Easton's Karl Stirner Arts Trail to welcome work of Lafayette College professor

EASTON, Pa. — A Lafayette College associate professor and artist will bring the public together at the Karl Stirner Arts Trail this weekend in a celebration of community, art, food and connections.

Nestor Gil’s newest project, the art-inspired community picnic known as LaJiraGira, will start off at the Silk pedestrian bridge linking to the arts trail, venturing to the Labyrinth installation.

The event will start at 4 p.m. Sunday, with a rain date of 4 p.m. on Aug. 13.

LaJiraGira follows in the vein of social practice, or socially engaged practice, a form of art that encourages engagement through human interaction and social discussion.

Karl Stirner Arts Trail Executive Director Jim Toia has been waiting anxiously for the premiere of Gil’s new work, which he said will create a strong connection among the audience, the artist and the project in a unique manner befitting of the trail.

“It's almost like if you imagine picnic blankets but having them designed and then printed on vinyl fabric that can be rolled out periodically over the next years to come for individual dates where the community is invited to come, and a local vendor will be creating food for the community," Toia said.

"That's all in collaboration with Nestor. He'll have artists who will be kind of helping them design the menu and oversee this kind of communal setting."

Sunday’s event will feature the food of Easton’s La Perla Tapatia, the city’s beloved Mexican restaurant run by chef and owner Alejandro Ramirez, his wife Mariana and their family.

Participants are encouraged to bring a blanket and a beverage for the event.

Gil said he looks forward to the depth that can be brought to such simple concepts when they are viewed through the “lens of art,” providing a sense of connection, community and wonder.

“Walk together, eat together, share in that most precious resource, time, together as a community, as an artwork," he said.

"Like many art movements before us [Dadaists, the Surrealists, the Fluxus artists and the Situationists, among others], we can take something as simple as a walk, as simple as a meal in the park, and reconsider it through the lens of art.

“Art gives us the opportunity to see the community in which we live, its spaces and the opportunities these spaces present for us to think about our relationship to it and to other people with whom we are this community.

"In this moment we can recognize one another, become more visible to one another, heed the buzzing energy that is always there, waiting for us to stir, to recognize that we are not alone.”

Gil’s LaJiraGira calls to mind his mission statement, which boldly requests he be referred to as “Visionary.”

“Stripped of its ego and arrogance, the term denotes ‘a person given to fanciful speculations and enthusiasms with little regard for what is actually possible,’" Gil's artistic statement reads.

"Call me that. I reclaim Visionary from the mythical genius in the name of the enthusiastic dreamer.”

Gil goes on to say his work is aimed to raise questions of culture and place, expanding to include “inquiries about movement, memory and loss.”

While mostly serious, his work also has channeled moments of humor, ranging from dry to absurd, Gil said.

Focusing on acts of passage and the relationship and tension between memory and myth associated with those acts, Gil relies upon his intuition and intentional inquiry, he said, to trace “histories of movement between and across borders through my work in performance as well as objects, images and installations.”

Beyond that, Gil creates works in the world of social practice strategies, such as LaJiraGira, which embodies the core of community, which also serves as a cornerstone of the Karl Stirner Arts Trail.

“At times I employ social practice strategies, reflecting upon the struggle to maintain community that attends a transition between spaces —physical, geographic, emotional, intellectual—and alluding to the dispersal phenomenon that is part of any migration/diaspora story,” Gil’s statement reads.