Juan William Chávez: Native Bee Workshop + Open House

Date: Saturday, May 13, 2023

Time: Open House (10AM-3PM); Native Bee Workshop (10:30AM - 11:30AM)

Location: Northside Workshop, 1306 St Louis Ave, St. Louis, MO

While the Open House (10AM-3PM) will be open to the public, the Native Bee Workshop (10:30AM - 11:30AM) requires registration. There are only a few spots left for the workshop. Please RSVP by emailing juanwilliamchavez@gmail.com  to reserve your seat.

Details:

Juan William Chávez began his decade-long interspecies collaboration with the bees at the former site of Pruitt-Igoe in North St. Louis. Drawing parallels between colony collapse disorder and issues facing shrinking cities, like environmental racism and housing segregation, Chávez’s social practice models ways to reorient perceptions of places perceived to be vacant.

In Decolonizing the Hive: Native Bees Stewardship Network, Chávez builds upon his relationships with bees and North St. Louis’s histories by expanding prevailing assumptions of conservation. The bee sanctuary built by Chávez at his Northside Workshop is a chemical-free native plant garden that invites native bees to thrive on their own terms. Sculptural interventions made from disassembled honeybee hives provide ample places for native bees to burrow while a variety of pollinator habitats provide different types of native bees the opportunity to feast. Walking paths and sitting areas create spaces for people to be with bees and reorient their relationship to fear. In addition to materializing the presence of bees, Chávez’s garden is a conduit that transmits information about native bees to audiences and key stakeholders who can intervene in native bee futures in their own backyards.

Though the native bee sanctuary is sited at Chávez’s Northside Workshop, the project invites visitors and participants to reexamine their assumptions about vacancy throughout the city. Empty lots are bee sanctuaries. To recognize vacancy as sanctuary is to also remember the Native and Black lives that have been displaced, and ultimately to see the mechanisms of dispossession and intentional property blighting at work.

Visitors to the Northside Workshop's (NSW) newly designed Native Bee Sanctuary and chemical free-teaching garden will meet artist Juan William Chávez and master garden Kiersten Torrez to learn more about the Native Bee Stewardship Network and how to advocate and support native bees through self-expression, environmental stewardship, and community building.

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