This Place is a Garden

The Art Garden begins with the understanding that Black and Indigenous people have lived with environments shaped by racial violence: plantations, reservations, polluted neighborhoods, flooding zones, and redlined blocks. Soil holds this history. Concrete carries harm. Water remembers who was pushed away from its banks.

In beginning to build this garden, we imagine the future as gardens beyond a destination for relaxation. They become spaces for healing and rebuilding, a transitory and fluid space that is carried along with us. It is not stagnant; each part of the garden informs and interacts with each other, its visitors (human&nonhuman), and all that lives amongst.

The garden will be a site for native plants to flourish; they will become our teachers and they will offer us dyes, fibers, papers, medicines, and food. The garden will be a place of learning; the plants will be our teachers as they carry long histories of survival and resistance. We will learn to listen when they need to rest and when they need to seed. We will learn their resilience, their adaptability, and their networks of care.

madder roots staining the ground red

indigo slowly fermenting in the dark

milkweed drifting through the air like soft breath

cochineal pressed into bright red pigment

vines and reeds woven into baskets and shelter.