Community Pigment-Making Workshops

Community pigment-making workshops are open to everyone — no special skills or background required. Participants forage materials from specific sites, then work together to transform them into natural pigments: grinding stones, simmering plants, straining liquids, drying powders. The process is tactile, unhurried, and always full of surprise.

The workshops serve as both a form of research and a form of community, bringing people into direct contact with the materials and histories of a place, and into conversation with each other about memory, inheritance, and ecological grief. Even workshops focused on emotionally complex processes (turning a plant that grew on a mass grave into paint, for example) are always full of camaraderie and laughter. Curiosity brings lightness, which brings new insights into difficult pasts.

Workshops have taken place at KL Płaszów in Kraków (in collaboration with FestivALT), at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, at Camp Colton in the Oregon Cascades, at the Oregon Jewish Museum, and in backcountry settings in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. Upcoming workshops are listed on the Teaching page →