Art Harvest is not just an art event, it comes from a very early tradition. In the very beginning of our country the whole community would come together during the harvest. Everyone in the community supported the harvest to ensure everyone survived the long winters.
This is the founding principle and value of neighbor helping neighbor that continues in our rural communities today. As we face greater challenges that threaten our ability to survive, we must come together and adapt and get creative in ways to ensure we survive through the winter and into spring as a community.
The Wet Mountain Art Harvest is a network of creative friends and neighbors that are joining together to adapt and support our greatest challenges in the Wet Mountain Region. They are no different than those faced by our country’s founders. Water, food, shelter, warmth, and health. How do we survive and thrive?
Keeping water in the Valley means life for all of us. Helping the ranchers and farmers keep their water rights keeps water in the Valley for all of us. Using the water wisely in the Valley helps all of us. If we as a community don’t come to the harvest and help, we as a community may not thrive or even survive.
This is the foundation of our work, keeping our Valley and the surrounding Wet Mountain Community not only surviving but thriving. Farmers and ranchers produce our food and we have farmers producing our food here, even young new farmers joining us to sustain our people through the winter. Much can be harvested if we are creative.
Community Harvests will help everyone, including our veterans, who have come to our region to start a new life and a family. Using creative adaptation we can create new income streams for those willing to help us thrive.
If you are an artist, poet, performer, musician you hold our culture and our creative ways of adapting. We can support many of our neighbors, especially our historical sites that can educate and honor our ancestors.
Water is Life is for everyone so join us at the Beckwith Ranch so they can start teaching visitors and reconnecting them with these values and where their food comes from.
So join us this Saturday, October 29 at the Beckwith Ranch just north of Westcliffe from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to enjoy and buy fine art from the Valley’s artists. 30 percent of the proceeds of the art harvest go to the Friends of the Beckwith Ranch and future programs that help protect our water, land, and community. Thank you for keeping the West and The Arts Alive!
– Press release by the Art Harvest at the Historic Beckwith Ranch