Trumansburg musicians play in ‘Mamas for Peace’ music festival

Musicians, artisans and small business owners from all over Tompkins County, including Trumansburg, will host “Mamas for Peace,” an all-women benefit arts festival to raise funds for local organizations supporting women, families and gun reform laws.

The small festival — which will include 10 musical acts and feature local women farmers, makers, artists and entrepreneurs — is set to take place at Stone Bend Farm in Newfield on May 10, the Saturday before Mother’s Day.

“Mama Look!,” a Trumansburg-based band, is curating the festival, alongside a multitude of other amazing women performers, artists, farmers, vendors and entrepreneurs — all from within the Finger Lakes region. The family-friendly event will center on celebrating, supporting and honoring women. Proceeds will go toward supporting the Women’s Opportunity Center of Tompkins and Onondaga Counties and Moms Demand Action. 

The Women’s Opportunity Center is an organization helping women achieve financial independence and personal growth. The center has helped nearly 20,000 women achieve those goals, according to the organization’s website.

Moms Demand Action is a national organization seeking protective gun control measures. The organization was formed in 2012 by Shannon Watts, a mother who started a Facebook group of individuals concerned with gun violence in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook school shooting that same year.

Amy Puryear, a member of Mama Look!, said the benefit show will be an outgrowth of events her community used to organize on Mothers Day about a decade ago at the now-defunct Rongovian Embassy in Trumansburg. 

“These were really well-loved and successful concerts with a whole bunch of musicians in our community and people coming together to raise money for important organizations and also to bring awareness that Mother’s Day originated as a call for peace,” Puryear said, referencing an article on Almanac.com that notes that Mother’s Day traces its roots to the 1800s. 

More specifically, the holiday was inspired by the work of Julia Ward Howe and her seminal text “Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace,” an anti-war reflection from the aftermath of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. 

Puryear said that performers will read “Mother’s Day Proclamation for Peace” at the event. 

Like the shows and performances at the Rongovian Embassy, Puryear said Stone Bend is slowly becoming a hub for artists and entrepreneurs to express themselves and grow their community. 

“Feels like the same energy where there’s so much joy and so much music, but also a lot of organizing important events,” Puryear said. “It really just feels like the energy that’s being cultivated at Stone Bend Farm is something that is embracing our community and welcoming lots of people. So it felt like the perfect place to bring this event back and to have a whole bunch of women-led artists and also entrepreneurs join us for the event to make it a mini one-day festival.”

One of the community members who will be helping with the event is Melissa Madden of Open Spaces Cider, a hybrid project mixing community education, fresh and organic food and bright and refreshing cider. Madden, a local cider maker and a longtime farmer, is helping coordinate an all-women-produced menu of beers, ciders and wines for the event. Her expertise, she said, will contribute toward making the service run smoothly. 

“I usually curate a bunch of farm winery, farm cidery, farm distillery options,” Madden said. “It’s just really been community based. I’ve focused on providing bars to events that don’t otherwise have one and are really specifically LGBTQ, or run by people of color, or art- and agricultural-type events.”

Julia Alvarez-Perez of Usonia Wine in Ovid and Alex Bond of Vagabond Wines are other winemakers for the event. Madden will help them coordinate. For Madden, seeing herself, Alvarez-Perez and Bond all succeed is remarkable, particularly in the cider and winemaking industries, which she called largely male dominated.

Eve’s Cidery (Autumn Stoscheck) and Lake Drum Brewing (Jenna L Pultinas) are also beverage vendors.

“I think we’ve sort of formed a sisterhood over the course of these 20 years that we’ve all been working towards our own professional goals,” Madden said. “We are still really struggling as an industry trying to get people and women of color in leadership positions. But women are really showing up, especially in Finger Lakes wine and cider.

Other vendors at the event will include:

• Brooke Palmer from Jenny Creek Flowers, who will operate a “tulip bar”
• Ava Holmes from Ithaca Chocolates
• Melanie Bloom, who will operate a Mother’s Day card-making station
• Uniit Carruyo from Mama Look!, who will have flower crowns for sale

Ulysses Connection appears every week in Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to editorial@vizellamedia.com. Contact Eddie Velazquez at edvel37@gmail.com or on X (formerly Twitter) @ezvelazquez.

In brief:

Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) of Tompkins County is offering a “hands on pruning workshop” on May 13 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Registration can be found here:  https://ccetompkins.wufoo.com/forms/zy2dkmy07ymgl5/

The class is part of a three-class series of hybrid courses. The fee for the program, according to CCE, ranges from free to $40. “This program is valued at $20, however, please pay what you are able,” reads an announcement in the weekly town of Ulysses newsletter. “Paying more than $20 will help others attend the class.”

Each spring, CCE-Tompkins offers a multipart citizen pruner training series for individuals who want to learn best practices for selecting, planting, caring for and pruning ornamental trees and shrubs.