Mushroom City Arts Festival

public group

Details

Hosted by Evolver and the Baltimore Free Farm, the 2013 Mushroom City Arts day will be an interactive exploration of the Mushroom as an organism: focusing on its impact on our ourselves and our environment. Discussions, art, music, film, workshops and walking tours will reveal the many real world applications for mushroom cultivation in contemporary urban life.

Why Mushroom City Arts?

The mushroom, often portrayed only as a food product, plays a remarkable role in developing and sustaining environmental stability. Mycelium, the underground root-like network of mushrooms, plays a critical role in maintaining healthy soil by absorbing and processing toxins, heavy metals, and even synthetic substances such as plastic or oil, and converting them into useful organic nutrients.

Mycelium, like neurons in the brain or the branching of tree limbs shows us how interconnected structures exist on multiple levels of life. It's in learning how interconnected systems function and in how we might utilize and mimic them that we see opportunities for growing and engaging the next world. In our 21st century world, where our traditional methods of production, consumption, and interaction with the environment break down a little more each day, we can afford to widen our perspective and learn from the living things around us.

Through Mushroom City Arts, we hope to educate ourselves and one another by exploring both the practical and the intuitive aspects of the mushroom. We hope you come and learn how this life form can inspire us, and help us move forward into a sustainable future.

flier design by: Will Shanklin

Mushroom City Arts Schedule (10/19/13)

Main Room

12 – 12:30 arrive and check out art
12:30 – 1:30 JHU Psilocybin Research and Q & A w/ Brian Richards
1:30 – 2:30 Immortal Jellyfish / Potluck
2:30 – 2:50 Jeff Arber & Ian Stenzel – Maryland Mycology
2:50 – 3:00 Gavin Heck – Mycosolve Grant
3:00 – 3:45 Community Discussion – Mycoremediation, Healing damaged landscapes
3:45 - 4 Break
4:00 – 5:00 Screening: The Secret Life of Mushrooms
5:00– 5:30 Discussion
5:30 – 7 Fractal Cat
7 – 8 Megadrives

Side Room

1:30 – 2:30 Workshop – Corner Spore
4 – 5 Workshop – Free Farm

Kitmaking Workshop with The Corner Spore

Overview of basic myco processes and kitmaking. Loose structure, talk, show and tell, q and a

Mushroom Log Workshop w/ Free Farm

Join Ted Martello and Don Barton of Baltimore Free Farm for a one hour primer session on how to make your own mushroom logs! We will have everything needed to make logs and you can get hands-on experience with real logs and spawn,become familiar with the materials and tools required, and learn methods for inoculating logs as well as care and fruiting techniques! We will be packing a lot of information into a small time frame so show up on time!

Free Farm Garden Tours

1:30 - 2
2 – 2:30
4 – 4:30
4:30 – 5

with bioluminescent mushrooms grown by Jeff Schatz (Corner Spore) as part of the garden tour ♥

Art:
Blue Alba & Al Infinitum
Dan Van Allen - Toadstool Temple
Michel Anderson
Adam Atkinson
Brian C Baker
Summer Blake
Kalinin Cornelis
Michael David
McKenzie Ditter
Robin Gunkel
Noah Hall
Matt Lippy
Elinda Peterson
Pablo Machioli
Fred Merrill - Sculpture
Matt Muirhead
Jeff Nowman
Susana Reyes Alcalá
Sarah Schwartz
Will Shanklin - Live Drawing
Aminah Shourbaji
Renee Weber - Live painting
Cory Zanker