The Seashore Psychology Training Clinic at the University of Iowa is pleased to announce that they will be continuing collaboration with Professor of Art Anne Beffel on an art installation entitled Color and Context. This extension of Beffel’s Color of Kindness project, currently exhibited in the Seashore Clinic, will engage graduate students as well as clinical faculty and staff.
Participants will be invited to recall a moment in which kindness, or its absence, was important to them and to describe colors present within their memory. In the updated project, Beffel will collect only the name of the color and its brief description through online survey. As Beffel creates a painting for each person’s named color, she will integrate its complement, located 180 degrees opposite on the Newtonian color wheel. The introduction of the complementary color is intended to embody both contrast and connection. Beffel notes, “Gullickson, and former training director Michael O’Hara, have been excellent collaborators and art stewards, extending themselves in countless ways. I’m particularly grateful for the opportunity to directly engage the clinic faculty, staff and students in articulating the colors that matter to them as we reflect upon the dynamic and evolving culture surrounding color in America.”
“We are thrilled at our continuing collaboration with Anne Beffel,” writes Seashore Clinic director Gregory Gullickson. “Anne has really brought such color and life to our clinic, and having students and staff inspire more of her work will add immeasurably to the beauty and healing spirit of our clinic space.”
Installation of Color and Context is planned for summer 2023 with support from Beffel’s academic department of Visual and Performing Arts at Michigan Technological University.
A self-guided tour, Contemplative Forest Art Walks is a series of mindfulness meditation stations in the Ford Center Forest. Each station is marked by a hand-painted, nine-foot-tall banner installed among the trees.
Public reception free and with refreshments on (Wednesday) July 31 from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Short remarks by artist Anne Befflel, Professor in Visual and Performing Arts, about the project at 6:15 p.m.
More information and a map can be found at www.annebeffel.com
Professor and public artist Anne Beffel (VPA) will hold an open studio event from 6 to 8 p.m. today (Nov. 28) in the Studio for Here and Now in the basement of Wadsworth Hall (G04W), across from WMTU.
At a 6:45 p.m. presentation, Beffel will discuss a public art and meditation walk in an urban forest she and the City Meditation Crew installed in Shoreline, Washington.
Beffel says, “Meditation Circuit is a series of meditation stations along a pathway marked by public art work. Each station offers a mindfulness-oriented activity intended to support well-being. Explore: listening; walking; even using cell phones as tools for meditating on colors in an urban forest. Meditation Circuits demonstrate the power of meditation and the value of public art.”
Meditation Circuit is inspired in part by the City Meditation Crew project, “Many Colors of Green,” in fall 2017 at Hamlin Park in which community members walked meditatively and contemplated their park using their cell phones as tools for attentiveness.
More information is available online.
Imagine the sunlight slanting toward the forest floor, filtered through viridescent leaves and pine needles. Imagine walking slowly, meditatively, through the wedges of light, fully focused on the moment, completely present. Dust motes swirl in the light. Birds call to each other above. A fly buzzes by. Twigs and decaying leaves crunch under foot. From branches above, delicate hemp banners painted in many shades of green to mimic the landscape waft gently on the breeze.
Meditation, the practice of focusing solely on the present moment and letting go of the clutter of the mind, appears to have an increasing number of health benefits. Anne Beffel, professor of visual and performing arts at Michigan Technological University and director of Studio Here Now, intentionally looks for ways to create space for mindfulness within public art. Studio Here Now is a creative public art design studio and gallery located on campus in Wadsworth Residence Hall.
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