All Climate Events

Wednesday December 4, 2019.  7;00 PM. EcoArt in the Community: Urban Farms and Healing Plants. Jamie Bruno and Michaeline Picaro. Sponsored by Rutgers University-Newark Paul Robeson Galleries; Clement A. Price Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience;   Rutgers University-Newark Department of Arts, Culture and Media. More information here. 

Join Newark-based artist Jamie Bruno and Ramapough Lunaape artist Michaeline Picaro on Wednesday, December 4th from 7-9pm at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Express Newark as they discuss their works-in-progress in new phases of their art careers. Bruno will discuss how she balances her advocacy and community organizing work with urban farming and composting along with her art making. Michaeline Picaro will discuss her work in terms of healing and plants. She brings her work as a nurse and as a traditional healer as new material from which she is now engaging her practice. Join us for dinner and discussion on topics ranging from urban farming to mycorrhizal networks to dirt pigments to Kirlian photography.

Artist Bios

Jamie Bruno

Jamie Bruno is an American interdisciplinary artist and local food systems advocate living in Newark, NJ. She has worked in urban agriculture for the last five years focusing compost policy and local food system development with nonprofits Planting Seeds of Hope and Urban Agriculture Cooperative. In 2014 and 2015 Jamie worked on garden-based nutrition and education initiatives with the national organization Foodcorps in partnership with The Greater Newark Conservancy. Jamie finished a Printer-in-Residence with Newark Print Shop in October of 2018, creating a new body of work about the environment by merging photography and drawing in a five-color bitmap screen-printing process. In 2017, Jamie helped to develop creative messaging for green infrastructure projects as a Resident Artist with Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership and coLAB Arts in New Brunswick, NJ under a National Endowment for the Arts Grant. Jamie received a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Rutgers University Mason Gross School of the Arts.

Michaeline Picaro

As a proud member of the Ramapough Lunaape Nation, I have learned from early native medicinal teachings from my father combined with spiritual teachings from being/sitting with nature at an early age. These teachings became a way of life, including the daily connection of listening, watching and practice of all that mother earth teaches. As a mother of three, my concern for my children and relatives, and the environment, combined with my teachings, research and nursing background, allowed me to continued me on this journey — a journey of using and reawakening the knowledge of natural medicine for healing and food foraging. The effects of industry and the depletion of farming fields have left us with less nutrients needed for healthy body and mind. These missing or depleted nutrients and minerals are a direct connection to many mental and physical health ailments we see today. Nursing and holistic/energy healing along with my art background has allowed me to experience different modes of thinking in terms of healing and education. Art is an expression of thought that prevokes my connection to nature using Native American traditions, foods, and medicines, along with our traditional stories, allows the pigments I use to show the intertwining tale of creation medicine and how toxins are a part of all of our current DNA.

The EcoArt Salon is a monthly gathering that is free and open to the public for those interested in EcoArt and the environment to share their projects, discuss issues, network, and collaborate together.

The ongoing salon gatherings bring together artists, writers, curators, scholars, and the public from the NJ/NY and larger interconnected global community interested in the topic of EcoArts and its potential during a time of environmental degradation and ecological crises.