Backyard Pizzeria

Each semester, students and faculty descend on Stephen's outdoor pizza oven for an evening. This tradition usually falls at the start of Final Projects and is a well loved and much appreciated break from the studio-grind. Students are coached on how to create the pies by Mo, our Pizza Making History Teacher/History Making Pizza Teacher who mans the oven. With delicious dough provided by the dining hall ladies and a veritable production line of toppings, pizza after pizza was assembled (all creatively garnished) and popped into the oven. Many of the ingredients came from the school's gardens; OS30 chowed down on some beautiful fennel and garlic (planted by OS29! Thanks, guys!) and even an ox-egg or two.

We're a community of expert pizza-makers now and are covered in flour to prove it. Here's a quick pizza making lesson for the rest of you: First, sprinkle flour on a pizza peel (a wooden or metal board) and then relax the dough by letting it hang, rotating it so it stretches evenly into a circle (or blob, or triangle, or anything you can manage). You can also toss the dough up in the air but as some of us learned, many things get in the way like your head, trees, other people, and the ground. Lay the dough on the peel, making sure there is an even layer of flour underneath allowing the dough to "scooch" off when loaded into the oven. Choose your toppings and let the oven do the rest!

Special thanks to Anela for her hip pics and to Sarah for surprising all of us with bubbles and sidewalk chalk. As the Final Show rapidly approaches, we hope to have more fantastic celebrations together.

Swarm Season

A bucket full of bees!

Last week, while the kiddos were away on spring break, exciting things were happening in the Oxbow neighborhood. In sync with the arrival of spring, honeybees started swarming! We were very fortunate to notice a swarm resting in a tree near campus, and were even more fortunate to capture the swarm and set it up in a new hive. Here we'll tell you the story of how it happened, and what it means when bees swarm.

Honeybees swarm when they have outgrown their hive and are ready to set up a new colony. Swarming generally happens in the spring when the weather warms up and the bees jolt into action. A hive prepares itself for swarming by raising a virgin queen, who will take over the hive while the old queen leaves to start the new one. When she's ready, the old queen takes flight, and, loyal to her pheromones, thousands of worker bees follow her. As they leave the hive together they form a fluid cloud searching for a place to land. Collectively, they amass somewhere safe and wait as scout bees make flights out and about in search of a suitable new home. This scouting search can take anywhere from hours to days, and while the bulk of the bees are waiting, they form an amorphous mass that can take on wild and beautiful shapes. This is what our swarm looked like, hanging from a tree on Third Street. 

If you can manage to capture a swarm, it's a great way to start a new hive. But catching a swarm can be a bit tricky, especially if it's waaaaay up in a tree like this one was. First we had to collect some tools and supplies. Among them were five-gallon buckets, into which we put some pieces of wax comb. The comb is there to attract the bees--its feel and smell say "HOME!" to honeybees. 

Oh, we should mention that at this point we had also called our beekeeper buddies over at Napa Valley Bee Co. They are swarm-catching experts and knew just what to do. With the comb-baited bucket in hand, beekeeper Jason climbed a (very tall) ladder. He gently snuck the bucket under the mass of bees, and very slowly and patiently guided the swarm off the tree branch and into the bucket. This process took upwards of THREE HOURS. Let's just say that Jason is a Zen Bee Master. It was an amazing process to watch, and in the end, there were actually so many bees that we had to use a second bucket. This was an unusually large swarm!

After the swarm was secured into our two buckets, we whisked them over to our bee buddy's apiary where there was an empty hive box waiting for occupants. Setting up the bees in their new home was quite simple--we just gently dumped the bucket onto the hive frames! Recognizing that they were home, the bees quickly crawled down into the frames and started settling in. Very soon after arrival, the queen will have started laying eggs to populate the new colony.

Here are our girls in their new home! While they get established, we'll be preparing a new spot for the hive to live on campus. And we've planted a huge row of flowers over in the Back 40 to make sure they have plenty of forage this summer. Just a couple days ago we saw another swarm heading down Third Street, but it landed too far out of reach...it's busy bee season over here in Napa!

Ox-Bowling

Before leaving for Spring Break, OS30 went bowling together as one last community activity to kick off some much needed and deserved R&R. While some of us barely broke 45 points, others unleashed some freak bowling skills - achieving whopping scores well over 100! Of course it isn't all about winning but...we may just have to return to improve our skills and have a showdown. 

Very special thanks to Napa Bowl for hosting us! 

Eliot, Zen, Elijah, Daniel, Brem

Rose, Roger, Phoebe, Patricia, Riley, Megan, Maeve

Zoe, Maddie, Mia, Dejah, Amanda, Chiara and Libby and Isabella

Iggy, Anela, Sarah, Kafé

Visiting Artist: Nathalie Miebach

This week, OS30 finished their second visiting artist residency with the Boston-based sculptor Nathalie Miebach. Nathalie's work is dynamic, complex, and science-driven, most often focusing on weather systems as a starting point for an intensive research and process-based art practice. Check out Nathalie's amazing work on her personal website here, and watch her discuss her work in a TEDTalk here. 

Nathalie's residency at Oxbow began with the following assignment:

"This workshop will ask students to build a sculptural, visual story about an experience they have had with weather. We will approach this from the perspective of a storyteller. A story consists of different parts (the setting, the characters, the flow or tempo of the narrative, the texture of the relationships, etc.), which will all turn into different sculptural components. For some students, the story will be a conceptual guide throughout the week, for others it will only serve as a starting point to begin the sculpture with."

Throughout their week with Nathalie, students were introduced to several new sculptural techniques, including various types of traditional basket weaving. Below are some examples of the exciting and varied work that resulted--note that none of the students had ever worked with these techniques before!

Amanda's sculpture

Riley's sculpture

Isabella's sculpture

Dejah's sculpture