… Sitting By The River shines a spotlight on locals in Nyack and Rockland County who make a difference in their communities. Listen to the full interview with Strawtown Studio founder Laurie Seeman by scrolling to the bottom of this article.
Mother Nature, in all her wisdom and abundance, has always been a reliable source of serenity, especially in a sometimes turbulent world.
Nature is the setting where Strawtown Art & Garden Studio (Strawtown Studio) has made its mark. The programs stage outdoor classrooms that invite children to play, connect, and restore. Kids have a natural curiosity, so they love to explore at Strawtown, where they quickly feel at home with nature.
Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Strawtown Studio has become a beloved, non-profit organization that connects children and adults with the natural world right around them. Through nature, art, science and earth stewardship, Strawtown provides programs for children, and recently for adults as well. Participants experience creativity, skill-building, outdoor exploration, as well as learning to love where they live.
Laurie Seeman, together with artist educator Joanna Dickey, head up this touchstone to nature. Strawtown’s location has changed over the years, and today its main operations are located in the Garner Historic District in Garnerville. Originally a grist mill built in 1760, and then a textile mill complex in the 1830s, Strawtown is nestled within these historic brick buildings, with a babbling brook as its backdrop, one of their favorite outdoor classrooms.
When Laurie moved to Rockland from New York City, where she had been an art dealer and curator for 10 years, she realized that children were not playing outdoors anymore. She began to question, “What can we do about this?” When her daughter came home from school one day and shared about the destruction of the rainforests, Laurie grasped an important fact: although children were learning about the destruction of nature in far away places, they were not aware of their own local nature.
Laurie spearheaded a mixed-aged, child/parent hiking club where the children were free to explore and enjoy this organized community. This experience led her to become the art director at The Nature Place Day Camp in Chestnut Ridge. Having homeschooled her daughter in kindergarten and first grade, the camp role came naturally to her. It was here she founded the first Earth Art with Children program. Projects were derived from nature that included: carving with soft stone, string work with wood, utilizing pigments from the soils for painting, and creating a Land of Mirrors, with large mirrors placed in the woods so that kids could view themselves in nature.
This is when Laurie realized that creating artful invitations to engage in nature was her art form.
The program was really successful with the children, and after three summers, Laurie decided to take her new skills as a teaching artist and budding naturalist and turn her program into a full-time enterprise, Strawtown Studio, named after the road she lived on. She found a home for the program at Marydell in Upper Nyack, a former girls’ summer camp, and opened her first studio there.
Joanna was in college studying art when a mutual friend introduced her to Laurie. After being hired, she joined the adventurous children on their outings, came home from that summer experience and told her parents, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
The job combined everything she loved: nature, art, children and community. As an art student, Joanna remembers that no teacher had ever taken her outdoors to engage with the natural world through an artistic lens. In college she was considering the field of art therapy, but she found exactly what she was looking for at Strawtown.
Adds Laurie, “Joanna and I keep growing together seamlessly…without Joanna, I’m not sure how my artful intentions would be appearing in the world.”
At Strawtown, the art and science become entwined when students develop an in-depth relationship with nature. For example, while collecting natural materials for art-making, that process turns into scientific observation. Or crafting a marsh grass painting tool can reveal a plant’s living structure. Even digging clay along a riverbank can become a lesson in earth science. The philosophy and approach has been intentionally developed from careful documentation, journaling, and thoughtful reflection, which still remain at the heart of all their programs.
“Strawtown was the first place I felt truly intellectually challenged, allowed to create something from nothing, imagine, and make my own magic.”
~ Maya K.
Water education and advocacy began in a natural way. Taking children to the streams leads them on the journey of learning about local waterways, how safe they are, biological monitoring, impacts, and seeking out experts. They learned that aquatic insects are not only cool to watch, but can be an indicator of water quality. Laurie shared a story about a 9-year-old named Ray Smith.
They had taken a group of youth to the Sparkill Creek for a day of exploration. Ray was by the water and exclaimed, “Laurie … the water smells nasty. You have to tell the adults. And tell them the kids know what they’re not doing.”
Laurie immediately contacted John Lipscomb (formerly the Riverkeeper boat captain), who took a water sample with all the children present. He later reported that the water was “alarmingly off the charts with evidence of enterococcus from fecal matter.”
Those young people playing an integral role in that alarming discovery was exactly the point.
“In the world today,” Laurie says, “we need to get the kids involved young, to let them have a say.”
Sparkill Creek’s polluted water and Ray’s voice sparked Laurie and Joanna to start the Sparkill Watershed Alliance, a community action group committed to the preservation and health of the Sparkill Creek and its watershed.
Through the years, Strawtown’s activities have taken on a life of their own. They provide community leadership, including heading the glass eel migration monitoring study with N.Y.S. DEC, plus taking action for nine years to stop the proposed desalination plant in Haverstraw Bay, the prime nursery of the Hudson River – an important Strawtown outdoor classroom. Their current programs include: InHabit Art Youth Adventure Program, Community Environmental Arts workshops and festivals, Summer Earth Art program and Educator workshops and training.
Strawtown has come so far in 20 years, and with the help of their new Operations and Strategic Development Manager, Kristen Vaphides, and their Board, they are expanding their reach even further with a three-year strategic plan.
Strawtown has received numerous awards and recognition including the 2011 Hudson River Stewardship Award from the Hudson River Watershed Alliance, and the Arts Educator Award for Laurie in 2022 from the Arts Council of Rockland.
The Strawtown Studio 20th Anniversary Celebration gala, held on April 26, was filled with love and support at the DyeWorks Gallery in Garnerville. Held in a vast and beautiful space, it was complete with natural art installations, speeches, food, music and merriment. Strawtown hosted two special guest speakers: Karenna Gore, daughter of former V.P. Al Gore, who is the founder and director of the Center for Earth Ethics; and, Dr. Stephen Cowen, Holistic Developmental Pediatrician and the author of the book Fire Child, Water Child.
Mother nature has indeed made her mark!
Editor’s note: If you would like to learn more about Strawtown Studios, email info@strawtownstudio.org or visit https://linktr.ee/strawtownstudio.
