Joe Rohde, a Santa Barbara artist and legendary Disney Imagineer, captivated the audience at the Community Arts Workshop (CAW) on Sept. 18 with an engaging conversation about creativity, collaboration, and exploring the world.
Rohde’s book, Floating Mountains: The Art of Imagining the Impossible, combines anecdotes, advice, scientific insights, practical exercises, and illustrations drawn from decades of creative work. Over his 40-year career as a Disney Imagineer, Rohde collaborated with designers and explorers on numerous projects, including the creation of Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando.
Throughout the evening, Rohde shared concepts from his book and read excerpts for the audience. Rohde explained that throughout the book, “I’m learning and growing, and expanding, and doing things I’ve never done before, because I am not going to do them alone.”
As he recounted his travels to Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, Mongolia, India, and across Eastern and Southern Africa, he transported the audience to these places through storytelling.
In one story, Rohde emphasized the importance of cultural preservation, sharing an experience of constructing a space where native Hawaiians had full authority over every concept and design detail. He described this process as a way for native Hawaiians to express their values and identities to visitors. By using this immersive approach, Rohde said, “It causes designs to happen that we could never predict.”
This project was the first Hawai’i resort in 160 years of tourism to make Hawaiian language a requirement. “The jacket of the bartender is labeled Hawaiian and the people that work there have to be Hawaiian,” Rohde said, highlighting that this is not the expected way things had been done in Hawai’i.
During one of Rohde’s expeditions, he described that as weeks turned into months, his paintings became increasingly representational. One day, he had an epiphany: Everyone was contributing to his painting. “I could actually cultivate this,” he thought, “to deliver and go places where that was the point. Where we were all the ones to work on paintings together.”
This spirit embodies one of the central themes of Rohde’s book, collaboration. In an ongoing project he began with Jane Goodall before her passing, along with other artists, this sense of collaboration comes to life.
The project aims to create a meaningful physical space and conservation center that fosters a deeper connection between humans and animals. Rohde explained the artists meet once a week, share drawings and collaborate on creating an elaborate and interesting place in Arusha, Tanzania.
Closing the evening by reading two excerpts from Floating Mountains, Rohde returned to the message that had shaped the talk: “When people ask, ‘How can I do this? How can I do that?’ My number-one answer is ‘Not alone.’”
In diving into the nature, nurture, and practice of collaboration, Rohde explains how to remain true to the origins of an idea while making room for others to help shape it.
Through Floating Mountains, Rohde invites audiences to connect their creative pursuits with others and the world around them. And, as he reminded the audience throughout the evening, we do not have to do it alone.
