caste, social hierarchies and music, social minorities, marginalization and the relationship between music and social/political movements. Based on her research, Rasika is presently experimenting as to how music performance (and any artistic performance) can potentially be a transformative force towards socio-cultural and political change. Her work with feminist activists and musicians crucially guides this project.

Laura Bell
Laura Bell is an Atlanta artist working in mixed media and a Hambidge Fellow. Her works reference the natural world and the astonishing, often unsettling beauty found in natural phenomena and is explored through the use of hybrid, imaginary, and existent imagery. Bell is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA, where she will have a solo exhibition in Fall 2016. Her piece at the Great ARTdoors Festival is Entangled.

Marc Brotherton
Marc Brotherton is an artist and educator who currently teaches in the School of Art and Design at Kennesaw State University. Brotherton regularly exhibits his paintings in solo and group exhibitions at museums, art centers, and art fairs, nationally and locally. His work has been reviewed in many newspapers and magazines such as The New York Times, Creative Loafing, The Albuquerque Journal, Burnaway, ArtsATL, dArt International Magazine, NY Arts Magazine, and Flash Art Magazine, among others. Marc Brotherton received his MFA in painting and drawing from the City University of New York at Brooklyn College, and his BFA from the University of New Mexico. He is represented by Causey Contemporary Fine Art in New York City; Brotherton lives and works in Atlanta, GA.

Amandine Drouet
The 2014-15 winner of the Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award, Atlanta artist Amandine Drouet is creating a site-specific installation for the Great ARTdoors Festival.

Here is what she says about her work:
Carl Jung once said that the idea of a second birth is found at all times and in all places. This sentiment inspires my work, inspires my interest in the juxtaposition of diverse elements; particularly the tension between beauty and decay, death and life, and rebirth.

I let chance and randomness guide my work, choosing to recycle materials that have been discarded in some way or another. Found materials such as trash, discarded dolls, pianos, fabric, pieces from dilapidated buildings is reused to create something new. Each of these elements had an original purpose. However through my work, I explore and define these elements with the unknown, the subconscious, the unseen in a suggestive, rather than a definite way; like a fabricated nostalgia without the historical coordinates.

Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki
PlantBot Genetics is a parody of the Monsanto Corporation and other Biotech Firms who skillfully manipulate current food production and distribution systems. Co-founders Wendy DesChene and Jeff Schmuki satirically look at the possible evolution of plant species through modern agricultural practices and share current scientific knowledge on the environmental and social costs of bioengineered crops. Through humorous interventions with robot plant hybrids like Monsantra, named after the Monsanto Corporation, one of the largest suppliers and producers of genetically modified seed, we aim to begin conversations about food issues. Like B-movie Godzillas, "PlantBots" are a hybrid of imagination possibility and reality, encouraging communities to see their environments in a new way.

The PlantBot ArtLab visits communities to interact directly with local populations through hands-on art activities that blend natural science, robotics, environmental literacy by way of projects that range from remote controlled robots, recycled toy animatronics, of both living and artificial plant materials, to solar powered insects and living moths.

Canadian artist Wendy DesChene graduated with an MFA in Painting from Tyler School of Art and immediately incorporated materials that would support her activist inspired works. Weary of the limitations placed on art by institutions, she began to invite audience participation into her installations. The outcome was a community collaborative exhibition titled WYSIWYG that has toured 11 different communities, including the Art League of Houston, Minnesota State University, the Art Academy of Cincinnati, and The Henry Street Settlement of New York. Other collaborative-based projects have been presented at the Soap Factory, and Tomio Koyama Gallery of Japan. Wendy is the recipient of several fellowships including being twice awarded a Canada Council Travel Grant. Her recent collaborative work as PlantBot Genetics, with artist Jeff Schmuki has been awarded NEA and Pulitzer Foundation Grants for exhibitions and/or programming at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, The Goethe Institute in Egypt, the Bach Modern in Austria, the New Gallery of Canada, and Marfa Dialogues occurring in St. Louis.

Jeff Schmuki has exhibited and/or completed projects at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon in Seoul, South Korea, the Goethe Institute of Cairo, Egypt, and the Bach Modern in Salzburg, Austria. In 2009, the collaborative PlantBot Genetics was co-founded with Wendy DesChene and in 2010, works incorporating renewable power technologies and sound were created at the American Academy in Rome as visiting artists. Recent exhibitions by Jeff and PlantBot Genetics include Foodture at the Elaine L Jacob Gallery of Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan and PlantBot Genetics: a Critical Contact Exhibition Series at the Cafritz Foundation Arts Center in Takoma Park, Maryland, and artist lectures and studio visits at Long Island University in Brookville, New York. Public projects while artists in residence at The Hafnarborg Art Center and Museum in Iceland and the McColl Center for the Arts in North Carolina gained invitations to the Landscape Laboratory at Buitenwerkplaats‏ in the Netherlands, the KulttuuriKauppila Art Center in Il, Finland as well as Marfa Dialogues/St. Louis at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St Louis, Missouri. Jeff is the recipient of Hambidge's Hooded Warbler Fellowship for the Natural Sciences.

Jake Xerxes Fussell
As a teenager Jake Xerxes Fussell began playing and studying with elder musicians in the Chattahoochee Valley, apprenticing with Piedmont blues legend Precious Bryant (“Georgia Buck”), with whom he toured and recorded, and riding wild with Alabama bluesman, black rodeo rider, rye whiskey distiller, and master dowser George Daniel (“Rabbit on a Log”). He joined a Phenix City country band who were students of Jimmie Tarlton of Darby and Tarlton; he accompanied Etta Baker in North Carolina; he moved to Berkeley, where he hung with genius documentary filmmaker Les Blank and learned from Haight folkies like Will Scarlett (Jefferson Airplane, Hot Tuna, Brownie McGhee) and cult fingerstyle guitarist Steve Mann (“Push Boat”); he appeared on A Prairie Home Companion. He did a whole lot of listening, gradually honing his prodigious guitar skills, singing, and repertoire. In 2005 he moved to Oxford, Mississippi, where he enrolled in the Southern Studies department at Ole Miss, recorded and toured with Rev. John Wilkins, and, last year, met up with acclaimed artist William Tyler to begin recording his first solo album. Jake’s self-titled debut record, transmutes ten arcane folk and blues tunes into vibey cosmic laments and crooked riverine rambles.

Cynthia Gregory
“The current direction of my studio work guides me to specific ideas and formats. For instance, I am most excited about 1) expanded tableau installations that further explore humanistic spaces of contemplation and wonder via hand constructed furniture pieces combined with sculptures, 2) the idea of stacks/accumulation as it relates to lost and found history, 3) house formations and memory in terms of forgetting rather than remembering, and 4) concepts surrounding the “sidereal,” i.e., constellations both in a literal sense and figuratively. While drawing remains my foundation, the future work I am most excited about making is entirely sculptural and furniture-installation-based.”

Cynthia Gregory is a Kentucky-based artist whose studio work integrates drawing, sculpture, and furniture making to illuminate objects and their relationship to themes of time, history, accumulation, and containment. She has exhibited her artwork widely in national and international juried and invitational exhibitions including the Evansville Museum of Arts, History and Science, Antioch College’s Herndon Gallery, Bradley University Galleries, Indianapolis Art Center, Manifest Gallery, Budapest’s Raday Kesehay Gallery, and San Antonio’s Blue Star Contemporary Museum of Art, which selected Gregory’s work in 2015 for solo exhibition. Gregory is a 2013 recipient of an artist residency from the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, and in 2014 Gregory was among the nine artists commissioned to create work by the jury-selected Cincinnati Community Supported Arts (CSArts) Season 2.

Cynthia holds several degrees including a BA in English (Northern Kentucky University), a BFA in Fine Art (College of Mount St. Joseph), an MLS (Indiana University), and an MFA (University of Cincinnati). When she is not making in her studio, Gregory serves as an academic technology librarian and research liaison to her university’s fine art department.

Laurence Holden
“Once I was whole. Now I am broken. Clay moves in my hand and breaks in my hand just as life does. I follow - the flow, the breaks, the walls that rise around a profound emptiness. This is my witness - these works.”

Laurence Holden is an artist poet living in Rabun County, Georgia. He has been a Hambidge Fellow since 1984. His visual works have appeared in over 20 solo exhibits, and are represented in over 200 public, private, and corporate collections. His written work has appeared in numerous journals, and works in both fields have received numerous awards.

Jeremiah Jossim
Protection Spells explores the ancient side of the human mind, looking back to time when magic and superstitions were more prevalent. Each piece is made from local materials and is intended to shown in proximity of that same environment. As Hambidge is a sensitive and creative space, Jossim felt the need to create these pieces as spiritual guardians for any being that comes into its borders.

Jeremiah Jossim is an artist living and making in Georgia. He received a BFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010 and shortly afterward moved to San Francisco where with a group of fellow artists, he helped build and establish an artist collective that allowed for creation and affordability. He moved back to the south to be closer to the land he knew as a child and now makes work that speaks to human psychology, architecture and its connection to the landscape.

Esteban Patiño
Colombian-born Atlanta artist Esteban Patiño bases his work on a system of six symbols that replace the Latin alphabet. Each symbol takes on a new meaning as it is rotated. Patiño created these abstract and playful symbols as a way of visualizing spoken language. Following on the heels of his role as guest artist at the High Museum’s Art Lab, Esteban, with the help Festival attendees, will be creating a community-influenced site-specific installation for the Festival. Esteban is the recipient of Hambidge's AT&T Scholarship.

Allen Peterson
Allen Peterson explores themes of system and community in his work, in which individual elements often combine to form structures based on interrelationships, and performance blurs the line between labor, system, and ritual. Significant works include Northwest Atlanta Globe, in front of Atlanta’s Northwest Library; Diving Board/Kiddie Pool, public sculpture in the town park of York, Alabama; ATL Globe From Memory, a four foot cast iron spheroid of Atlanta maps that was purchased by SCAD-Atlanta; and Terrain, a room-sized cast iron installation of hexagons which has been exhibited in four states. Peterson’s performance art has likewise been featured at universities and art conferences in the U.S. and internationally. He has received awards from various juried exhibitions, residencies, and universities, since his art career began. Peterson enjoys making sound and music in his work, including writing the soundtracks for his performance works and building unusual instruments out of hardware.

Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys
A perennial favorite, local band Oliver Rice and the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys always plays the best traditional bluegrass music.

Lucha Rodriguez
Lucha Rodriguez’ hand cut paper installations are one-time events that only happen at a specific place and for short periods of time. She likes the challenge of morphing the work depending on the space, as the work changes from room to room depending on the environment it’s in. She finds the challenge of reinventing her work for each space exhilarating. During her residency, Lucha will be creating a site-specific installation for the Great ARTdoors Festival. She is curious to investigate the natural setting of Hambidge and to create new work that’s inspired by its surroundings and the constant interactions with nature both physically and conceptually. She is the recipient of one Hambidge's Fulton County Fellowships.

Lucha Rodriguez received her MFA in Printmaking from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010, and her BFA in Graphic Design from The Art Institute of Atlanta in 2006. Her work ranges from etchings, monoprints and colorful silkscreens, to immersive multi-layered installations of cut paper, each created with pink – the artist’s signature color. Rodriguez intricate cut-paper constructions recall the inner workings of the body and the books of medical illustrations that fascinated her as a child inspire her forms.

Born in Venezuela, she has been featured in numerous group and solo exhibitions throughout the U.S., Mexico, India, Hong Kong and France. You can find features on her work in The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Atlanta Magazine, The Hong Kong Standard, Mundo Hispanico, Creative Loafing Atlanta, CommonCreativ, and Burnaway.

She has received artist grant awards from the City of Atlanta, Office of Cultural Affairs and Art on the Beltline to create public art such as murals and sculptural projects. Her most recent commissions include a commemorative, limited-edition print created exclusively for Oscar de la Renta’s premiere exhibition at SCAD FASH - Museum of Fashion and Film. Rodriguez’s wearable art has been featured in Culture Shock events at The High Museum of Art commemorating exhibitions such as Modern Masters, Dali: Surreal Soiree and Fiesta para Frida.

Pandra Williams and Susan Cipcic
The Hambidge Mundus, created by Pandra Williams is a living wall of plants that form a cul-de-sac atop an earthwork, serving as an experiential lens which limits the viewer’s gaze, restricting their focus to the native plants, flowers, insects and birds to which would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

During the Great ARTdoors Festival, from 1-3pm, Pandra and her collaborator Susan Cipcic will create a time capsule with the help of Festival-goers (both children and adults are encouraged to participate). At 4pm they will ceremoniously bury the capsule in The Hambidge Mundus.

Pandra Williams’ environmental installation practice focuses viewer attention through the creation of interactions between the viewer and subtle or possibly overlooked details of the natural environment which both serves and sustains us. Multidisciplinary artist Susan A. Cipcic (MFA 1999, GSU) has been a Georgia Master Gardener since 2006. She often incorporates moss and other garden thematics in her installations.

Event Co-Chairs

Wanda Hopkins
Leckie Stack

Hosts

Platinum Possums Lucinda Bunnen + Lucinda & Bob Chapman + Melissa Bunnen-Jernigan & James Jernigan + Jennifer & Bowman Garrett + Judy & Scott Lampert + Lindsey Mann + Belinda & Ken Reusch

Golden Eagles Alecia Adair-Foltz & Doug Foltz + Cyndae Arrendale + Lyn & Rick Asbill + Turner Ball + Stuart Clayton & Joe Staley + Sherry & Jeff Cohen + Annette Cone-Skelton & Robert Hipps + Margaret & Dallas Denny + Nena Griffith + Laura & Gregg Heard + Wanda Hopkins + Jo & Jim McLean + Kirk Rich + Paula & Russ Rogers + Jane Fickling Skinner & Dan Skinner + Mary & Sam Thomas + Beth & Tom Ventulett + Ruth West & Bob Wells + Woodie & Steve Wisebram

Silver Foxes Diane & Kent Alexander + Margaret Baldwin & Paul Pendergrass + Audra Dial & Matthew Ford + Patricia & Jim Durrett + Jesica & Brian Eames + Elizabeth Feichter & Frank White + Nikki Gugliotta + Catherine & Dick Haining + Marianne Lambert + Elizabeth & David Martin + Helen Meadors + Donna & Jeff Mintz + Vicky Nixon + Virginia Philip & Ben Clark + Barbara Pyle + Marianne Scharbo-DeHaan + Suzanne Shaw & Daniel Biddy + Leckie & Bill Stack + Jessica & Matthew White + Barb & Thom Williams

Bronze Bears Judy & Dick Allison + Jane & David Apple + Maria & Brad Bruckman + Becky & Tom Callahan + Jason Cook + Lisa Ezzard & Brooks Franklin + Carla & Carl Fackler + Gwen & Bob Fink + Jen & Whit Friese + Charles Gandy + Carol & Larry Gellerstedt + Ann & Tim Johnson + Beth Jones + Mo Kennedy + Mitchell Klink + Paige & Bruce Harvey + Chris Lewis & John Johnson + Mary & Robin Line + Katherine Mitchell & Jack Lawing + Judy Zaban Miller & Lester Miller + Lynne Moody & Michael Thun + W. Chester Old & Steven Bennett + Margaret & Kincaid Patterson + Saundra Robinson + Early & Bill Smith + Don Spencer + Erin Steele & Rich Weinstein + Debby Stockton + Gail & David Watson + Leigh Hale Welch + Kathy & David Williams + Beverly & Biff Wilson + Susie & Lee Winton