53: Garden Battles and River Rituals: How Felicia Young Heals Communities with Art and Activism

Felicia Young uses arts-based strategies and tools to spur community action. She has helped save hundreds of New York's community gardens, clean up a sacred river in India, stymie one of America’s most powerful politicians, bring attention to local solutions to the climate crises, and most importantly bring people together to make real change. BIOFelicia Young is a social action artist and the Founder/Executive Director of Earth Celebrations, a non-profit organization since 1991 engaging communities to generate ecological and social change through the arts. For the past 30 years she has applied the the arts to build community, collaboration and environmental action on climate change, water quality, river restoration, waste management, and the preservation of species, habitats, nature, gardens, parks, and a healthy urban environment. She has pioneered cultural strategies utilizing collaborative arts to build broad-based coalitions and diverse sector partnerships with local organizations, academic institutions, government agencies, schools and community residents to work together, develop solutions and mobilize action to achieve common goals and ecological, policy and social change.Her social action art projects include a 15-year grass-roots effort and annual theatrical pageant that led to the preservation of hundreds of community gardens in New York City and a project to engage community on restoration efforts of the Hudson River and impacts of climate change. She then applied these cultural strategies to build an international collaborative effort to restore the Vaigai River in Madurai South India, in a severe crisis due to pollution and the drying effects of climate change. Felicia's current Ecological City: Cultural & Climate Solutions Action Project engages community on climate solution initiatives throughout the community gardens, neighborhood and waterfront on the Lower East Side of New York City, and their importance to city and global climate challenges.As a native 3rd generation New Yorker, she has deep roots in the City of New York, as well as much inspiration from the festivals, ceremonies, and mythic dramas from her mother’s native land of India.Felicia Young has also developed a course " Art, Ecology and Community" for Princeton University. She has BA in Art History from Skidmore College and a MA degree in Performance Studies from New York University. Notable MentionsMetropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met",[a] is the largest art museum in the Western Hemisphere. Its permanent collection contains over two million works,[1] divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.Julian Schnable is one of the most seminal and virtuosic artists working today. His multidisciplinary practice extends beyond painting to include sculpture, film, architecture, and furniture. He is an award-winning movie director but primarily a painter. His use of preexisting materials not traditionally used in art making, varied painting surfaces and inventive modes of construction were pivotal in the reemergence of painting in the United States in the late 1970’s and the rest of the world. (artist’s website)Skidmore College is a private liberal arts college in Saratoga Springs, New York. Approximately 2,650 students are enrolled at Skidmore pursuing a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree in one of more than 60 areas of study.Jacques-Louis David was a French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward classical austerity and severity and heightened feeling,[1] harmonizing with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic.Mbari: There is an artistic taboo among my people, the Igbo of Nigeria. It is a prohibition—on pain of being finished off rather quickly by the gods—against laying a proprietary hand on even the smallest item in that communal enterprise which they undertook from time, and to which they gave the name mbari. Mbari was a celebration through art of the world and of the life lived in it. It was performed by the community on command by its presiding deity, usually the earth goddess, Ana. Ana combined two formidable roles in the Igbo pantheon as fountain of creativity in the world and custodian of the moral order in human society. An abominable act is called nso-ana, taboo-to-Earth.Once every so often, and in her absolute discretion, this goddess would instruct the community through divination to build a home of images in her honor. The diviner would travel through the village and knock on the doors of those chosen by Ana for her work. These chosen people were then blessed and separated from the larger community in a ritual with more than a passing resemblance to their own death and funeral. Thereafter, they