The Gatherade Stand is a co-authored art project in the form of a lemonade stand that served drinks made from wild-foraged plants and created opportunities for collaborative creativity centering those same plants. The project aimed to encourage connecting students and their communities to the natural world through gatherings that center wild plants. The spring season focused on the nettle plant. The platform supported community building, nature education, and cross-disciplinary art making through weekly workshops on site at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School that focused on the nettle plant through collaging, drawing, poetry and spoken word, as well as a soda making workshop with foraged nettle leaves.

The art made in the workshops came together to form participatory installations that were open to students on the school playground and in their library. There, students served the nettle sodas, which we canned and adorned with labels made of prints of their original artwork and names. At this critical time of climate catastrophe, this project asked: how does nature education fit into the curriculums of urban, public schools - especially in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods? What does it look like when elementary school students share the messages they hear from nature? How do we share and celebrate those messages? What stories naturally stick, and what connections become possible?

I began by serving nettle tea to the students. I created a large wooden sign that proudly appropriates Gatorade branding in response to the student’s interest in soda logos. The students made visual artworks that responded to the prompt: “If a nettle plant made a protest sign, what would it say?” I hosted a table at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School Celebration Day at the school with a collaging workshop inspired by shapes of nettle leaves. Further workshops facilitated song and spoken word and poetry writing about and for the nettle plant and making soda from dried nettle leaves inside a school classroom. I canned the soda with Mike Lockwood of Duality Brewing, and chose student artworks and names for the can labels. I made placemats featuring names for the nettle plant in languages spoken across the student body, alongside new original names created by the students. I invited DJ and composer DJ Tikka Masala (Janhavi Pakrashi) to collaborate on an original audio piece about nettle. Artist Bex Copper made polaroid portraits with the students, the sign, and the cans during a pop-up on the playground at the school. Gilian interviewed Alexis Johnson about her experience as a collaborator on the project. Gilian also interviewed Nellie Scott, director of the Corita Art Center in Los Angeles about Sister Corita Kent and her history with pop art as a strategy to reach a public with her messages of justice and peace for SOFA Journal’s Spring 2022 issue. Gilian, Ms. Johnson, and the students created an interactive installation in the library of the elementary school, known as The Gatherade Stand 01. This installation was presented as part of Assembly 2022, an annual social practice art conference at KSMoCA. ‘Making Earth Cool’ included a print from the nettle cut-outs workshop in their residency exhibition at Parallax Art Center in Portland, OR. I gifted that print to KSMoCA, and it is now in their permanent collection, hanging in the hall at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. School.

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Photos: Harvee Bird, Bex Copper, Laura Glazer, and Gilian Rappaport

*Cans donated to Trash for Peace, a Portland-based environmental justice organization building innovative waste reduction and recycling systems and offering youth sustainability education.

Special thanks to Ms. Johnson, Amanda Lareeva, Aggy Hosey, Lisa Jarrett, Michael Bernard Stevenson, Harrell Fletcher, Lucia Monge, LillyAnne Pham, Diana Cuertas, Mo Geiger, Laura Glazer, Luz Blumenthal, Laura Glazer, Kye Grant, DJ Tikka Masala, and Hilary Rappaport. I sourced most materials from SCRAP, a creative reuse center selling donated art supplies in Portland, Oregon.

Co-directors, KSMoCA: Lisa Jarrett, Harrell Fletcher