art is where the hart is
by Phyllis Hunt

Sherry Hart’s acre patch on the plains of Boulder is an eclectic Art Farm and summer camp that inspires creativity in children and adults alike.

Art classes, animals and gardening coalesce on a treed acre on Jay Road in Boulder, where artist and art teacher Sherry Hart transformed a shady lot into Sherry Hart’s Art Farm and summer camp. “The Art Farm is the point between spirit and earth,” Hart explains, “so you’ll see lots of earth symbols here, along with statues of wood and stone deities from different traditions.”

Indeed, the Art Farm is a kaleidoscope of colorful perennial and vegetable beds that share residency with hundreds (hundreds!) of garden objects of all descriptions. These objects, and the live animals Hart keeps in the Art Farm’s stable, inspire art projects in year-round classes for children and adults.

Hart designed and planted the garden in concert with collecting and arranging the Art Farm’s numerous objects, which include large and small wood and stone sculptures, rusty farm tool objects, long-discarded wagons, tricycles and toys, and other eclectic pieces. Hart established the Art Farm for her enjoyment and for children in her after-school art classes and summer art camps. Adults also find fun at the Art Farm in classes Hart describes as “sand tray groups” and “all-day play days.”

One of Hart’s students, 8-year-old Shae Bradlina, shares a secret about the Art Farm: “A new piece of art comes alive every day,” she whispers.

A mere glance around the Art Farm confirms it. Large green Buddha hands welcome students to the garden through the Art Farm’s main archway cloaked in blue clematis. Two stone dragons languish protectively near a rusted tricycle, while another clematis weaves through a rusted wagon wheel propped against the trunk of a towering maple tree.

A willow goddess stands in an adjacent stone-edged bed. She’s made from fallen willow twigs that Hart decided to infuse with new life. Ivy springs from the ground near the goddess’s feet, draping her in green. A few steps away, a carousel horse seems lost in a dream of spinning.

Yards from the archway, a swing sways in the breeze under the commanding canopy of an old cottonwood. “This is where it all began,” Hart says of her garden-cum-Art Farm, “with this swing. And Saint Francis there was one of the first sculptures. I love stone sculptures and the organic quality of stone, so there’s a lot of it here.”

One striking sculpture is Ganesh, the dispeller of obstacles. His elephant trunk and four rhythmic arms seem to captivate nearby blue veronica and yellow yarrow. A half-dozen Buddhas in varying sizes and poses dot the Art Farm, and Kwanyin, the Chinese goddess of compassion, appears in granite and again in marble.

Under the cottonwood canopy, a robin sits on a rusted tractor seat eyeing water that spouts and splashes from one of Hart’s six fountains. “I like the bucket fountain best,” says 10-year-old art student Meera Tawa, as one of Hart’s three roosters interrupts her with a shrill cock-a-doodle-doo.

A far corner hides a miniature green-and-white gingerbread playhouse with a porch railing twined in pink clematis. Pink honeysuckle dances up the side of the playhouse that’s protected and shaded by lavender and deep-purple lilacs. Local folk artist Currie Lockett’s guardian totems supply additional protection, with stern and whimsical faces that peer from weathered rectangular boards propped on garden fence posts. Stone geese peck the ground below the totems, but the true pecking occurs in the Art Farm’s chicken coop, where live chickens lay tan, white, brown and green eggs.

Zuni, a miniature horse, shares the Art Farm’s stable with two small goats and a Shetland sheep. Eight-year-old Kayla Tawa drew one goat for her farm animal project. “I got to see him to draw him,” she says with a smile.

Along an opposite edge of the Art Farm, a stone Virgin Mary keeps watch from her shrine, a 4-foot upturned bathtub Hart found at Boulder’s ReSource and decorated with tile, mirror fragments and bottle caps, which frame the tub’s rim. “The bottle caps come from my annual parties,” Hart says. “See how the mirror creates Mary’s halo?”

The shrine is one of countless Art Farm artworks, as is the nearby peace bomb—a 3-foot projectile with nine bowling bowls at its base. “I’m a multimedia artist and the garden provides another medium for my art,” Hart says of the garden’s various objects that inspire classroom art projects.

As Meera, Kayla and Shae roam the Art Farm in search of fun and creative projects, the garden’s 3-foot-tall reclining Buddha contemplates the point between spirit and earth, and finds peaceful repose alongside the many other objects at Sherry Hart’s Art Farm.

Phyllis Hunt is a freelance writer and owner of The Write Proof in Boulder. She loves to write, but admits to being a wannabe pen-and-ink artist.

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