An important part of the work that Food 4 Farmers does for families is host information sessions. These sessions focus on seasonal hunger issues and discussions about life at home. The workshop I observed was about 4 hours long, and most of the women had traveled at least an hour to get to the class. At first the women were shy, but as the workshop progressed everyone seemed to relax.

This October I was lucky enough to travel to Nicaragua for two weeks to document the work of Food 4 Farmers. Food 4 Farmers is a non profit that focuses on addressing the problem of chronic seasonal hunger is Latin America. Coffee is a seasonal product, which means when it is no longer a time for harvest or growth, families must rely on what’s left of their income from the coffee harvest, or their savings. Food 4 Farmers works with co-operatives and community-based organizations to help identify challenges, resources and strategies specific to the community and build long-term solutions to hunger. In order to accomplish this, Food 4 Farmers works with communities on Strategic Planning and Capacity Assessment, Community Diagnosis, Partnerships and Alliances, and Monitoring and Evaluation. On this trip I travelled with Marcela Pino, co-director of Food 4 Farmers, to Jinotega where we worked with Soppexcca, a coffee co-op.

About a month ago I had the pleasure of meeting up with The Gang of Thieves at the Bella Terra Music Festival. They are an amazing band with a funk rock sound and are probably some of the nicest people I’ve ever met. After launching a successfull kickstarter project, they recently recorded an album with […]

Mary Ellen Mark Workshop at CPW.

Renata Davis Photoshoot.

A few months ago I did a photoshoot at one of my favorite book store’s of all time, Lyrical Ballads. I stumbled into the store four or five years ago and fell in love – they have a huge variety of books and a seemingly never ending supply of them. As you walk through the store you realize that behind one tower of books, there is another room, with more antiques and treasures to be discovered. I had been eyeing the store as a photoshoot location for years, so I finally got up my courage to ask if I might be able to do a photoshoot for my project. 

I met Forrest a few weeks ago and was fascinated by his life story. I decided to take a chance and see if he might be interested in creating an image with me. Thankfully, he said yes.

Making art in memory of Tom Kirkpatrick. 

Audrey is a fascinating, incredibly caring and talented person, and I was so lucky to become friends with her at Skidmore, and we ended up living together our senior year. I wanted to interview Audrey for this project because I knew, even though we became very close senior year, I had not heard all of her stories and she had a unique upbringing and outlook on life.

This blog has largely been dedicated to art – art that I have observed, created, been inspired by, and anything that I have truly connected with. It has been a cataloguing of my artistic life. I rarely include much writing in my posts, as I am not a writer, but a visual person. Nevertheless, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on the role of art in the past year of my life, particularly because it has proved to be one of the larger players and influenced some of my biggest decisions.