Recently Tina Picz, Warren, announced a free pop-up art event in collaboration with Juniper Creative Arts in Waitsfield in April. The event was moved to a larger space in Montpelier to accommodate the needs for the event. Picz coordinated the food from Taino Kitchen, which offers Puerto Rican cuisine, though she is no longer involved with the overall coordinating of the event as it moved outside The Valley. Picz hopes to offer similar events in The Valley this summer and beyond.
Picz and Juniper Creative Arts, which is known for its murals, speaking engagements, education, and other artistic endeavors, are members of the Vermont Releaf Collective, which focuses on Land, Environment, Agriculture and Foodways and includes BIPOC members all over Vermont. Picz joined the group in 2020, shortly after her family moved to Warren.
“Through that collective, I've been able to meet a lot of different Black, Indigenous, people of color throughout Vermont, which has helped me to establish some community here,” Picz said. “Moving from the city and having lived in really diverse areas like California and New York City and Cambridge, being here in a very rural community in a very small town, it takes a lot of extra effort to create that community to find people that you can relate to. For me to have to face my feelings around being in a place where it is majority white and rural, [was] just a whole new kind of healing time for me. Meeting different artists, different people that are related to food and land and like me, starting to grow food here and getting really into foraging, just allowed me to meet different people that are involved in those things.
CENTERS ON BIPOC PEOPLE
“Juniper Creative creates art centering on BIPOC people and the BIPOC experience. Seeing their art really helps a lot of BIPOC people to feel represented in a landscape that's very starkly white and, even artistically very Eurocentric. I think it's really important to have people like them, the artists that share that culture and that help us to find affirming space and validating art and culture around us that represents us.”
Picz has worked as a commercial food and product photographer and stylist for about eight years. “In the last year, I've taken off a lot from photography to do a lot of writing,” she said. “A lot of my writing now has been focused around healing poetry and ancestral poetry and around land-based joy and healing.”
Picz reached out to Juniper Creative Arts about bringing a pop-up art show to Waitsfield. “It was originally proposed as something pretty small in a small commercial space in Waitsfield. It turned out that that what they wanted to create was just too big for the space. And it needed a larger capacity for the number of people that started being really interested, so they moved it to Montpelier.”
“It's in talks to try to do something later in the summer in our area, because the original kind of imagining around it was ‘how can we imagine new ways of bringing that culture into rural spaces?’ My plans for the future are to continue trying to coordinate events like this for our area. Whether that's with them, or there's a lot of other artists that we can connect with and makers, foodies and people that do need more support and that maybe haven't had as much acknowledgement in the state yet. It's become a role I want to take on more to bring those people together and be able to bring those events to rural communities.
MORE CENTRAL AREA
“These rural towns, there are so many small pockets of mixed-race families like ours, and it’s always this big trek to have to get to the cities for these events. Why isn't there a more central rural area, a venue or space where more of us can gather and get together in these rural spaces? That's become important to me and our family to try to promote that.
“Allowing those people to tell their stories through their art, culture, and music and food is a way of breaking down biases, and preconceived othering or marginalized artists or people that just haven't had the space to be seen or validated or affirmed in, in spaces that are rural . . . It's hard in spaces that are majority white, there needs there needs to be more ability and access to see diversity within our normal daily lives.
“Last summer was the first time I held a really small event at my home for Conscious Homestead, which is another BIPOC-based group in Winooski. They came here for a retreat just to be on the land and forage and sit around the fire and have time out of the city. We have all of this space here in these beautiful areas that we live in in The Valley and sharing that space in a way that makes people feel safe is important. Inviting people into our spaces and allowing people to use those spaces or sponsoring or donating to groups like that is just a great way to welcome those people into areas that they might not normally come to or enjoy because of fear of, ‘Oh, we don't belong there, or that's just not our town’ or whatever, but The Valley’s for everyone to enjoy.”
The Juniper Creative Arts pop-up art event will take place at the Center for Arts and Learning in Montpelier from 2 to 5 p.m. on April 15, 2023.
