an Invitation… to gather, share stories, and make art.
a Celebration… of the work we do not only to heal ourselves, but also each other, and the planet.
a Declaration… that, collectively, we can dream bigger dreams and create greater good when we dare to fly.
an Improvisation… of movement, sound, touch, sight, smell and intuition.
an Investigation… into the potential that can be unleashed—and the invention that can be unlocked—through art.
a Manifestation… for a global vision of acceptance, expression, and unity.
Life On Earth Art inspires healing and transformation through art. Because we know Life On Earth is Art.
Life On Earth Art welcomes community participation in the spirit of “we gather, we share stories, and we make art.” Community members become collaborators and guest artists whose work, stories, and personal transformations become powerful additions to the total energy of every large-scale experience.
Life On Earth Art offers custom educational programs for kids of all ages, organizations, other non-profits, and even corporations to learn about the healing power of art. These multi-day programs are designed to offer organizations and their members the opportunity to discover their inner artist, as well as become part of something bigger than themselves.
Life On Earth Art is driven by the Radical Inclusion of the often invisible and forgotten communities on which our large scale experiences seek to shine light. Our projects not only are created for these groups, but also because these groups, like the patients at DSH-Napa, are contributing artists to the works. They paint. They sing. They share stories. And they lead the conversations and the injustices we seek to change.
Life On Earth Art partnered with DSH-Napa to transform a large hall into an evocative space of healing and creativity through the creation and installation of UNBOUND, which features nearly 1,000 large papier mâché Winged Hearts. The project is led by 70 therapists for 1,200 patients, and is supported by hundreds of community members.
Following UNBOUND-DHS, we will install an UNBOUND experience on every continent. Cities, states, and institutions will reach out to partner to create an UNBOUND in their locations – crafted by their communities to spark conversations they need to have. Working with specific organizations, we will produce themed UNBOUND installations. (Imagine the impact of an UNBOUND installation themed around War & Peace or PTSD crafted entirely by military veterans.)
We will help communities REBOUND from tragedy by partnering with local organizations to activate temporary satellite studios to offer community artmaking and create healing installations of half-hearts and stories. We imagine REBOUND becoming as integral to helping communities heal trauma after tragedy as an organization like The Red Cross.
We will activate a “Street Fleet” of Winged Hearts to support civic protest and peaceful engagement around society’s most pressing issues. We have already deployed Winged Hearts to the Women’s March in Sacramento, have gathered outside of San Quentin, and will be participating in the 2022 SF Pride Parade. We can imagine being called to deploy hundreds of Winged Hearts at the southern border, or on the steps of the Supreme Court.
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This work was inspired by the 1100 children with cerebral palsy who were committed for care to Sonoma State Hospital in the 1950s. Without parental consent and against their will, they were subjected to painful medical experiments, during which many of them died. We honored these forgotten children for Dia de los Muertos by acknowledging their suffering and symbolically setting them free.
Life on Earth Art was invited to be part of a coalition with California Prison Focus and No Justice Under Capitalism to produce a protest at San Quentin Prison, drawing attention to the state negligence that led to the then over 69 inmate deaths in California due to COVID 19. LOEA created the Incarcerated Heart Sculpture as a dramatic backdrop for speakers and provided 69 winged hearts on a flatbed stage. At the end of the action, participants took hearts and held them up at gates of San Quentin in vigil to those lost to Covid and those at risk inside.
In Oct 2020, Life on Earth Art was invited to participate in a rally and march for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and voting rights by the Women’s March Sacramento and tailored the heart to feature voting rights warriors of color: Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Amelia Boynton Robinson, Fanny Lou Hamer, Stacey Abrams, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Since the beginning of 2018, more 500 activists have been murdered and countless more have been silenced through arrests, death threats, violent attacks or lawsuits. Artist Tracy Ferron and her team constructed a nine-foot Winged Heart featuring the names of these fallen activists. All of them were targeted for working for a more just world; fighting for the ideals embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an historic document forged by the United Nations after the horrors of the Second World War. This document and its recent companion, The Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth are inscribed on the hearts’ wings. Audiences are invited to interact with the heart by writing wishes or messages to the heart, which they ‘post’ through a vintage mail slot on the back.
Spellbound is a 12-ft spherical steel cage which casts mysterious beautiful shadows as it slowly revolves. Spellbound is a provocative metaphor for modern life. In an Earth that has fallen off its axis and is collapsing, the heart of humanity is trapped, cut off from the head which has run violently amok. This caged Winged Heart symbol shocks our system to bear witness to our reality and to question the ways in which humans are trapped – personally and collectively. Audience members can slip between the bars of the cage and have the mesmerizing experience of standing inside.
Thousands of fans streaming into the inaugural Mill Valley Music Festival (which was headlined by Ben Harper) were immediately greeted by Big Mama--our 16-foot Winged Heart suspended inside the 12-foot Spellbound cage. Slowly rotating, Big Mama captivated everyone who stood before her and was especially curious to the young kids who looked up to her. As she turned, and the wind picked up, Big Mama seemed to magically beat to the music.
Life on Earth Art collaborated with the Museum of Sonoma County to create a community altar for the grand entrance of their 2021 Día de los Muertos exhibit, Requiem. El Vuelo de los Espiritus (The Flight of the Spirits) featured 88 Winged Hearts growing larger as they flowed up the walls of the main stairway to the exhibition. Community members tenderly painted and decorated these hearts to commemorate their loved ones lost in artmaking workshops held both at the museum and at the Life on Earth Art gallery. “The spirit of the installation was hopeful, inspiring, and meaningful. Handwork is so important in healing. You are letting go of some pain but you are also filling your heart, replacing that pain with this loving nurturing.” - Karen
In Oct 2020, Life on Earth Art was invited to participate in a rally and march for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and voting rights by the Women’s March Sacramento and tailored the heart to feature voting rights warriors of color: Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Mary Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Amelia Boynton Robinson, Fanny Lou Hamer, Stacey Abrams, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Life on Earth Art collaborated with the Museum of Sonoma County to create a community altar for the grand entrance of their 2021 Día de los Muertos exhibit, Requiem. El Vuelo de los Espiritus (The Flight of the Spirits) featured 88 Winged Hearts growing larger as they flowed up the walls of the main stairway to the exhibition. Community members tenderly painted and decorated these hearts to commemorate their loved ones lost in artmaking workshops held both at the museum and at the Life on Earth Art gallery. “The spirit of the installation was hopeful, inspiring, and meaningful. Handwork is so important in healing. You are letting go of some pain but you are also filling your heart, replacing that pain with this loving nurturing.” - Karen
Life On Earth Art partnered with DSH-Napa to transform a large hall into an evocative space of healing and creativity through the creation and installation of UNBOUND, which features nearly 1,000 large papier mâché Winged Hearts. The project is led by 70 therapists for 1,200 patients, and is supported by hundreds of community members.
Artist Tracy Ferron founded Life on Earth Art to dare imagine a healed world and explore how the transformative power of art can inspire connection, engender unity, and cultivate individual transformation to foster global conversation and change.
By bringing people together to explore and raise awareness about injustices, Tracy aimed to amplify relatedness, compassion, and healing. She began working with the iconography of Winged Hearts and cages to examine imprisonment and liberation in our society and to ask the questions, “What spells are we under in our culture that propagate hierarchy, caste, division and inhumanity? How can we break them?”
Her work has been featured at the Museum of Sonoma County, two installations highlighting particular topics of social injustice: the medical experimentation on 1000 children with cerebral palsy at a California mental hospital in the 1950s (Los Olvidados Liberados: The Forgotten Ones Set Free, 2018) and a tribute to human rights and over 500 human and earth rights defenders murdered around the globe, 2018-2019 (At the Heart of it All: Righting the World, 2019).
Life on Earth Art also collaborates with diverse artists and non-profit groups to co-create catalytic artivist actions. Two of Life on Earth Art’s recent actions include a march and protest for the rights of the incarcerated at San Quentin Prison with California Prison Focus and No Justice Under Capitalism and an interactive installation at the Sacramento Women’s Voting Rights March and Rally.
Tracy received her Master’s Degree in Engaged Humanities from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Tracy’s interests in social change and storytelling are informed by her two severely mentally ill brothers and her studies of cultural history and film at the University of California, at Berkeley and New York University. Tracy received a Fulbright Scholar Fellowship to Berlin. She has presented at Burning Man (2014), the Jungian Society for Scholarly Studies Conference in Washington D.C. (2017), Google (2018), Museum of Sonoma County (2018, 2019) and the Northern California Art Therapy Association (2020).
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