What is a Walking Artist?
VMFA Special Workshop
Instructor: Alexandria Searls
Saturday, July 26
10:00 AM - 2:30 PM
Join VMFA Instructor Alexandria Searls on Saturday, July 26th from 10:00 AM - 2:30 PM for a VMFA Special Workshop at Brent & Becky’s Bulbs!
A walking artist creates the experience of a walk and then materializes that experience in text, photography, film, or a design. The walk can be short or long, fast or extremely slow, in a pattern or in a straight line. The walk can be along an established path or through fields and woods without a path. The walk can be along city streets or out in nature or in a combination of the two. The walk for this particular workshop will take place along the beautiful gardens at Brent & Becky’s Bulbs.
This workshop will introduce you to walking art, its history and its practice. First, you’ll watch a presentation of videos about the walking artists Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Cardiff & Miller. Then we’ll head out to explore the gardens for our walking art piece. Together, we’ll decide on the design of our walk, taking the history of the area into consideration, as well as the sights and sounds. We’ll choose our methods of materializing our walk. We can film or photograph during our walk, or we can walk and then return to do the documentation.
The highpoint of the day will be doing the walk itself, claiming our path and our interaction with the land.
Finally, we can each write text or paint a design reflecting our walk. With Adobe Premiere, we can cut together a video that shows our walking art.
The first part of this workshop will take place at Brent & Becky’s Bulbs. We will then break for lunch and meet back at Arts on Main to complete the video. All supplies will be provided by the instructor. Bring your friends and come join in on this special workshop!
FOR AGES 14+
This program has been organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and is funded, in part, by the Paul Mellon Endowment and the Jean Stafford Camp Memorial Fund.
ABOUT YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Alexandria Searls teaches photography and video at Piedmont Virginia Community College in Charlottesville. Her short films have shown worldwide and include underwater videos that explore the beauty and health of rivers and streams. She maintains a walking art practice at the Lewis & Clark Exploratory Center, where she leads visitors along wooded trails, demonstrating skills of nature observation and relating the history and natural history of the land. Alexandria holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia, which she earned with a combination of writing and photography studies. She uses text to document her walking art practice. She is also the author of 21 Days of Mindful Photography.