Here and Now Mandalas
Here and Now Mandalas 2025
Sophie Sanders led a 5-hour Here and Now Mandalas (2025) event, in Downtown Keene, NH that coincided with the City of Keene’s Snow and Ice Festival. This newest iteration of her project acted as an antidote to the “winter blues” and offered an opportunity in New England families and communities to partake in a free visual art experience and collaborate through experimental drawing and stenciling processes in the winter outdoors. Attendees made mandalas and moved throughout the nested shapes with Sanders and her assistants by responding to the ice, sand, and stencils provided. For the first time, Sanders and assistants created intricate mandala drawings with colored sand on 18 blocks of ice weighing 50lb each.
In an accessible way, the project introduced visitors to meditative concepts of mandala artmaking and mindfulness and encouraged their appreciation and acknowledgment of the natural environment with site-specific art. Sanders’ creative art process relates to printmaking and sand drawings in a variety of cultural contexts. The joy of collaboration and outdoor artmaking in winter is a rare opportunity to come together in a life-affirming celebration of the season.
Caption: Artist Interview "Painting on Snow" with NH Chronicle WMUR Channel 9 aired 2/29/25. Thank you so much to Karen Meyers and all the lovely people at NH Chronicle!
Here and Now Mandalas 2025 was presented by the Friends of Public Art and the City of Keene, and was awarded grants by the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Putnam Foundation, The NH Charitable Foundation, and the Kingsbury Foundation. Monadnock Food Co-Op contributed to healthy snacks at the event. MaXT Maker space in Peterborough, NH hosted Sanders as an artist-in-residence, where she created over 50 wood stencils.
Friends of Public Art operates under the umbrella of Arts Alive as a fiscal sponsee since 2014. You can see our workatwww.fpamonadnock.org.