Monthly Archives: February 2015

Print Studio

The Abactors’ Hideout: A Letterpress Community Studio

Smoke Farmers have recently reclaimed and remodeled the old tractor shed adjacent to the Milking Parlor, using materials salvaged from other collapsing outbuildings. Poet-Carpenter Arne Pihl oversaw the construction crew and personally pounded over 1,000 bent nails. No one really knows how the skylight got up there. The result? A fully-equipped letterpress print shop: The Abactors’ Hideout*. Since 2009, the studio has hosted workshops, picnics and residencies for new and experienced printers. Studio use is also available for rent at a reasonable cost. We are currently accepting proposals for use.

To support our projects we’ve established a fund, Permanent Press. Join us in keeping this facility a low cost resource for artists. Donor benefits and levels of recognition range from RAYON to POLYESTER to ACETATE to SILKANA. Donors at the LIFEPRESS level will have their names painted on the studio wall and receive a custom-printed, unnatural polyfiber object by midnight courier.

For further inquiries print shop directors can be reached at:

Kate Fernandez – pilcrow(at)smokefarm.org

Linden Ontjes – linden(at)smokefarm.org

Till Poetry Retreat

Hosted by Arne Pihl and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke

Till is literary organization based out of Seattle that hosts an annual writing residency at Smoke Farm. Founded by Arne Pihl and Chelsea Werner-Jatzke in 2013, Till fosters literary exchange and builds community among writers through scalable, affordable, and local writing programs. Open to writers of all genre and stages of their career, Till increases access to the literary world through writing practices, feedback forums, workspaces, literary readings, and publication opportunities. By decreasing barriers to the pursuit of a writing practice, Till cultivates a space for diverse voices and an opening where writers can create, inspire, and grow their craft.

Annual Arts Festival

In 2006, Rubicon began its series of wonderful, expansive and exciting art festivals at the Smoke Farm venue. The festivals uniquely support both artists and the Rubicon community. They provide artists a chance to work with a remarkable environment, creating a hearth for creative ideas, a forum for community feedback and support, and a beautiful platform for site-specific art, dance, sculpture, poetry, painting, and theater. Then, open to everyone, they allow a great opportunity for a family or student to get away from the city for a day, and greet the farm. After a day’s meandering through trees studded with sculpture, dancers in the tall grass, and paintings on the trail, the attendees, artists, and volunteers alike are invited to sit down for a beautiful meal and enormous bonfire.

Burning Beast Fundraiser

Hosted by Tamara Murphy
www.burningbeast.com

Rubicon Foundation’s major fundraiser is also Washington’s greatest, largest outdoor feast. Burning Beast is the brainchild of renowned Seattle chef Tamara Murphy, who was inspired by the idea of a culinary Burning Man, or a free-form outdoor festival. It brings many of Seattle’s best chefs and cooks to Smoke Farm, provides them with one whole, local animal, and challenges them to cook it in a firepit in a field. 400 tickets are sold (out!) per festival, and with the 150 or so cooks, assistants, organizers and volunteers, the festival encompasses about 550. Each year, then, the farm is transformed for three days into an enormous ring of fire-pits, home-welded roasting apparatuses, and event tents. Seattle foodies flock to the farm for dishes unavailable anywhere else — moose-blueberry-farro, smoked herring (prepared on a rustic device resembling a Calder mobile), steamed buns with pork belly, rabbit sandwiches, beef roast wrapped in caul fat, and more. And at the end of the event, the Foundation holds the traditional burning of the beast, a custom-built 20’ tall wooden goat, and the crowd dances under the smoke and the stars.

In its five years, the event has been a great success; Burning Beast has made the culinary festival calendar in Washington, receiving press from the Stranger, Seattle Weekly, and the Seattle Times food blog, to name a few.

Seattle Time’s Blog: Seattle Chefs on Fire: Feel the Burning Beast.

Seattle PI Blog: Burning Man? No, it’s Burning Beast!

 

Wetland Restoration

Hosted by Matthew Cary, Stuart Smithers

Since 2002, Rubicon Foundation has been actively working with the Cascade Land Conservancy to rehabilate the land of Smoke Farm. Essentially “Un-farming”, we are attempting to restore the wetland ecology that existed prior to the fields created from cattle herding.

The Garden Committee

Hosted by Eric Dillin, Matthew Philbrook, Anne Blackburn, Adam Nishimura, Stuart Smithers

The garden at Smoke Farm serves a variety of functions. Not only does it provide healty herbs, fruits, and vegetables to the summer users of the farm, it also serves as a site for various activities: educating students about the life cycle of plants, exploring the concepts of Permaculture and Organic farming, and reflecting and meditating through manual labor. While a few of Rubicon’s staff are responsible for planning the garden, they always welcome experiments, new ideas, and helping hands.

 

Smoke Farm Bee Society

Director(s): Gregory Kircher, Terrence McKitrick, Mathew Goad

Symposium

Hosted by Stuart Smithers, Brendan Kiley

The Rubicon Foundation’s annual Symposium is a weekend of inspiring and challenging presentations, explorations, exchanges, and discussions with an audience of 200 to 250 Northwest thinkers, artists, teachers, and organizers—the people who shape and build our communities. The presentations take place in an open-air barn on the edge of a large field.

Topics for the Symposium have included race and imprisonment, brain structure and imagination, the life and death of newspapers, social-psychological incentives to deny unsettling phenomena such as climate change, city planning in China, recent psilocybin experiments at Johns Hopkins, US drug policy, and much more. Speakers have included scientists, MacArthur and Soros Foundation fellows, and members of the Black Panther Party. Presentations are followed by audience conversations and the weekend ends with discussion over a communal dinner by a notable Seattle chef.

The Symposium welcomes a diverse crowd of people, provides ample space for conversation and contemplation, and is a temporary site for community in action.

2009: Change You Can’t Believe In

  • Mott Greene, “The Physiology of Imagination”
  • Tim Keck, Stranger Publisher, on future media
  • Mark Cook reflects on life as a member of the Black Panther Party
  • Carl Lehman-Haupt, “Starting Over When It’s Already Too Late”
  • Ken Williford explains why Astro-Biology matters
  • Marya Kaminski, Eulogy

 

2010: The World That Pretended to Be What it Was

  • Bob Swain, architect, building entire cities in China.
  • Sunil Argawahl, MD/PhD, on the geography of marijuana.
  • Ed Meade and Mark Cook, George Jackson Brigade, on political prisoners in the U.S Sarah Rudinoff, actress turned real estate agent.
  • Corianton Hale, on the concept of cool.
  • Clark Martin, psychotherapist featured in the NYTime’s article on psilocybin research at John Hopkins, on the mind.

 

2011: All That is Solid Melts into Air

  • Will Potter, investigative journalist, author of “Green Is the New Red” from City Lights Books
  • Sanho Tree, scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in D.C., international expert on the drug war
  • Gilda Sheppard, sociologist and filmmaker, authority on pedagogy and prison systems in Ghana and the U.S.
  • Michael A Schwartz (MD), professor and psychiatrist, founding president of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry
  • David Schmader, writer and solo performer, who will present a new monologue
  • Sukha Worob, professor, print maker and photographer, will be our first artist-in-residence

 

2012

  • Irina Feygina: “Society vs. Nature: Transforming Climate Change Denial into Pro-Environmental Action”
  • Zoe Scofield, Juniper Shuey, and Brendan Kiley: “The Pleasures and Pains of Being on Display”
  • C.S. Soong: “When Subjects Become Objects and Vice Versa: Reflections on Alienation, Labor, and Human Agency”
  • Tanya Erzen: “Jails for Jesus: Why Are U.S. Prisons so Religious?”
  • John Zerzan: “The End of Community and Life in the Technosphere: Pathologies of Mass Society”
  • Dinner by Monica Dimas of Monsoon.

Camp Zero: Philosophy Camp

Hosted by Stuart Smithers, David Shapiro, Carl Lehmann-Haupt

Rubicon Foundation’s annual philosophy, yoga, and meditation retreat is led by professors Stuart Smithers and David Shapiro. The name “Camp Zero” comes as a double reference: as philosophers, we constantly return to the fact that we begin with nothing, discarding all our current “knowledge” in favor of expanding questions. The “Zero” also refers to the Zen enso the calligraphic form symbolizing non-duality and Being, loosely. Camp Zero pits its students against challenging authors, including Kierkegaard, Rilke, Marcus Aurelius, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Emerson, Plato, Parmenides, Levinas, and Heidegger. Discussions are conducted freely, with no results, rules or techniques expected. The rural environment, daily yoga, and guided meditation shade the conversations, as well.

Sawhorse Revolution

Hosted by Adam Nishimura, Sarah Smith, Kyle Nunes, Mia Palomo, May Ackerman, Micah Stanovsky

Find out more and get contact info at http://www.sawhorserevolution.org/

The Sawhorse Revolution builds upon the sturdy foundation of two youth construction Fortnight Camps held at the Rubicon Foundation’s rural Smoke Farm, and a successful after school pilot program. Over the past two years, King and Snohomish County youth have come to Fortnight at Smoke Farm to plan, design, and build a robust, safe and sustainably constructed nature observatory thirty feet up a Douglas fir. The students of Sawhorse Revolution, our after-school construction program have created a beautiful handcrafted workbench that they and other students will be able to use in future projects, and which will model the impact and place the youths’ work can have for others.

The focus of Sawhorse Revolution is on woodworking and construction skills, key areas of manual intelligence that are increasingly neglected or cut from recession-fraught school budgets. The need for an education inclusive of experiential learning opportunities grows as public schools continue to scale back spending on extra-curricular activities and vocational and life-skills courses. This is especially true of high schools in under-served neighborhoods, and for children from low-income backgrounds. These are the primary areas for Sawhorse student outreach and recruitment as we seek to enhance educative experiences where the need is greatest.

After two years of highly successful programming, Sawhorse Revolution is growing quickly. Our after school programming will expand during the 2012 – 2013 school year, as we invite more students to participate and build on solid partnerships. Sawhorse Revolution has strong relationships with a variety of organizations and schools that seek to provide students with hands-on education. We work closely with the shop teachers and counselors at West Seattle, Chief Sealth, Franklin, Nova, and Garfield public high schools to ensure our student recruitment extends to a diverse range of both young men and women. We have also been working with the Seattle Central Community College carpentry program, the Center for Wooden Boats, Coyote Central, and the West Seattle Tool Library to recruit knowledgeable and experienced builders and counselors. Our partnerships are reciprocal, thus we also encourage our students to learn about our partner organizations. By developing a strong citywide network of hands-on education, we hope to connect our students to additional programs and resources beyond our own.

Find out more and get contact info at http://www.sawhorserevolution.org/