🕷️🐛🐞 Registration required – this event is free but space is limited 🐝 🪲 🐜
Join us for a FREE family-friendly event to celebrate Halloween, Louisiana's special natural surroundings and planet Earth, through art, music, food and science.
This year's theme will be “Creepy Crawlers”, inspired by the 1960’s activity game that taught children to cast plastic insects and other ‘creepy’ organisms out of molds.
These events aim to raise awareness and appreciation of local biodiversity and to connect our community with a side of nature many of us know very little about: insect life. Insects are an essential part to ecosystems, yet many of us are unaware of their connection to us and the role they play in nature or that many insect species are rapidly disappearing.
This year we will host five Southern sculpture artists as they create bug and other creepy-crawler-themed sculptures from recycled metals using a portable casting furnace and blacksmithing forge installed onsite at the Atelier grounds. Festival goers will have the opportunity to meet these special guests including:
· Elizabeth Belz (Brasstown, NC) will use a portable blacksmithing set to forge insect and arthropod-shaped free-standing sculptures.
· Anne Bujold (Lafayette, LA), will create a native Louisiana bee installation in partnership with Kimberly Hamm, a PhD researcher in UL Lafayette’s Entomology Department.
· Liz Markum (Denton, TX), will create metal casted sculptures from arthropods found at Atelier de la Nature.
· Leslie Tharp (Gainesville, FL), will create a tangled creepy crawler root sculpture from recycled iron.
· Kristen Tordella-Williams (Auburn, Alabama) will create an enormous spider sculpture from recycled iron
Other special guests will include:
· Video game designer Chera Meredith (Knoxville, TN) creator of the game Bug and Seek and co/founder of So Peculiar LLC.
· Entomologists and arthropod experts from all over the country to join us and share their knowledge.
In addition, we are inviting entomologists and arthropod experts from all over the country to join us and share their knowledge.
Our 2024 festival mascot is “Franken-Mantis” by artist and biologist Cheyenne Eagles.
Registration required for morning, afternoon and evening sessions – this event is free but space is limited. Register here!
Morning and afternoon sessions activities:
· Metal furnace pours with recycled aluminum and iron
· Iron forging demos with repurposed materials
· Meet insect and arthropod scientists
· Beetlejuice Cochineal Beetle Natural Dye demo
· Mead-making demonstration and honey-tasting
· Giant Interactive BUG Installation
· Preserved deep sea roach display
· Learn the names of different bugs in Uma (Houma) language
· DIY isopod sculpture workshop using recycled/up-cycled materials
· Experimental insect-inspired music
· Screenings of insect-inspired films
· Live spiders and other creepy crawlers with arthropod-inspired robots
· Eating BUGS! An edible insect-tasting
· Creepy Crane food display
· Insect lamp-making activity
· Live snakes and other reptiles
· Traditional Cajun and Creole cooking using locally sourced ingredients
· Trick or Treating
· Creepy Pumpkin Decorating
· More to be announced
Evening session activities:
· Metal furnace pours with recycled iron
· Bug Banquet
· Blacklight Insect watching
· Bug and Seek Video Game Tournament
· Screenings of insect-inspired films
· Live music
· More to be announced
Additional Event Information:
The 2024 Master of Ceremonies will be Renella Rose Champagne of KRVS’s “Lost in Love” program.
This year’s food will be prepared by Chef Colt Patin (a Certified Executive Chef and Certified Chef Instructor), his students from the Culinary Institute in Baton Rouge, and the Cub Scouts Pack 301 (Breaux Bridge, LA), who will serve Cajun and Creole dishes prepared with local and seasonal ingredients.