JUL 19
FEAST II:
Let the Plants Carry Us
CPW – Kingston, NY
Saturday, July 19, 2025
1:30-4:30 PM
Curated by Kathy High
MENU
Let the Plants Carry Us reflects on plants as a means to address climate chaos, improve health, and build resiliency. It features People’s Health Sanctuary leader Xavier Coughlin; environmental artist Ellie Irons; bioregional folk herbalist Tara Quakenbush; sound artist Lisa Schonberg; environmental artist/scientist Jeni Wightman; and media artist Jude Abu Zaineh working with food and plant microbes.
Pertinent photographs and videos, including those generated by participants before the event, are projected and discussed at CPW during FEAST. Projections also include videos and sound of mud microbial musings by Wightman and videos of ant encounters by Schonberg, and plant photos by Abu Zaineh.
FEAST II includes discussions during Herbal Apothecary tea tastings, Yesfolk Tonics kombucha, acupuncture, and workshops listening to soils, ants, and other invertebrates in the vicinity, concluding with a sumptuous high tea.
PHOTOS
SHORTS
FEAST II Overview
Ellie Irons
Jenifer Whightman
Jude Abu Zaineh
Kathy High
Lisa Shonberg
Xavier Coughlin
CURATOR
Kathy High
Kathy High is an interdisciplinary artist working with technology, art and biology. She collaborates with scientists and artists, and considers living systems, empathy, animal sentience, environmental justice, and the social, political and ethical dilemmas of biotechnology and surrounding industries. She has received awards including the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and National Endowment for Arts. Her art works have been shown at documenta 13 (Germany), Guggenheim Museum, Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center, Exit Art (NYC), UCLA (Los Angeles), Science Gallery, (Dublin), and MASS MoCA (North Adams), Para-site Gallery (Hong Kong), and Medical Museion (Copenhagen). High is Professor of New Media in the Arts department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and has a lab at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies. She is Co-Director for the urban environmental center, NATURE Lab, with the community media organization The Sanctuary for Independent Media.
FEAST II
PARTICIPANTS
Xavier Coughlin
Xavier Coughlin is an emergency medicine doctor from Hudson valley. He works hands-on with the Sanctuary for Independent Media (Sanctuary) to help develop the People’s Health Sanctuary and provide the community with access to a safe place. He seeks to develop a free integrative medicine clinic, and he continues to bring a variety of clinical skills to address the goals of a radical understanding of health.
Website
Ellie Irons
Ellie Irons is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. From foraged watercolor paintings (Feral Hues: A Guide to Painting with Weeds), to un-lawning experiments, her work combines socially engaged art, ecology fieldwork, and embodied learning. Working with various publics, Irons asks us to rethink our entanglement with plants. She is the co-Director of NATURE Lab for The Sanctuary.
Website
Lisa Schonberg
Lisa Schonberg is a composer, percussionist, and ecological sound artist. Informed by her background in ecology, Schonberg composes music with a focus on cryptic insect sounds and other underappreciated beyond-humans. She documents soundscapes, insects, and habitat through video, music composition, and engaging publics in listening to heightened consideration of these soundworlds.
Website
Jenifer Wightman
Jenifer Wightman is a biologist and artist interested in the co-evolution of life and landscape. Using biologist Sergei Winogradsky’s technique, she makes living color field paintings with microbes that photosynthesize pigment in unique soil samples. Transitions in the color indicate ecological succession of microfauna metabolizing a livelihood within a finite ecosystem which Wightman photographs.
Website
Jude Abu Zaineh
Jude Abu Zaineh is a Palestinian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist-curator working across art, food, science, and technology studies. Her work develops counter-archive practices and investigates themes of culture, displacement, storytelling, diaspora, and belonging through de-colonial and feminist perspectives. She examines ideals of home and community influenced by her childhood in Southwest Asia.