Live Culture Episode 26: the nature of art by WPKN Community Radio

This month we have two sets of guests who bring together the visual arts and music. We begin with Home Winds, a book of photographs that comes with its own song!

This new publication from Planthouse Gallery celebrates the trees on an old New Jersey Farm and speaks of time, the importance of stewardship and the longing for home. I am in discussion with acclaimed photographer Benjamin Swett, singer/songwriter Heather Woods Broderick about this project. Over the course of a year, Swett captured the essence of Home Winds Farm through a series of portraits of the maples, beeches, lindens and black cherry trees that have populated the land for decades. The farm has been preserved under the New Jersey Farmland Preservation Program, ensuring the land would be protected forever for agricultural use. Broderick’s tribute song is a soulful ballad inspired by memories from her own upbringing on forested land in the Northeast. Proceeds from the release of the song Home Winds will benefit institutions devoted to fighting climate change. Home Winds, the book and record, came out on April 28, to coincide with the exhibition at Planthouse Gallery, April 28 – June 20, in New York City.

Benjamin Swett is a New York-based writer and photographer with an interest in combining photographs and text. His books include New York City of Trees (2013), The Hudson Valley: A Cultural Guide (2009), Route 22 (2007), and Great Trees of New York City: A Guide (2000). He has worked as a newspaper reporter and was a writer and photographer for the New York City Parks Department for thirteen years before taking up photography full-time in 2001. His book New York City of Trees won the 2013 New York City Book Award for Photography and his photographs are included in public collections such as the Museum of the City of New York as well as in corporate and private collections.

Heather Woods Broderick is a singer/ songwriter born in the state of Maine to a musical family, She currently lives in Oregon. A professional touring musician, Heather's work often invokes ideas of home and place. She sings, plays piano, cello, guitar and flute and has worked accompanying other artists as well as launching her solo career. She has two albums out: Glider and From the Ground.

During the second half we speak with Fritz Horstman a visual artist who also has an audio component to his work-- writing, playing and singing as a part of the duo Spacelover, with Meredith Andrews. Much of Fritz’s recent work has centered around water and fluid systems such as rivers. He has described his work as addressing “the ever-moving seam between nature and culture”. He currently has work up at ODETTA gallery in Brooklyn as a part of the show River Woman, and was selected to participate in the current deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, where he has projects both in the gallery space and outdoors. He has also traveled to do work at residencies in Japan and in the Arctic Circle, and more locally as resident artist at the Yale Peabody Museum. Fritz is currently engaged in collaborating with MIT-based geophysicist Daniel Rothman.

More about this months guests can be found at:
• http://www.benjaminswett.com/
• http://www.heatherwoodsbroderick.com/
• http://planthouse.net/home-winds/
• http://www.fritzhorstman.com/
• https://spacelover.bandcamp.com/