Meet Liz Chick: A Natural Dyeing Artist & Event Producer
In Brooklyn, where rent is high—and getting higher—for artists and creatives finding spaces to practice their craft is a regular challenge. Cramped inside small apartments, their creative process and vision are often limited to whatever their space has the capacity for. For Brooklyn-based artist and event producer Liz Chick, having space is essential to her work—organizing botanical and natural dyeing educational events and workshops. Recently, Liz found her dream studio space in Clinton Hill and she is preparing for the new environment to be a total game changer. A game changer not only for her, but for the many creatives who she collaborates with to put together inclusive, engaging, and creative events in Brooklyn. Sustainable Baddie is lucky to be one of the first communities to collaborate with Liz and inaugurate her gorgeous new studio space.
This Saturday, March 25th, Sustainable Baddie and Liz Chick are putting together a natural dyeing workshop based completely on food waste. During the event, we will learn about the process and activity of natural dyeing. In preparation, we wanted to learn a little more about Liz as an artist. We talked to Liz about her art practice and how it intersects with the values of community and sustainability.
For Liz, natural dyeing is all about using whatever is left and especially utilizing the abundant natural resources of food and floral waste. Whether it’s leftover bouquets from weddings around the city or her own leftover avocado pits, there are natural dyes all around us that can be used to upcycle and alter garments to give them more years of life and love. In just an hour's conversation, Liz taught us there are many amazing things to learn about natural dyeings, like how an avocado pit can create a beautiful shade of pink, or a pomegranate seed can offer green and yellow hues. Liz believes that natural dyeing is an educational experience about our natural world, as much as it is a sustainable hobby and useful method for upcycling.
As sustainable baddies, we know that changing our style and refreshing our wardrobe can come at a financial cost and can lead to more waste. Liz wants attendees of her workshops to walk away with a functional, artistic, and accessible skill that can help add excitement and longevity to an old wardrobe, well-worn accessories, or shabby home decor. Liz is in the market of wasting less and loving more, and natural dyeing is one of the best methods for practicing this outlook. On Saturday, Liz will lead participants through the how-tos and the science of natural dyeing at our collaborative natural dyeing workshop. You can expect to leave with a new skill and appreciation of the complexities of colors and how they exist in our natural world.
Although natural dyeing is a considerable part of Liz’s work, there is more behind her practice. Natural dyeing was introduced to Liz during her undergrad years. Liz moved from Illinois to New York City to study business at Parsons School of Design. It was there that she was able to engage in a wide variety of classes that stimulated both her (very present) right brain and left brain self. She started learning natural dyeing during a busy time in her life when she was working two jobs and taking a full course load. At the time, the slow and methodic practice of natural dyeing was not her forte. After she graduated and found herself at a desk job, she felt the need to get back into a creative process. She shares, “I was mostly just at a desk all day, and I was just going crazy. I was really looking for more ways [to work] with my hands.” She started by making beeswax wraps and then dyeing these fabrics before coating them with beeswax. After a while, Liz got tired of being covered in beeswax but her interest in natural dyeing just stuck.
After working at her desk job, she found herself in roles across the city that combined her interests in zero-waste, education, and creativity. For about a year, she worked for Grow NYC’s compost education program where she developed a curriculum and led workshops with students to educate them on food waste. Fast forward to now, Liz has been able to combine her interest in natural dyeing with her experience in business and her organizational nature (hello Virgo moon!) as an event producer. In her experience hosting and planning events, she has found those that include a hands-on activity are more exciting and engaging for attendees. In addition to her workshops, Liz works on many event projects throughout Brooklyn that incorporate various elements of hands-on engagement. She finds that events with an activity feel more natural, helping people let their guard down and get comfortable.
A passion for hands-on play and practice is part of the reason why Liz’s new studio space is so essential for her work. Having an environment that is large enough and equipped for her natural dyeing workshops is one layer but beyond that, Liz sees the space as home to a series of new event ideas and concepts. Liz shared with us that the through line of her work is “bringing people together to connect to one another and to their own creativity.” Coming up, she is already planning a supper club series with her friend and cook, Lottie, and prior to our workshop, she is putting together a creative coffee hour: a sort of adult play time to practice art and play with various mediums in the company of others, and of course coffee.
With new event ideas and projects on the horizon, Liz is also able to take new steps toward inclusivity. In New York, balancing the need to pay rent, pay for resources, and pay adequately for creative and manual labor can get expensive. Liz has always wanted her work to be accessible and enjoyed by all who are interested, but she recognizes that financial barriers can make it difficult. With each event, she explores alternative ways to admission, including scholarships and work shares. So far, her scholarships favor LGBTQ and BIPOC folks, but she acknowledges it can be hard to make the decision of who should receive the scholarship at the end of the day. Still, Liz remains excited to debut her work and share ideas with her upcoming April Fools’ supper club. This will mark her first time doing a work share for an event, and she looks forward to seeing how it plays out and exploring ways to do more work shares like it in the future.
One of Liz’s jokes with her work is that she is “recreating lunchtime, and also recess.” Navigating that intersection of being an adult, living in a new and massive city, and inviting play and openness wherever we can, is what lunchtime and recess mean to her. This message rings true for us at Sustainable Baddie, where our vision is for our audience to experience joy as a part of this community. We consistently search to find play and joy within the difficult, and sometimes heartbreaking, work of climate action. Natural dyeing, and the way that Liz has adapted this hobby into a method for building community and creating engaging spaces, is a beautiful example of how we can transform desperation into joy with respect to climate action and sustainable living. In her new space, Liz is looking forward to all the creatives that will get to come together there, not only to share ideas and visions but also to have a physical place for those ideas to play out in real time. We are certainly honored to be the first, and we hope that you will join us for this playful workshop on March 25th.