What We Return: Cow Skull Decorating Workshop

There was a time when living close to the natural world also meant understanding our dependence upon it.

Across cultures, animals that fed, protected or sustained human communities were not simply consumed and discarded — they were honored. In old Finnish traditions, bear skulls were placed in sacred sites in the forest as acts of reverence. Other traditions remind us of what Robin Wall Kimmerer calls the Honorable Harvest: when we take life to sustain life, we enter into a relationship of responsibility and reciprocity.

This workshop begins there.

Together, we’ll transform cow skulls using shells, beads, metallic elements and found materials, creating an object of beauty while considering a larger question:

How might we live differently if we truly honored the lives that sustain our own?

Our food, soil, oceans, forests, water and countless other species make human life possible. As those relationships have increasingly become relationships of extraction, we are beginning to witness what happens when reciprocity disappears.

This is an art workshop, but also an invitation to slow down, make with our hands, and spend a few hours thinking about our place within a much larger living world.

No previous art experience is necessary. All materials are provided, and you’ll leave with your own decorated cow skull artwork.

Sunday, September 20 · 2–5 PM
Bushwick, Brooklyn
Part of Bushwick Open Studios.