Stone Barns Center Elements: TERRAIN

Inspired and curated by Chef in Residence Johnny Ortiz, the next installment of the ongoing Stone Barns Center Elements series will focus on terrain. The virtual programming will explore the ways in which we interact with the lands we are on. 

Do not miss out on a chance to see Chef Johnny cook live at the horno, which he built with our farm team, made of adobe clay bricks he brought from New Mexico and soil from our fields. 

Food & Farming Professionals - $10  This ticket is for those currently working or training in agriculture or the culinary arts.

General Public - $40* 

Ticket price includes access to all three virtual programs.

Terrain as vessel
11:00am - 11:45am EST
Chef Johnny Ortiz in conversation with Maida Branch and Mitch Iburg. 

Terrain as mother
1:00pm - 1:45pm EST
Chef Johnny Ortiz in conversation with Ron Boyd, Ronald Rael and Quentin Wilson

Terrain as nurture
2:30pm - 3:30pm EST
Cooking demonstration: posole with corn cooked with horno ash and flour tortillas with Chef Johnny Ortiz, Blue Hill cooks Kylie Millar and Jake Dupont and Stone Barns Center Farmer Lizzy Gendell

All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants. 

*Stone Barns Members receive 10% off select programs. To become a member, please visit stonebarnscenter.org/membership. Current members will receive a discount code by email. If you have not received your discount code, please email membership@stonebarnscenter.org.

Ron Boyd
As a kid growing up along the Arkansas River east of Pueblo Colorado I spent my summers on the neighboring farms. Mostly small 10 and 20 acre vegetable farms. I’d say that was the beginning of my interest in fields of food. In the early 90s I farmed a couple acres for the local markets and restaurants in Taos New Mexico.  By the year 2000 my wife and I began a small part of our now 100 acre farm along the Rio Grande South of Taos. With last 20 years that farming has included fruit tree grafting and production, 400 trees in our ORCHARD mostly old heirloom varieties of apples and stone fruits.  Farmers market in Taos Kept us busy for about 12 years with certified organic vegetables and fruit. And in the last six years we’ve been seed producers for Baker Creek heirloom seeds in Missouri. Small farm tools and innovations have always been a part of the farm.  For the last four years we are growing out old time wheat, rye and barley varieties. We are fortunate to have unlimited water for our fields,  abundant sunshine. strong bodies. happy hearts. And we consider good food and beautiful care for pacha mama our contribution to the planet. 

Maida Branch
MAIDA supports the growth of Indigenous artists and preservation of their homelands through sustainable business practices.
We believe in a profit sharing business model of which 50% of the final price goes to the artist who made it.
MAIDA is a love story, a coming home story. An ever evolving project and expression of ancestry, homecoming, diaspora forced and chosen, memory learned and lost, reclamation and preservation.
Inspired from the land and family in which the founder Maida Branch came, of Zuni & Ute captiva, and Inda-hispana descent (Dilia and Mora, NM), her family has been living in Pueblo Territory since time immemorial.
Based in Northern New Mexico, MAIDA showcases and supports exclusive handcrafted collaborations with Indigenous artists through various mediums.
Collections reflect the rituals and culture of their origin, and are made and shared with the intention of being enjoyed by everyone, creating a conversation about their use and origin in everyday lives.

Mitch Iburg
Mitch Iburg is an American ceramic artist who works extensively with locally sourced clays, stones, and minerals collected throughout the state of Minnesota. By exploring materials through a diverse range of forms and applications, his studio practice examines the overlapping languages, expressions, and histories of craft tradition, scientific research, and contemporary art.

In 2017 he and his partner Zoë Powell established Studio Alluvium - a workspace, showroom, and educational platform located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. By teaching online workshops on collecting, preparing, and testing local materials, Studio Alluvium seeks to foster community on a global level by connecting makers throughout the world who are united by a shared reverence for the earth and phenomena that have shaped it.

Ronald Rael 
Ronald Rael is a multi-generational rancher and internationally recognized designer, architect and author and co-founder of Rael San Fratello, a multi-disciplinary practice rooted in the discipline architecture, but whose work spans the contexts of craft, research, entrepreneurism, writing, digital design, and social practice. In 2021 The London Design Museum awarded Rael San Fratello with the prestigious Beazley Design of the Year Award, one of the most prestigious awards in design internationally. In 2014 his practice was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. The work of Rael San Fratello can be seen in several documentary films produced by The Museum of Modern Art for his work on the U.S.-Mexico border and for additive manufacturing, by KQED in an emmy winning documentary film about the work of Emerging Objects, a 3D Printing Make Tank co-founded by Rael, by The New Yorker, and for their humanitarian initiatives with the international aid organization Alight (formerly the American Refugee Committee). Among the books authored by Rael include Earth Architecture (2008), Borderwall as Architecture (2018), and Printing Architecture (2019). His work can be seen in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, The London Design Museum, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the FRAC Centre, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya. He is a professor of architecture at the University of California Berkeley.

Quentin Wilson
Quentin Wilson came off a Kansas wheat farm to the South Valley of Albuquerque at age of ten. He saw men and horses plodding around in mud adding straw to make adobe bricks by the side of Sunset Road. By age twenty-seven with his wife, Maria, he bought ten acres of dry land in Ojo Caliente, New Mexico. Following his early imprints, he tried to raise wheat with no luck in drought years. Quentin bought several old combines and participated in farming by harvesting wheat, oats and triticale. An altruistic side to this venture was to see if the reintroduction of harvesting equipment would encourage farmers to plant human consumable grains and rely less on the eterno-mono-cropping of alfalfa in the irrigated valleys. His career moved into building adobe homes along with several hornos, the mud baking ovens, in which he bakes high-altitude gluten-free bread.