August 16—21, 2020 – Recordings from the week are linked below!

Artful Living, Handmade, & Homegrown. In partnership with the Cumberland County Improvement Authority, WheatonArts presented its first-ever Virtual ECO Week! This week-long event featured visits with local artists, live and pre-recorded programming from environmentally-minded organizations, and a daily Kids ECO Camp with hands-on art activities. Use the links below to experience the recordings from this event at any time! 

SUNDAY, AUGUST 16

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: Newspaper Baskets & Butterfly Collages

On-Demand: Turn your old newspapers into a woven basket for home decor or to hold school supplies. Click here to learn how to prepare your newspaper and weave it into a basket! 

On-Demand: Follow along with our video tutorial to create beautiful butterflies using collage techniques.

10 a.m. – Watershed Ambassador Video Presentations 

Enjoy on-demand video presentations throughout the day from members of the New Jersey Watershed Ambassador Program! Videos range in topic and links will be provided at 10 a.m. on Sunday, August 16 for each of the following presentations:

Virtual Enviroscope Lesson Non-Point Source Pollution
Rain Barrel Building
The Incredible Journey of Water
Fun Water Science Experiments

2 p.m. – Artwork Created from Recycled Materials: A Conversation with Kristen Neville Taylor and Lucia Thomé

Join Philadelphia artist Kristen Neville Taylor as she talks about her resident artist experience at Recycled Artist in Residency (RAIR) through a conversation with Lucia Thomé. Located in northeast Philadelphia, RAIR resides within a construction and demolition waste recycling company, offering resident artists both studio space and access to more than 450 tons of materials per day. During her residency, Kristen created a series of sculptures in reaction to the environment and material resources of the tipping yard.

6 p.m. – Potter Terry Plasket: Wild Clay

Clay is one of our most abundant natural resources. Despite our region’s notoriety for sand and the glass industry, we also have an abundance of clay in South Jersey. Join this virtual conversation with ceramic artist Terry Plasket as he discusses the process of prospecting, processing, and firing local wild clay from Vineland, New Jersey. 

Terry will show and explain the process of preparing local clay from start to finish to achieve a viable clay body, and share the successes and failures he has encountered. Digging and processing clay by hand is an arduous task. However, there is something about this connection to making pottery that is not only personally rewarding but also a humbling reminder of the labor involved for previous generations of potters whose process included clay-making. To conclude, Terry will take viewers on a short tour of the WheatonArts Pottery Studio and kiln site.

MONDAY, AUGUST 17

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: Butterfly Symmetry Painting

On-Demand: Experience the art principle of symmetrical balance while making colorful paintings of butterflies! We will walk you through the steps of cutting out butterfly-shaped surfaces to paint and different mediums to use in creating your butterfly painting. Butterfly surfaces will use include paper, canvas, and fabric. Mediums will consist of tempera paint, acrylic paint, and fabric printing ink. Click here for the video and instructions. 

10 a.m. – Monarch Butterfly 101: Monarch Waystation Tagging at RCE 

Go on a virtual tour of the Pollinator Garden at Rutgers Cooperative Extension with Pam Burton. Discover the importance of planting milkweed for monarch butterflies’ survival and what other elements are necessary to make a successful waystation for the beloved monarch. Learn fun facts about monarchs, including the four stages of their life cycle, the parts of a monarch butterfly, and how those parts “work.” Watch how to net and tag a monarch safely and to enter scientific data used in understanding the Monarch migration to Mexico. Information will be provided to you, the “citizen scientists,” as an encouragement to create and register home gardens as new Monarch Waystations.

6 p.m. – Grow Native! With Rutgers Cooperative Extension

Experience a virtual tour through the Pollinator Garden at Rutgers Cooperative Extension Center highlighting Rutgers Fact Sheet 1140: Incorporating Native Plants in Your Residential Landscape. Discover the importance of incorporating native plants into home gardens, with suggestions of “plant this not that.” Learn the value of reducing the amount of lawn space while increasing biodiversity and discuss the importance of matching the “right” plant to the” right” place. 

7 p.m. – “Exploring Your Watershed from Home” Live with Sal Mangiafico of RCE

We all live in a watershed, and you can navigate yours from your computer. Learn about free online platforms and mapping websites that provide the information needed to explore local streams, habitat, soil types, and the environment right around your home. Demonstrated tools include the OpenStreetMap collaborative project; U.S.D.A.’s Web Soil Survey; StreamStats from the U.S. Geological Survey; and the New Jersey Conservation Blueprint interactive mapping tool from The Nature Conservancy and partners.

TUESDAY, AUGUST 18

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: Newspaper Baskets Live Part 1

Check-in with us on the status of your newspaper baskets and get your questions answered. Learn tips and tricks for creating your eco-friendly baskets.

6 p.m. – Dr. Sam Moyer Artist Demonstration: Process & Craft of His Broom

Mount Laurel resident Dr. Sam Moyer, known as “The Jersey Jerry Broomsquire,” uses his Ph.D. in Genetics to develop his natural, “art with genes,” multicolored machine-harvestable broomcorn. He handcrafts brooms from this broomcorn, planted on 1.5 acres of preserved farmland on the former Jersey Jerry Orchards in Burlington County, New Jersey. After harvesting, he sorts and dries each bundle before binding them together with his “broom winder” (created from a rearranged bicycle), to form the broom’s brush. He then attaches each brush to a carefully shaped handle made from “slab woods,” the first cutting of logs.

To learn more about broomcorn and its history, click here. 

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: Beekeeping & Local Honey with Busy Bees NJ

Gary Schempp, local beekeeper and owner of Busy Bees NJ, will explain the life-cycle and social structures of bees, the importance of bees within our ecosystem, and the benefits of eating local honey. Gary will explain how he rescues and rehomes bees to the hives on his family farm, and what we can do to help save the bees!

6 p.m. – The Watchers in the Woods: A Conversation with Ken Leap about his Mural Art

Discover incredible nature-themed murals by J. Kenneth Leap. Learn about his background as a painter, how he chooses his locations, view before and after photos of his mural projects, and watch time-lapse videos of the murals painted into being. 

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: The Magic of Recycling with Magician Bill Kerwood

Amazing magic and live interaction right on your screen! Laugh & learn with this magical comedy while learning exactly how to recycle in Cumberland County. Discover simple yet amazing tricks that you can do for your friends & family again & again. This action-packed 40-minute presentation is fun from beginning to end. Presented by the Cumberland County Improvement Authority.

6 p.m. – How to Spot Butterflies with Pat Sutton, Presented by CU Maurice River

Pat Sutton Program 1 of 2. With over 40 years of experience as a professional naturalist and author, Pat Sutton will present a program relating her fascination with butterflies! Join the excitement of searching for, studying, enjoying, and attracting these winged jewels — just as she and her husband have done in their book by the same title (Houghton Mifflin, 1999). She will uncover mysteries about their life cycle, relationships to the plant world, odd behaviors, survival in a world filled with hungry predators, the spectacular migration of some species, and the restricted ranges of others. She will share some of their butterfly watching adventures on their home turf at Cape May and throughout southern New Jersey and afar – an Arctic wilderness trip in northern Alaska, a winter trip to THE Monarch roost in Mexico, butterflying in the tropics, and more. Presented by CU Maurice River. 

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21

10 a.m. – Kids ECO Camp: Newspaper Baskets Live Part 2 

Learn how to seal and paint your newspaper baskets to increase their durability in a live Zoom presentation!

6 p.m. – The Sutton Garden in Summer: A Narrated Video Tour Followed by a Live Q & A, Sponsored by CU Maurice River

Pat Sutton Program 2 of 2. Learn from nationally-renowned gardening expert Pat Sutton! Go on a virtual garden tour with Pat through her 43-year-old wildlife garden in Cape May, NJ. Learn about the more than one hundred native plants and natural components in her garden that attract and benefit wildlife. July is a month when some of her favorite nectar plants bloom and attract a bunch of fun pollinators.

Pat’s plantings demonstrate many different ways a habitat can offer the basics: food, cover, and water. Her half-acre property includes two wildlife ponds, a pocket meadow, extensive shade gardens, layered gardens under a tulip tree, wildlife corridors, shrub islands, a woodland of native plants, an extensive pollinator garden, native nectar plants galore, a wide array of native host plants, feeding stations, and more. We invite participants to stay on for a question and answer section after Pat’s presentation.

Sponsored by Citizens United to Protect the Maurice River & Its Tributaries (CU Maurice River).

We will continue to add to this page as programming becomes available. Please check back for updates. 

Thank you to our partners for making this Virtual ECO Week happen:

Thank you to PNC Arts Alive! for sponsoring the Kids ECO Camp art activities.