Celebrate the exhibition and installation of Nature’s Long Memory at the LEAP STEM Puerto Rican Art Center at LEAP Academy! Nature’s Long Memory is a pop-up sculpture that is part of the Water Spirit series, designed and built by Sarah Kavage and the Camden Crew, a team of young Camden, NJ artists composed of Adriana Amador-Chacon, Priscilla Rios, and LEAP alumnus Breiner Garcia.
Nature’s Long Memory was designed as a mobile devotional structure to be installed at Watershed Alliance partner sites in and around New Jersey. Made of locally harvested Phragmites reed (an invasive, yet robust species of plant), the sculpture has been placed at various public spaces throughout Camden including Cramer Hill Nature Preserve, Pyne Poynt Park, Von Nieda Park, Bethel AME Church, and RCA Pier. With each installation a new design has been employed by the Camden Crew, including a series of prompts designed to engage those who encounter the work. The prompts asked participants to reflect on their role in nature and their own impact on their community. The LEAP installation will be its final stop, showcasing its many different forms and variety of interactions and scenarios it has generated in its travels.
The installation will include a variety of original artworks, informational presentations and programming engaging themes of nature, culture and how art can connect them all. By highlighting the larger Lenapehoking watershed in general and Nature’s Long Memory in particular, the exhibition offers LEAP students and visitors from the general public an opportunity to consider how, working symbiotically with each other and with nature, we can begin to make a better and collectively resilient future.
DIRECTIONS & ACCESS: LEAP is accessible from Philadelphia via the Patco train stopping at Lindenwold Station; in Camden via NJ Transit Busses 404, 405, 406, 407 and 451 and the Patco train stopping at City Hall. Parking is available on 6th and Cooper Streets.
This is an ADA accessible indoor event; masks are required. Open to the public. All ages.
Nature's Long Memory installed at Cramer Hill Nature Preserve, Camden, NJ. Photo by Ricky Yanas.