Rally for the bees

Culture | June 15th, 2016

We need bees. They pollinate, enabling plants to reproduce. The Plains Art Museum is engaged in the fourth year of a project to educate our community on the importance of bees.

The Defiant Gardens Pollinator Project began with a summit, hosted by the Plains Art Museum under the direction of Former CEO Colleen Sheehy. By 2010, Minneapolis-based Artist and Ecologist Christine Baeumler joined the project.

According to Melissa Kossick, Communications Coordinator and Media Producer for The Arts Partnership, the initial social engagement was centered around the Madison neighborhood of Fargo, “selected for its incredible diversity, with 17 different languages spoken in that school.” Kossick was brought into the Pollinator Project as Lead Curriculum Developer in 2011, along with NDSU Extension and 4H Youth Engagement Coordinator Monique Stelzer. Now Kossick is Social Engagement and Artist-Educator for the project.

This Spring, the Plains Art Museum’s Buzz Lab Teen Internship Planning Team, including Christine Baeumler, Melissa Kossick, and Plains Art Museum’s Director of Education, Netha Cloeter, designed a template for the Buzz Lab Teen Internship, in its third year, which poised the project as an “integral dimension” of Baeumler’s Pollinator Garden for the Plains Art Museum, according to Karis Thompson, Community Engagement Liaison for Plains Art Museum.

Thompson explains that the 2016 interns are being invited to “think and act on behalf of pollinators, exploring avenues for heightening the bee-friendliness” of our cities and engaging to “create art to advocate on behalf of pollinators.”

Each year, the Plains Art Museum receives applications from Middle School and High School students from across the Metro. Kossick says that is an “unbelievably difficult” task for the project’s leadership team “to select the interns from the talented application pool.” Kossick describes the student interns in Buzz Lab as “some of the brightest of our region. They are invested in both ecological responsibility and the arts." This year, 21 interns, ages 11-17 were selected to be “advocates for pollinators and have the power to change the social perceptions of urban agriculture."

The Rally for the Bees is a rally organized by the Buzz Lab interns held in the Plains Art Museum atrium on Friday, June 17, 3:30 – 4pm. The event will be a way to introduce the interns’ learning from their week-long internship and future projects to their families and friends of bees and community stakeholders, according to Thompson. The rally gives a chance for the interns to “engage with and maintain the Pollinator Garden,” according to Netha Cloeter, Director of Education and Social Engagement at Plains Art Museum.

The Buzz Lab Teen Internship is an offshoot of the Defiant Gardens Project, which is a concept and term borrowed from Kenneth Helphand’s book “Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime” (2008). Helphand writes: “These gardens offer evidence of the profound meanings contained in the expression of gardens.”

Another branch of Defiant Gardens is the Heritage Garden and Amphitheater in Moorhead. Kossick explains that each artist team “decides what aspect of the garden’s context they aim to ‘defy,’ whether defying the urban environment, the harshness of winter, or an industrial site.”

Kossick asserts that funding for this project "has been critical to its success and longevity.” Defiant Gardens for Fargo-Moorhead has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, Artplace America, the Bush Foundation, and Lake Region Arts Council.

IF YOU GO

Rally for the Bees

June 17, 3-4:30pm

Plains Art Museum, 704 1st Ave N., Fargo

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