September 25, 2009
The One Mile Garden is a collaborative project with artists Bob Bingham, Ally Reeves, and Robin Hewlett, and the Coleman Center for the Arts and the community of York, Alabama. This community project will be featured in the Coleman Center for the Arts’ gallery from September 25th to November 13th, 2009. An opening reception and community potluck meal will take place on September 25th from 6 to 8 PM.
The One Mile Garden is a multi-centered vision and realization of community that has catalyzed small scale food production, and celebrated and strengthened residents connections to the land and each other. The project includes a central garden for growing, teaching and learning that is located at the Coleman Center for the Arts in downtown York, and satellite gardens at the Eastern Star Baptist Church, the Patton St. neighborhood, and York West End Jr. High School. The project will continue to radiate throughout the community with additional sites. Satellite gardens will be installed at the York Housing Authority, as well as a small public fruit tree orchard at a public park. The orchard will be part of the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation’s goal to plant 18 billion trees worldwide, and illustrates the role that rural communities can play in global initiatives.
The gallery installation serves as an additional hub for project activities. The opening event will take the shape of a potluck meal in which community participants bring dishes prepared with food they have grown themselves. Food events have been organized throughout the project in potluck meals, herb tastings, and community dinners. These events were opportunities to share personal and cultural stories about the food we eat, grow, and prepare. After the initial event the gallery installation will continue to serve as a nucleus for project activities. An artist built demonstration center is at the center of the room, where participants can sign up to give a cooking demonstration or canning and gardening workshops. Videos of the demonstrations serve as a local library and resource center for community participants and audience members abroad.
This project has been heavily shaped by local collaborators as it has developed over the last two years. Area organic gardener Catherine Shelton has been influential in determining various aspects of the gardens. Shelton’s method of organic layer gardening creates raised beds by building up alternate levels of organic material: cardboard, newspaper, dirt, mulch, leaves, and grass. Over time these organic layers compost into the soil and new layers have to be added, creating rich and fertile grounds for the plants to grow. The sculptural nature of this method allowed each bed to be shaped in different forms, which were determined by the artists and participants. Visually they call to mind earthworks of previous decades, but these sculptural works are grounded in their participatory model and community function.
In the context of community garden as contemporary art project, it is interesting to consider for a moment the similarity in trends between community gardens and community based art. Each discipline utilizes similar processes, relying on participation, involvement, and organizing. Each discipline serves a social utility, and uses communal processes for shaping public space and social relationships. Each discipline can convey, shape, and reflect our deeply held cultural associations and values. Each has been used in recent history as a method for offsetting larger trends within contemporary society. Both the art community and it’s organizations as well as community garden programs have played similar roles in community development and urban gentrification. Programs in each discipline frequently remain fragile in the midst of larger economic and societal forces, yet prove themselves most vital in times when those very forces are more turbulent.
The One Mile Garden project utilizes multiple historical instances of community gardens throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries including vacant lot cultivation, church plots, school plots, and neighborhood plots1. Throughout time, trends in community gardens have been shaped by historical eras and events. Community garden programs were on the rise after the Industrial Revolution, and during the Great Depression, both the first and the second World Wars, and the 1970’s recession.2 Not surprisingly they have been on the rise recently. This increase represents a larger trend to decrease negative environmental factors associated with food production, but also as a response to the economic downturn, which has left many with a desire or need to be more self sufficient. Garden programs are currently evolving in increasingly varied contexts from city specific urban programs, to the White House victory garden, to art organizations like P.S.1, as well as a multitude of contemporary artists and artist groups.
The One Mile Garden, an urban garden program in a rural community, draws particular attention to the industrialization of our food supply. Dating back the late 19th Century, city garden programs were a direct response to rising urbanism and industrialization. Practitioners of these programs feared that cities lacked green space, access to fresh produce, and the influence of agrarian values and practices.3 Over a hundred years after these concerns originated in society, there is now no inherent tie between living in a rural area and growing your own food. In America, most of us buy our food from the grocery store regardless of where we live. In fact, it would seem that many cities have a wider distribution of food grown within a local radius than more remote settings. While the One Mile Garden called on many participants with deep connections to the land, agrarian practices and values, and rural traditions of growing and preparing food, many of these participants expressed concern for the loss of these traditions among younger generations and within the larger culture.
Food production is inherently tied to ideas about our individual and collective place in society. Agriculture, on a long trend of industrialization and globalization, stands in contrast to the development of community gardens. Where as community gardens may “…serve to further a vision of what should be in times when society is unclear about where the future is heading,”4 modern agriculture can be framed as pursuing a utopian idea of the technological future. Wendell Berry writes in his classic work, The Unsettling of America, that modern agriculture is an “industrial dream of future-as-paradise.”5 Berry was writing from 1974 to 1977, a time of economic recession that saw a rise in both agribusiness and technological food processes, as well as a counter trend of environmentalism, community gardens, and a move back to nature. Berry takes particular trouble with an article published in National Geographic in February of 1970, “The Revolution in American Agriculture,” by James B. Billard.6 The article chronicles modern advancements in technology and agriculture, identifying the modern farmer as a business practitioner, and the goal of modern agriculture to overcome worldwide famine through mass production. Berry traces these aspirations to America’s deep roots with Manifest Destiny. Agribusiness becomes the fulfillment of destiny as the conquest of nature.
The lengthy National Geographic article closes with an artist’s interpretation of the future of agriculture, a painting titled “Farm of the Future” by David Meltzer, which was commissioned by the National Geographic Society, and created under the influence of the U.S.D.A.7 The painting shows a futuristic farm that consists of crop dusters, cow condos, and a centralized glass domed control center. A generic pristine city can be seen in the distance, nestled between majestic mountains and the futuristic farm. It seems as if the Jetsons could descend any moment by aerocar. The painting illustrates a common view of the future, in which technology frees society from current or anticipated problems and demands. It is a utopian view of both the rural industrial farm, and the clean industrial city. The two exist seemingly in harmony, though in complete isolation from one another. The painting also represents a traditional role for the artist, in which a painter renders imagined ideas isolated in images.
The One Mile Garden presents an alternate view. The figurative one mile radius that extends from the central garden and activity center is a way of defining community through collective imagination followed by organized action. This is a model for artists, participants, and communities to create a more vibrant now, instead of simply imagining a distant future.
-Shana Berger, Co-Director
About
The One Mile Garden is made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts; the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; the Alabama State Council on the Arts; the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Melon University; the Berkman Faculty Development Fund, Carnegie Melon University; the Sparkplug Foundation; the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation; the Tombigbee Resource and Conservation & Development Council; Americorps VISTA; the University of West Alabama; the Daniel Foundation of Alabama; and the generous contributions of our individual supporters.
A special thanks goes to our master gardener, Catherine Shelton; One Mile Garden Programs Coordinator, Suzanne Hagood; Ollie Mae Coleman and everyone at the Eastern Star Baptist Church; Anne Torma and all of the neighborhood folks; Jackie Jackson and everyone at West End Jr. High School; and all of the many people who collaborated on this project.
People
Bob Bingham is a Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. His artwork “incorporates systems of growth, live plants and natural materials with mechanical and electronic devices. Through this combination of systems he addresses issues pertaining to a sustainable future where technology and nature exist in a symbiotic relationship.” Bingham’s work has been widely exhibited in the United States, Italy and Japan including The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Brooklyn Museum; White Heat, Kanagawa Hall Gallery, Yokohama, Japan; Art+Nature, Rico Gallery, Santa Monica; Steel Cities, Cleveland Center for the Arts; and Urban Paradise/Gardens in the City, Paine Weber Art Gallery, New York. He has had many public installations including the Creative Time’s Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage; in Piazza del’ St. Stepheno Rome, Italy and the first Pittsburgh Center for the Arts Biennial. He co-directed an interdisciplinary team effort, The Nine Mile Run Greenway Project, which culminated in exhibits at the Wood Street Galleries and the Regina Miller Gallery, CMU, Pittsburgh and led to the formation of the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association.
Robin Hewlett holds a B.F.A. in Fine Arts and Drama from Carnegie Mellon University. Her artist statement declares. “Rather than making things, I make things happen. I approach art making as life practice in the same way that an athlete might shoot hoops as basketball practice. Art making becomes a series of exercises that allow me to practice the things I want to be better at in life. This mostly includes interacting with other people, addressing systems of power, and creating ethical, sustainable ways of relating to the world around me. I like to invite other people to practice with me.” Her work has been shown extensively including at the the Experimental Station in Chicago, IL, the International Center in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
Suzanne Hagood, the One Mile Garden Programs Coordinator, received her MFA from Texas Tech University in 2003. She has taught at Ohio of Athens University, Auburn University, and the University of Tennessee. Her work has been exhibited nationally, including in Knoxville, Dallas, Houston, Santa Fe, and New York City. Her work has been featured in ART PAPERS magazine, and Aspect: the Chronicle of New Media Art. Hagood has received a number of invitations for her performance and collaborative works including the 2004 Santa Fe Music Festival, at the Santa Fe Art Institute and the International Sculpture Conference, Revelation Texas Show, at the University of Houston, 2000. Awards include a George Latta Award for Excellence and the Dr. E.N. & Fan Woodson Jones Scholarship.
Ally Reeves is currently enrolled in the Graduate of Fine Arts program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. Her work expands and explores the roles of artists and other cultural institutions, placing emphasis on artwork which is collaborative and communicative. Her work has been widely exhibited including at the Andy Warhol Museum, the Matress Factory in Pittsburgh, and the Transformer Gallery in Washington, D.C..
Catherine Shelton, The Coleman Center for the Arts’ Organic Gardening Specialist, was born in Eutaw, Alabama where she was raised in a rural area on a cattle farm. She learned about growing vegetables and raising chickens, hogs, cattle, and turkeys. In elementary school she belonged to the Future Farmers/Future Homemakers of America where she learned the fundamentals of cooking. Her interest in food and cooking, particularly in culinary and practical uses of herbs, has developed throughout her life. She has worked at the Federation of Souther Land Cooperatives in numerous capacities. She currently maintains her own organic gardens in Livingston, Alabama, and provides food to area residents.
Notes
1Laura J. Lawson, City Bountiful, A Century of Community Gardening in America (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 1-14, 17.
2Ibid, 1-14.
3Ibid, 30.
4Ibid, 289.
5Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America, Culture & Agriculture (San Fransisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 67.
6James B. Billard, “The Revolution in American Agriculture,” National Geographic, February 1970, 147-185.
7Ibid, 185-186.