Watershed Projects
coLAB arts & Lower Rartian Watershed Partnership
In 2015, coLAB Arts and the then recently formed Lower Raritan Watershed Partnership (LRWP) embarked on an inspired partnership to wrestle with arts-based interventions to our natural and built environments.
Below is a collection of the projects born out of that initial collaboration.
A Watershed Moment
In 2016, coLAB Arts presented an immersive visual and performance art experience intended to reconnect attendees with the Raritan River. The event featured Rock Dance Collective’s original dance performance on land and on the river, with musical performance by the Secret Opera. The event was help in New Brunswick’s Boyd Park.
Our co-producer and Director of Education, John Keller, ended his opening lecture at the 2019 New Jersey Water Works annual statewide summit with this about the project.
“To integrate both professional arts creation with community arts creation. Recognizing that while not everything can be called great art, great art can come from anywhere. We balance the ethereal of the performative with the substance of created artifacts; both a natural growth from a new communal education on watershed health and quality and the provocation of a call to action.
When this happens a new kind of reality might be possible. Where if we truly look for the river in all of the aspects of our lives. We begin to question why is it absent? And we see our spaces built in essence to do whatever they can to keep the river out. To blot it out from our landscape…”
Jose Rosales performing an original piece by New Brunswick Public School Students at A Watershed Moment.
Rock Dance Collective performing their original choreography on the Raritan River.
Rock Dance Collective performing their original choreography in Boyd Park.
Watershed Sculpture Project
In 2018, coLAB Arts and LWRP created the Watershed Sculpture Project which aimed to:
1. To challenge artists to create transformative work from objects collected from streams and rivers throughout the Lower Raritan Watershed
2. To educate and motivate our local and regional communities to understand how they can positively impact their public waterways
Each sculpture was made by a community participant and is curated under the guidance of the coLAB Arts Resident Artist made possible by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Raritan River StorieS
In 2019 coLAB Arts began an oral history archive of stories perhaps lost, perhaps suppressed, perhaps forgotten, around this idea: Water is everywhere, and water is important to everyone. The archive details the stories of folks who have been boating, fishing, and stewarding the Raritan River for decades.
The Raritan River Ways mural was co-created by coLAB Arts, LWRP, and mural artist Leon Rainbow from the collected oral histories as well as a community response process. The two-story mural is on the facilities building in New Brunswick’s Boyd Park. The colorful mural overlooks Route 18 and serves to reconnect New Brunswick to its waterway.
Check out what LWRP’s Heather Fenyk had to say about the Raritan River Ways mural: