Huddled together outside Schupf Arts Studios, Colgate students and local ecology enthusiasts took turns hammering away at the ground, chiseling out a hexagon-shaped piece of asphalt. Removing the asphalt airs out the soil below, eventually creating a small island ecosystem and helping heal the land that has accumulated toxicity in being paved over.
This was one of the events during a two-day gathering titled Grafters X Change: Branches and Networks in late March. The event brought together Colgate and local community members, eco-artists, and activists to foster creative community resiliency.
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History Margaretha Haughwout conceived of the event after moving from the San Francisco Bay Area last year. There, she co-created the Guerrilla Grafters, a collaborative art-activist group that grafts fruit onto non-fruit bearing trees in urban areas to provoke conversations about food accessibility and the urban commons. Here in central New York, she invited artists and ecologists from the surrounding area to share their knowledge and address agricultural issues as a community through the scion exchange.
“I’m interested in getting folks to share the stories of where their scion wood is coming from,” she said. “So when we’re grafting onto a new tree, we’re not only getting the branch, but we’re also getting a history of a community or location.”
As such, community members brought in labeled scions from their orchards, and attendees took them home to graft onto their own trees, allowing their orchards to produce increased varieties of fruit.