Join the Garden and our talented community partners for a celebration of artist Kristine Mays’ Rich Soil. Events will take place throughout the Garden on March 8, and include a special story time, dance performances, live art, and more. All programming is included with Garden admission.
10:00 a.m. Story time with Shauntae Lilly in the Lora M. Robins Library
11:00 a.m. Brown Ballerinas for Change will perform in the Rose Garden. Brown Ballerinas is a dancer-led organization whose mission is to help create advocacy, social justice, and to increase participation of ballet in underrepresented communities.
11:00 a.m. – 2:00 p.m. Artist Ron Stokes will be live painting in the Central Garden. Based in Richmond for the past decade, Stokes is a self-taught street artist that merged his talents with abstract art and developed a unique style of storytelling through color and pattern. He is also founder of The Art Seen, which curated the Soul for Soil exhibition currently on display in the Garden’s Community Art Gallery in the Kelly Education Center.
12:00 p.m. “The Voice of the Journey” acapella performance by Lady Hymningbird (Shauntae Lilly) will take visitors throughout the Garden. Each song will be performed at a different Rich Soil installation, weaving a tapestry of resilience, beauty, and transformation.
1:00 p.m. Brown Ballerinas for Change will perform in the Rose Garden.
2:00 p.m. Elegba Folklore Society will perform “May the Ancestors Be Pleased.” This performance amplifies the “reckoning” artist, Kristine Mays, speaks of reflectively about her creation of Rich Soil. Elegba Folklore Society infuses ritual with West African dance, music and spoken word in an interactive recognition of the ancestral unknown and unnamed who are the forebears of Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden.