Tom Ashcraft and Peter Winant, two artist/professors from the School of Art, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA,US, and core founding members of Workingman Collective, a Washington DC based artist collective, and the four art residency students from Popopstudios International Center for the Visual Arts are participating in the 3rd annual eco-symposium in Schooner Bay.

The symposium will be led by Marielle Barrow GMU PHD candidate/scholar/artist, John Cox and hosted by Antonius Roberts Schooner Bay Artist-in-Residence and Clint Kemp from Black Fly Lodge. Sponsored by Schooner Bay and The Endowment for the Arts.

This symposium brings a range of voices and disciplines together toward the exploration of cross- disciplinary sustainable solutions to community development. Citizenship is recognized in this context as the collective responsibility to care for the environment, to encourage environmentally conscious practices and to engage communities in eco-cultural practices.

We seek to explore the possibility for artistic interventions to inspire such a notion of citizenship. How can artistic interventions function as a tool for ethnographic documentary and as educative and communicative mechanism? How can we determine the potential of artistic interventions to sustain the individual or collective psychological and economic well being of its practitioners?

Schooner Bay aims to a re-examine and re-configure interactions with the natural environment with emphasis on maintaining the natural ecology of human existence within the natural environment. Displacement and consumption are often enmeshed in developmental agendas and politics, however Schooner Bay takes a new approach. The best land is preserved and protected and natural systems, rather than man made fabrications are invested in. Schooner Bay expects to reap ‘ecological dividends’ with both cultural and social benefits as the interdependence of nature and culture is fostered.