The Mushroom Dye Gathering will be an alchemical exploration into the amazing colors that local mushrooms and their fellow forest dwelling plants can offer to us. We’ll learn to brew mushroom and botanical dye liquors, mordant fibers, and achieve a range of colors with ph and mineral modifiers. The goal for the day will be to dye enough felt swatches for each participant to make a small bunting banner to take home, along with sample skeins in an earthy rainbow of colors.

As part of the Larry Spring Museum’s Chaos Fungorum 22: Do Mycelium Dream of Electric Humans?, the Dye Gathering celebrates the curiosity of Mendocino fiber artist Miriam Rice, whose pioneering research into artistic applications for fungi, including natural dyes and pigments, led the modern resurgence of using mushrooms for color. Her work is carried on through the International Mushroom Dye Institute and the Miriam Rice Archive at Pacific Textile Arts.

Pacific Textile Arts is an all volunteer educational nonprofit existing to support, share, and celebrate the fiber arts. PTA’s campus includes a gallery in their historic Victorian house, where exhibits are new each month; an extensive catalogued textile library; a tapestry weaving studio; and a large classroom for meetings, events, and workshops, stocked with weaving looms and equipment. A covered patio provides an area for social events and dye workshops, just like this one.

Anne Beck is an artist whose work is deeply rooted in her internal and external environment, both materially and conceptually. She first encountered mushroom dyes during a demonstration led by Nancy Denison, PTA member and student of Miriam Rice’s, shortly after moving to Mendocino in 2008. Since, she has gently incorporated color from the world around her into her paintings and drawings. Anne has taught papermaking and printmaking extensively, but this will be the first dye workshop, so it will be non-hierarchical and rhizomatic, true to the mycelial source material.