Julie Anand

Yuma friends,

I decided to use this year's post to describe a collaborative project I worked on over the summer, Río Canciòn. I received a grant from Arizona State University's Global Institute of Sustainability to travel to Honduras to work with my brother John Blake Batten of Guaruma, an environmental education non-profit http://guaruma.org 

Over the course of a week, we made art with about one hundred youth of the villages of Las Mangas and El Pital, about an hour up river into the jungle from La Ceiba on the Carribean coast. We made Mundos Pequeños—tiny microcosms of found materials and modeling clay to explore ideas of scale. 

I also introduced the students to cyanotypes, a turn of the century method for making blueprint photographs, so that they could experience analog light phenomena and explore patterns in nature printing plant material from their surroundings. We talked about Anna Atkins, quite possibly the first female photographer, who used this method to make the first book illustrated by photographs in her Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions. I was interested in having these kids recognize that people can study plants for a living and also in gesturing to female empowerment by referencing a botanist/artist from 1843.

 

Students made both blueprints on paper and also contributed their blueprints on cloth to a collaborative tapestry. 

Ultimately, we had enough funding to bring Camillo Lopez and John Blake Batten of Guaruma up to Arizona for a culminating exhibition at ASU with outcomes from the workshops as well as over a hundred of the student's digital photographs of their incredible ecosystems. 

It was truly a wonderful collaboration and I am deeply impressed with the vision of these young people and with the work my brother is doing in Honduras. Wanted to sing the praises of Guaruma.org and share an experience with you all. Can't wait to see you once again at our community shindig!

 --Julie Anand   ASU Professor and Yuma Symposium Board Member