Join the Storytelling with Saris team to help harvest the vegetables from the Nicholson Project neighborhood garden. We helped out in the garden in the spring and and are thrilled to go back to see what ha s been growing. We will do some earthing exercises with Monica Jahan Bose and work with the gardener in residence\, Peter Lewis.

Peter Lewi s is an avid gardener\, artist\, and chef. He has been working with Nichol son Project since 2022 and is the main point of contact for garden activit ies and distribution during peak growing season. Peter also manages seeds starts and runs the Community Composting Program at Koiner Farm in Silver Spring\, MD.

Monica Jahan Bose is a Bangladeshi-American artist an d climate activist whose work spans painting\, printmaking\, film\, perfor mance\, and public art. Her socially engaged work highlights the intersec tion of climate\, racial\, gender\, and economic injustice through co-crea ted workshops\, art actions\, and temporary installations and performance s. Bose uses the sari — a precolonial 18-foot-long unstitched garment that is always recycled and never discarded — to represent women’s lives and t he cycle of life on our planet. She has exhibited her work extensively in the US and internationally (23 solo shows\, numerous group exhibitions\, a nd more than 25 performances) including solo exhibitions at the Bangladesh National Museum and MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. Her ongoing co llaborative project STORYTELLING WITH SARIS with women farmers from her an cestral island village has travelled to 12 US states and eight countries a nd engaged thousands of people. Her work has appeared in the Miami Her ald\, the Washington Post\, Art Asia Pacific\, the Milwaukee Sentinel\, th e Honolulu Star Advertiser\, the Japan Times\, and all major newspaper s in Bangladesh. She has a BA in the Practice of Art (Painting) from Wesle yan University\, a post-graduate Diploma in Art from Santiniketan\, India\ , and a JD from Columbia Law School.

The Nicholson Project is an artist res idency program and neighborhood garden in Ward 7’s Fairlawn neighborhood. Its mission is to support\, provide opportunities\, engage\, and amplify a rtists and creatives from our community and the local artist community—par ticularly artists of color and those from Ward 7 and 8—while engaging our neighbors through community-based programming. Its vision is to serve as a cultural hub and community anchor celebrating Ward 7’s authentic identity \, while infusing new vibrancy into Southeast DC. We hope to inspire other s to use similar non-traditional arts and community-centered projects as a pathway toward stronger\, more vibrant communities.

Stortyelling with Saris is supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.\n