Creek College

Website: www.CreekColleges.com
Role: Co-Director and Co-Founder
Collaborators: Kristina Dutton and Kim Sutherland
When: October 2015 - Now


Creek College is a project bridging art and environmental conservation. We offer a range of art classes and experiences in exchange for activities that aid in the restoration of watersheds suffering from environmental degradation. 
 

The Creek College project is an alternative approach to traditional education models. It aims to generate collaborative engagement and to create a platform for challenging conversations surrounding the state of our environment. 

Creek College works like this: 

We choose a body of water at a given location and invite artists to submit proposals to teach there (literally there! on the creek). 

There is no monetary exchange for participating. Instead, each class is paired with a restoration barter activity. 

The classes are dependent on the interests of each artist. Past classes have included; sculpture, written word, graphic design, sound, dance, and more experiential offerings. 

 

Each chapter focuses on the unique needs of its community and environment. We partner with local watershed councils and ecologists to develop our barter system, advise our on-site art classes, and dream up other outdoor happenings.

We collaborate with participants to document the project for online and print publications by providing day journals or through new skills learned on-site in our classes. Sharing experiences this way gives us all a chance to broaden our thinking, benefiting one community to the next. 

Our inspiration comes from a shared vision with other art education and conservation programs, along with the creativity and enthusiasm of our artists, teachers, and community. Like so many before us, we see nature and art as inseparably linked.