Lecture and Master Class with Claudy Jongstra

Thursday, September 27
7:00 pm Lecture

Hear directly from Claudy about why she centers agriculture as the foundation of her artistic practice and how her artworks serve as both embodiments of and influences on her local landscape in the Netherlands.

Join us for a pre-program beginning at 5:00 pm. The Blue Hill Café and Grain Bar and the Stone Barns Center Farm Store will be open late, and wine by the glass will be available for sale. Guided Pasture Walks out to WOVEN SKIN will be offered at 5:45 pm and 6:15 pm. 

Saturday, September 29
10 am – 3:30 pm Master Class with lunch
Plant to Pigment: Cultivated, Foraged, Salvaged

Use Stone Barns Center’s farm campus as your palette to create your own felted artwork under the tutelage of Studio Claudy Jongstra. Participants will harvest cultivated dye plants, forage for wild pigments, and transform food waste into color. In this collaborative and tactile Master Class, Jongstra and fellow instructors will share their natural dye expertise and knowledge of ancient textile craft while re-examining the relationships between ecological equilibrium and material culture. Each participant will dye and felt wool from Stone Barns sheep into a wearable textile or a wall hanging. Enjoy a casual lunch catered by Blue Hill Café and Grain Bar. End the day with a glass of wine and a tour of WOVEN SKIN led by Claudy Jongstra herself.

Master class includes a lecture ticket for Thursday, September 27.

For the past 20 years, Dutch artist Claudy Jongstra has built an artistic practice intertwined with the natural cycles of her local environment of rural Friesland, in the Northern Netherlands. Native Drenthe Heath sheep and a biodynamic dye garden provide both the physical and inspirational foundation for each of her monumental hand-felted artworks and architectural installations. Each piece embodies environmental advocacy through careful consideration of the evolution of color and material from source to site. Jongstra’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art; the RISD Museum; the Stedelijk Museum; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, among others.

We are thrilled to host Jongstra’s monumental sculptural installation, WOVEN SKIN, at Stone Barns Center this fall as part of the work’s New York premiere. WOVEN SKIN features an assemblage of sixty hand-felted textile artworks that evoke a primal architectural impulse, and demonstrates the unbreakable linkages between culture and agriculture, between the natural world and creative inspiration. The piece maps a regional agricultural community to conceptual art and connects humans across industries, communities, and the globe. Read more about the piece here.