An early LIFE FRAME (beginning in 1974), resulted
in CROSSROADS COMMUNITY (The Farm), a life-scale environmental
and social artwork that brought many people from different disciplines
and cultures together with each other and other species—plants
and animals. The Farm also involved extensive land transformation
including the integration of disparate land parcels—all
adjacent to and incorporating a major freeway interchange into
a new city culture-ecology park. (It was one of the first inner-city
Brownfield projects that The Trust For Public Land worked on.)
The Farm created a whole: a new City Farm Park and gardens,
The Raw Egg Animal Theater (TREAT), community programs in art
and environmental education, and the juxtaposition with the
freeway monolith, creating a bucolic and vibrant contrast of
nonmechanized and technological forms. It was an early LIFE
FRAME—a sketch—a work of life-scale environmental
performance sculpture, as well as being one of the first Alternative
Art Spaces in the country, the home of a State pre-school, and
the popular venue for school children of all ages during and
after school, and on weekends.
©2002 Bonnie Ora Sherk. All Rights Reserved
