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Sweet Sounds: Angelika's Healing Music performed during the 2009 Trails and Vistas, Terra Caeli, in an aspen grove in Tahoe Donner along the art hike, and will be performing again this year. |
CommentsAnnual Art Hike Grows into New Role
By David BunkerPublished: June 20, 2010
In every walk with nature, one receives far more than he seeks.
~ John Muir
Imagine hiking through Squaw Valley's Shirley Canyon and having a man pop out from behind a rock and begin telling you John Muir stories, or a celebrated San Francisco dance troupe materializing before you, hanging from trees and dancing on giant granite boulders.This is the startling juxtaposition of art and nature found at Trails and Vistas.
Now in its seventh year, the annual art hike begins selling tickets July 1. The two-day September event moves to Squaw Valley this year and works under a theme of “If Dreams Were Clouds.”
But this year's event is not just another art hike. There are significant changes afoot. The organization has become its own nonprofit, is offering three themed hikes, and has expanded to include dance classes in the months leading up to the event. Trails and Vistas is also planning to launch art hikes outside of the Truckee/Tahoe area and is working to offer field trips for local school children throughout the year.
This year's three hikes will include a first-ever family hike with the help of Trails and Vistas sponsor KidZone Museum, as well as a leisurely art hike for attendees who want to avoid the physical demands of climbing up Shirley Canyon at high altitude.
The expansion of the organization has been pushed not by Trails and Vistas organizers but by the public. The art hike's popularity is evident by the event's near tripling in size — from 260 attendees in 2003 to 700 last year. Each year, the hike sells out weeks before the event.
Trails and Vistas Executive Director Nancy Tieken Lopez founded the event after doing a thesis project on art hikes, but after moving to Truckee 10 years ago she was unable to find a large indoor space to perform art.
“We don't have a performing arts center or a visual arts center — so what makes sense is to take the art out into nature,” said Lopez.
And so the idea of an outdoor gallery, music hall, and performing arts center — where art was divorced from its typical walled-in, urban setting and reintroduced to nature — was born.
Lopez's vision is shared by the collection of artists that populate the art hike each year, dancing, singing, and exhibiting sculptures and paintings alongside the trail.
This year's featured artist is Capacitor, a mind-bending dance troupe from the Bay Area that has danced deep underwater and in the recesses of Costa Rican rainforests.
In these unlikely performance spaces, nature is Capacitor's omnipresent partner in each movement, and each dance harkens back to a time when art was deeply intertwined with nature.
The basic connection between art and nature — something often lost in the over-connected world of iPhones, television, and the Internet — is something Trails and Vistas highlights.
In doing so, the hike pays tribute to a deep history of humanity's linkage with the natural world.
“There is definitely a lot of history and culture that we are trying to express in each art piece,” said Lopez.
One of Capacitor's recent projects, a dance work created in the Costa Rican jungle and called “Biome,” has been described as “an exploration of desire and yearning in the natural world.” But Lopez said the dance troupe, after visiting the location and examining the natural features in Shirley Canyon, will come up with something unique for Trails and Vistas.
“It's fun to move to a different environment and play with different land features — streams, granite faces, and meadows,” said Lopez.
Each of the event’s art pieces is tailored to highlight the natural world and inspire the viewer to think of the preservation and conservation of the land, which ties in with event partner Truckee Donner Land Trust's mission. Other partners include InnerRythms Dance Theatre and Arts for the Schools.
Many local artists, including Cathee van Rossem St. Clair, Sarah Smith, and Glenshire Elementary fifth-grade art students, will be featured at Trails and Vistas.
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