Highwood Sisters Make Collaborative, Healthy Art

Jody and Cheryl Casden want to make you art. They also want to make you healthy smoothies. 

If those two things don't sound like a natural fit, it's because you haven't heard these Highwood-based sisters explain the connection yet. 

"We're just doing creative wellness," Jody explained. She was sitting with her younger sister at Maria's Bakery in Highwood. The two shared a cup of coffee, which was fitting for artists that seem to share a canvass as easily as they finish each other's sentences. Lately, the two have been working together on an art installation intended to focus on collaborative art and natural health.

The main concept involves a teardrop trailer, brandished with original artwork and a smoothie bar in the back. Inside is a bed that may at some point we used for therapeutic face painting. The sisters bring the trailer to farmers markets and art festivals, where, in addition to selling their paintings, prints, jewelry and buttons, they invite attendees to grab a brush and join in on some of the canvasses. Or they can try a smoothie and learn about how healthier living will make them more productive and creative.

"When you're not stressed, you're open," Jody explained, "and when you're open, you're creating."

Her sister sums up the installation's inviting approach a bit more abstractly.

"In art school they say paint a question, not an answer," she said. "We want to pose a question, but not give them an answer."

This is a project Jody and Cheryl have been preparing for in one way or another for years. Jody spent some time at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and Cheryl recently graduated from the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. Jody has worked as a massage therapist and has studied up on Qigong, a spiritual Chinese discipline that fuses elements of yoga and meditation. She's also taken classes on food-based healing, which involves learning what parts of what vegetables are the most nutritious. That's where the smoothies come in.

"I had jars at school all the time with just these weird, orange smoothies," Cheryl said after her sister showed her how to make smoothies. "She inspired me to eat healthier."

While at school, Cheryl wrote academically about art and wellness. Her run at MIAD ended with an art show where she set up her studio with a mat and pillows. She lowered the ceiling, added a wall and came up with a video and sounds to play for people who walked in and participated in a work that was half-art, half-meditation.

"I basically turned the room into one of my paintings," she said.

Now, with a trailer adorned in art and ready to go, the sisters plan to hit the road.  They'll be in Madison, Wisc. on July 5 for Bhakti Fest. In August they will participate at ART Milwaukee. They're considering returning to the Highwood Gourmet Farmers Market, which they attended last summer.

In between festivals, they'll be making art and sustaining themselves by doing in-home smoothie demonstrations and organizing people's homes.

"Not only are we an art installation, we're an octopus putting our tentacles out going into people's homes," Jody said with a laugh. "We're very flexible."

The sisters explained that part of assembling their installation has been thinking about how to best reach their viewers. The smoothies, the collaboration, the emphasis on meditation -- it's all in hopes of making a lasting impression.

"How do you want to affect an audience?" Cheryl said. "What do you want to leave them with?"

Jody offered an answer to her sister's question.

"We're trying to create positive change," she said. "When you know something that really works, you want to share it."