Jessica Cejnar Andrews / Monday, July 10, 2023 @ 3:36 p.m. / Arts, Community
Del Norte's Creative Corps to Focus On Pollinators' Plight, Endangered Wildlife, Klamath Dam Removal
Courtesy of the Upstate California Creative Corps
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Marcia Morgan
Marcia Morgan says the Upstate California Creative Corps matches up with “everything I feel in life.” So when the job creation and human infrastructure opportunity began offering grants to artists, she applied.
The Crescent City artist — one of three in Del Norte County chosen to participate — initially aims to use her skills with pen, ink and animation to shed light on pollinators and their importance on the food supply. She’s already begun engaging with her target audience and envisions a pollinator festival at the Del Norte County Fairgrounds around Earth Day next year.
Morgan said she initially asked for a $7,000 grant, but project reviewers urged her to think bigger.
Terri Glass
“I’ve never made more than $10 or $12 or $15 an hour. They told me to raise my artist fee to anywhere from $40-60 an hour,” she said. “I feel so guilty, but the total is going to be $29,278.”
Led by the Nevada County Arts Council and including the Del Norte Association for Cultural Awareness (DNACA), the Upstate California Creative Corps program is distributing $3.38 million in grants across the northern part of the state.
In addition to Morgan’s pollinator project, Gasquet-based poet Terri Glass received a $9,500 grant for her endeavor focusing on poetry and endangered plants and animals that call Del Norte County home.
Finally, dancers Lauren Godla, Kara Starkweather and Jessica Swanson will collaborate to create a video about Klamath River dam removal.
“Using vertical dance as a tool to explore the environmental and cultural significance of these rivers, we will activate communities to engage in this ongoing conversation,” they state.
According to a news release from DNACA, this project will also include testimony from Yurok tribal members.
The Upstate California Creative Corps program also awarded grants for four regional projects that include Del Norte County, DNACA Executive Director Stephanie LaTorre told the Wild Rivers Outpost.
While those regional projects include Del Norte County, LaTorre said it was important to her and others on the review panel that local artists be included.
“We all did things to try to partner, or at least matchmake in some way between artists and organizations in our local community to see if there was something the artist could bring forward,” LaTorre said. “Because we’re a small county, we didn’t get quite as many applicants as other counties did, but the ones we did receive we were so excited about.”
The California Arts Council created the California Creative Corps with $60 million in Workforce Development and Recovery dollars. The endeavor began with a listening session in November that included Nevada Arts Council representatives Eliza Tudor and Katrina Schneider.
Armed with the California Healthy Places Index, Tudor and Schneider set out to learn what each Upstate California county’s greatest concerns are. While Del Norte ranked high on that index in terms of natural resources, LaTorre said, it was one of the lowest ranking areas for income, housing and transportation.
“Art is an amazing way to spread awareness for all sorts of situations,” she said. “Look, for example, at the WPA (Works Progress Administration) back in the 1930s, which is kind of what this program is similar to, the California Creative Corps as a whole. I think we can all, even now remember Rosie the Riveter’s ‘We Can Do It’ and ‘Buy a Bond’ and how that was spread through visual art and how it was used in the reels that ran before movies.”
Glass, who moved to Gasquet from the Bay Area, said she got inspiration for her project, “Plea for Wildlife,” through observing wildlife and speaking with Redwood National and State Parks representatives. She was initially pursuing the artist in residence job with RNSP with this project in mind and decided at the last minute to try out for a California Creative Corps grant.
Glass has a biology degree and teaches at Mountain School and Sunset High School. Her latest book of poetry is “Being Animal,” which was published in 2020. She said she wanted to shed light on the endangered species that call Del Norte County home.
She chose 10, including the California condor, chinook salmon and coast redwood. There’s also the western lily, the snowy plover, the Oregon silverspot butterfly, the Humboldt Martin and Stellar’s sea lion.
“I researched each one — what’s causing their decline, what’s really interesting and beautiful about them — and tried to tug at the heartstrings of people,” she said. “If they feel for this particular wildlife, they might be more cautious when they’re out in its territory or they might want to volunteer to help preserve it.”
Glass says she’s going to write a poem for each species, mount it with an image of the plant or animal and put it on public display.
She noted that DNACA displays art at the Del Norte County Courthouse and at the Crescent City Airport. Glass said she also wants to ask if Redwood National and State Parks would put her work on display at their visitor center.
“And I want to do a reading of the poem themselves and open it up for discussion if anybody has any questions about it,” Glass said.
Morgan said she held vegetarian awareness festivals and Earth Day events when she lived in Nebraska during the 1980s and 1990s that would draw 600 people.
In Del Norte County, Morgan’s California Conservation Corps project “Honest Earth,” which ties into a song her husband Dale Morgan wrote, features butterflies, dragonflies and honeybees. She said she felt connecting the declining insect populations to the community’s food supply was important for people to understand.
“One out of three bites of food we take is due to pollinators helping us so we need to help them,” she said.
Morgan’s goal is to illustrate a book and create an animated video focusing on pollinators. She said her grant will go toward renting the fairgrounds as well as working with Paul Wenning and Mark Raintree as her “video and audio people.”
Morgan said she has already reached out to Uncharted Shores Academy co-director Margie Rouge and Crescent Elk Middle School principal Paige Swan about getting students involved. She said she envisions the pollinator festival to be a science fair of sorts.
“I’d like to get some of the older kids and have them teach us or have them teach the public and, I’m hoping, their parents and grandparents,” Morgan said. “They can have a booth or a little demonstration.”
Del Norte County will also be featured in projects spearheaded by musician Rita Hosking, Water Climate Trust, Save California Salmon and Grass Valley artists Jess Riegel and Kira Greene. For more information about the Upstate California Creatieve Corps, click here.
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