Events
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 summer, and and are thrilled to go back to see what has been growing. We will do some earthing exercises with Monica Jahan Bose and work with the gardener in residence, Peter Lewis. Location: 2310 Nicholson St, SE, Washington DC. Buses B2, 32, 36. Free street parking available.
Peter Lewis is an avid gardener, artist, and chef. He has been working with Nicholson Project since 2022 and is the main point of contact for garden activities 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 and climate activist whose work spans painting, printmaking, film, performance, and public art. Her socially engaged work highlights the intersection of climate, racial, gender, and economic injustice through co-created workshops, art actions, and temporary installations and performances. Bose uses the sari — a precolonial 18-foot-long unstitched garment that is always recycled and never discarded — to represent women’s lives and the cycle of life on our planet. She has exhibited her work extensively in the US and internationally (23 solo shows, numerous group exhibitions, and more than 25 performances) including solo exhibitions at the Bangladesh National Museum and MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rome. Her ongoing collaborative project STORYTELLING WITH SARIS with women farmers from her ancestral island village has travelled to 12 US states and eight countries and engaged thousands of people. Her work has appeared in the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, Art Asia Pacific, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Honolulu Star Advertiser, the Japan Times, and all major newspapers in Bangladesh. She has a BA in the Practice of Art (Painting) from Wesleyan University, a post-graduate Diploma in Art from Santiniketan, India, and a JD from Columbia Law School.
The Nicholson Project is an artist residency program and neighborhood garden in Ward 7’s Fairlawn neighborhood. Its mission is to support, provide opportunities, engage, and amplify artists and creatives from our community and the local artist community—particularly 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 others to use similar non-traditional arts and community-centered projects as a pathway toward stronger, more vibrant communities.
Stortyelling with Saris is supported in part by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Storytelling with Saris workshops will take place in February 2025 in Bangladesh. The workshops will include sari printing, new kantha creations from worn saris from Storytelling with Saris, new song creation, and performance.
Please come to the unveiling of Monica Jahan Bose’s first ceramic sari, called “Rising,” which will be installed in the Kalorama Triangle alley behind her studio. The ceramic tile mural will be mounted on the garage wall of the home of Mary Miller and Dennis Farley. We will have an unveiling celebration on March 9 from 3-5 pm in the alley behind 2015 and 2017 Belmont Rd, NW. Monica’s studio will also be open and there will be a film screening of the performances that inspired the “Rising” ceramic work.
“Rising” speaks to our connection as humans with the outdoor environment, including the water, the trees, and other species. It is designed with ceramic tiles using the same techniques and design concepts as the Storytelling with Saris saris. As in the fabric saris, the border tiles feature woodblock patterns. The tiles were rolled out by hand out of reclaimed clay. Monica pressed her sari woodblocks into the wet clay to create impressions. These border tiles were then handpainted using wax resist technique. The middle tiles of the sari comprise a figurative painting that Monica painted by hand using glazes.
Monica worked with ceramic artist and fabricator Elle Brande of Moonlight Studios in Beltsville, Maryland to create the work over the course of several months. Monica and Elle were colleagues at Red Dirt Studio many years ago and Elle assisted Monica in some of her very first performances with saris. We are thrilled to share this brand new work with the community. It serves as a small-scale prototype for future projects.
