A raise of hands

"Backyard chickens, bees cutting edge of growing local food movement"

2010-07-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

I read this article in the news this morning, and thought it was worth posting. It's about the growing interest in do-it-yourself fooding. I tried to write that it was about slow, sustainable, organic, local food, but so many buzz words in one sentence was difficult to swallow.

While keeping your own chickens is in many ways all of those things, I think the reality is that people want to do things themselves. They want to go "back to what it used to be," as the article says, which speaks first to a diy mentality, and second to all of the other positive environmental and social issues that "home fooding," as I'm now going to call it, addresses.

Keeping chickens, gardening in your yard, maintaining bee hives, are all first and foremost ways of being involved with getting food on the table. Fooding. That is the primary objective - delicious, fresh, healthy food, made by the efforts of your own two hands. The consequences of home fooding have really positive impacts on the planet and our neighborhoods and our families, which makes eating the food you help grow just that much more satisfying.

(bread made with home-ground local wheat and local honey, cheese made from local milk, and salsa made with green onions and tomatoes from the back yard - I'm not going to lie, this was an incredibly delicious and satisfying meal.)

what educators, therapists, program coordinators, parents, and sheriffs all know

2010-07-27T18:12:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the summer I met a sweet girl named Laura who works with adults with disabilities.

The program is called Alpine Transition and Employment Center (ATEC).

It is unique in that it is funded by the Alpine School District, but is a day program for mentally handicapped adults. It provides real-life training for adults, and Laura has implemented a gardening program.

In my observations over the last year, I've noticed that educational programs consistently use gardening in their curriculum. From public and private schools to community outreach programs, treatment centers, and homeless shelters, programs everywhere are using gardening to teach real life skills.

I think this is significant.

The local jail teaches inmates how to grow tomatoes so that they can provide for themselves after prison.

The homeless shelter encourages visitors to work in the garden, to provide both a peaceful place as well as healthy, tasty food.

Schools teach children how plants grow by building raised beds and growing vegetables that they eventually harvest and eat.

Less-abled adults are given a shovel and watering can because there's something at once therapeutic and educational about watching something grow.

This speaks volumes about the fundamental connection that we have with our food.

When people don't know how to completely take care of themselves, the first thing we do is teach them how to grow their own food.

I'll just say it again: I think this is significant.

I asked Laura to write a little bit about what she does, and she wrote:

The reason I started to garden with my guys is because we needed something different to do and I had just discovered the joy of gardening. The people I work with are pretty low functioning and may have not been able to understand or appreciate what I was about to show them but it is always worth trying!

A couple days before planting we took a trip to the greenhouse to pick up starts and soil, we had found some old pots in the back and decided to use those instead of ripping up grass. I had foundation money (money I donate from my check every month) to buy supplies and help get our little garden get started. Our first year we bought tomatoes, lettuce, broccoli, and peppers. We also used the space in front of ATEC usually used for bushes and flowers to plant onions and spinach. I had a big group of individuals and each one got to plant something. At first some were a little unsure of what to do but others were completely confident and knew what to do. I assume those guys were the "green thumbs." After planting they were peaceful and throughout the growing season some would go out and pick tomatoes and come back in with their loot, some would share and some would gobble up whatever they picked before coming inside! But mostly we just enjoyed watching the plants grow. This year we did the same thing only adding a pretty flower garden in the mix! They like having responsibilities like watering and weeding, and I never have to beg to get help. Someone is always out with me.

I'm interested in understanding how systems of agriculture work.

I want to know where the food is grown, and who's growing it, and how it's done, but I think the larger question is WHY?

On so many levels, being responsible for the food you eat is important.

The fact that we teach this process to children and the disabled and the unemployed and the law-breakers and the transients of our town speaks to that overarching question, and what I'm learning is this: being connected to our food in turn connects us to ourselves and to each other.

Participation in this act is important for our health and happiness.

Laura, along with educators, therapists, program coordinators, parents, and sheriffs everywhere are illustrating this point every day.

So Much Writing

2010-07-10T16:34:00.000-07:00

This blog has come to a screeching halt, and I apologize. I am not at a lack for things to write about - in fact, I have a dozen blog posts in the works. But I've been doing so much writing this week. My "thesis" is due soon, but more importantly, I've been grant writing. That's right. I'm asking people for money.

There's a program called Design Ignites Change, which uses design and art to create solutions to social problems. I just finished an application for one of their awards.

Here's a link to the blurb about the project.

This May Not Be For Everyone

2010-06-28T08:16:00.000-07:00

I killed a chicken last week. I went down to Payson to Brent's chicken farm, and he showed me how to kill a chicken, and then I did it.

I took pictures and I'm going to tell you about my experience.

But really, this post may not be for you.

So if it's not, check back tomorrow for a safe, death-free post about community gardens.

I've written before about Brent's chickens. They look as well cared for as a huge group of chickens can look. They're big and clean, and make the noises that happy chickens make.

So that's good.

He has mostly laying hens, but raises other kinds of birds, including birds for meat.

Meat chickens grow really fast. They put on a lot of weight and can be very hefty birds. He sold me a twelve pound chicken about a month ago, and it was a beast.

So, the first thing you have to do when you want to kill a chicken is catch one.

Brent has a whole system for knowing which chickens are ready to be harvested and which ones need more time.

They have colored bands on their legs that let him know how old they are, and since birds go through different feather cycles, he tries to be aware of what state their feathers are in.

There is a window of opportunity, between sets of feathers, when a chicken is significantly easier to pluck.

I just happened to be there during this two week window, and I experienced the difference.

Brent really knows his chickens.

The next step is to carry your chicken out to the chopping block and cut off its head.

This part is not easy.

The knife was super sharp, but I'm not all that strong. I'm thinking I'm not going to go into too much detail here because it got pretty graphic.

But I will say there was a sense of acceptance, and then of accomplishment, and then gratitude.

As the chickens were being caught, I thought about what I was about to do, and I, in typical form, started to cry. It's not all that difficult to make me cry, and watching these hens being rounded up was a little much for me.

But as I geared up to take a life, I accepted the fact that I participate in this act on a regular basis whether I like it or not - I eat meat. I eat it at least once a week, sometimes more.

Sometimes a lot more.

Every time I cook chicken legs or make a turkey sandwich or grill a hamburger, I am participating in this very act, only I'm removed from the consequences. When I pull a bag of chicken from the freezer, I don't have to see rich red blood or touch guts or watch something go from being alive to not being alive. But that's exactly what happens every time I eat meat - something has to die.

And so, I killed a chicken. I didn't cry when I did it, by the way.

I didn't cry because I had somehow managed to accept what I was doing, and recognize it as significant.

And then I felt immediately like I had accomplished something important. I took no pleasure (and I mean absolutely none) in taking a life, but for the first time ever I was present when the food that I would eventually eat moved from life to death for me.

While Brent walked me through the process of harvesting the chickens, I felt like I was tapping into something much older and larger than me. Remember the cave paintings? People have been performing this act, and celebrating it, and ritualizing it for a long time. And now I see why.

The single, quick act of killing the chicken only took a few seconds, and when it happened I felt a huge sense of gratitude. I was thankful for that chicken.

I don't usually feel gratitude when my meat comes from the freezer.

And then there was a lot of work to do.

You hang the chickens by a string and let them bleed for a while.

Then you boil a huge pot of water and dip them in the water and count to twenty.

That's what Brent said.

He learned how to harvest chickens from his grandfather, and while he walked me through the steps, I recognized that he was not just doing work. He was performing a type of age-old ritual, the kind that pass between generations, that is taught by stories and hands-on experience.

It was full of prescribed steps and ordered procedures.

After dipping the chicken in the boiling water and counting to twenty, you remove the wing feathers. Then you dip it again and remove the rest of the feathers.

A chicken has hair, which most people don't know. I didn't know, until I bought the twelve pound beast from him last month.

It had long, ugly hairs on it, and I honestly didn't know what to do.

It has nothing to do with the quality of his chickens, and everything to do with how he processes them.

Industrial chicken processing includes vats of formaldehyde and a variety of other unsavory and even dangerous chemical procedures to remove the feathers and hair. That's why your chicken is all white and smooth.

Brent showed me how to remove the hair without formaldehyde.

You take a newspaper and wrap it a certain way and light it with a match. You wave the fire over the carcass of the bird, making sure to not overheat any one area. He prefers this method because the newspaper doesn't burn very hot, and he doesn't want to start cooking his bird too early.

I couldn't help feeling like I was participating in some kind of religious ritual as I ran burning paper across the chicken's skin. We were silent as we performed this cleansing ritual.

The next step is to remove all the feet and then the innards.

You cut one slit behind the knee cap, and then one in between the knee and the leg, and then pull to remove the legs.

Next, a slit is made at the base of the tail so that the waste can drain out.

Then you cut a larger hold, reach in, and pull everything out.

As each organ was removed, I examined it and asked about it, wanting to understand better how everything inside this chicken had worked together only minutes before to make it walk around and cluck and eat and remain alive. I don't know what I was expecting, but the inside of the chicken was really warm.

Brent doesn't choose to save the innards for food, and since I don't really know how to prepare them (or any desire to know how to cook a delicious chicken heart or liver), we put it all in a bag. I'm not sure what he does with them. I wish I hadn't forgotten to ask.

Once the inside of the bird is clean, you place the whole thing in a bucket and rinse it with cold water. The bird is still really warm from when it was alive, and needs to be cooled down as soon as possible so that it doesn't develop salmonella.

Then you let it drip dry for a few seconds, place it in a zip lock bag, and put it in the freezer.

I asked him how he prefers to eat chicken, and he says his favorite thing is to roast it with onions and apples stuffed inside.

The way we eat is governed quite rigidly by traditions and rules we've learned over the years.

This is as it should be.

Michael Pollan writes about the rules of food regularly, but especially in In Defense of Food: An Eaters Manifesto and in The Omnivore's Dilemma.

But there are equally important and timeless rules governing how the food is grown, raised, harvested, and prepared. Most of the time-honored traditions have stuck around for a reason: they're important. They're the best way to do things.

I was really glad to have seen and experienced these tradiations first-hand.

After all of this, I will tell you that I absolutely hated killing that chicken. Yes I felt grateful, and I felt like I had accomplished something important, and yes it was a sort of land mark for me.

But I hated it.

I'm not sure if I will stop eating meat, but I certainly have a better sense of what goes into that delicious sandwich.

And I will not take it for granted.

Green Map

2010-06-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

Mapping is very popular these days.

I'd like to think that I came up with the idea for this project on my own, but that simply wouldn't be true.

Besides the heaps and mounds of people who helped me work through various ideas, my thinking on being an artist is that, generally speaking, I am simply a synthesizer of collective thought. All artists basically are. We can work all day long, alone in our studios, making work with our own hands, but in the end what we have to say comes from what's around us. And what's around us is our community. When approached from that perspective, you could say that all art is community-based in one way or another. Who I am and, in turn, my work is the result of the people and attitudes and culture around me.

And right now, the general attitude points to an invigorated interest in food: where it comes from, how it's grown, how it's eaten, and who grows it.

And by the general attitude, I mean I can't turn on NPR without hearing about genetically modified crops, the import and export of produce, the environmental impact of shipping, particularly of food, or the effect of corn syrup on the cognitive processes of children. Most of the major environmental, social, and political issues right now have their fingers somewhere in the agriculture pie.

And that's probably the way that it should be - food is the great unifier. It is important to one and all. So any system involving people will inevitably touch on food in one way or another.

And like I've said before, food brings people together - it takes communities to grow it, and families to share it, and loved ones to make it worth cooking.

I don't believe that this growing interest in food is a fad. I believe that it's a reinvestment in something humans have always known was important. We've just lost focus for a while. This interest is not new, but very, very old. We're just remembering.

And we're assessing. We're figuring out where we went wrong, and what we need to do to get things back on track.

Like I said, mapping is huge these days. It's a practical thing - if we want to find food that's grown near us, we need to know where it is.

But it's also an emotional, spiritual thing. We don't just want to know where we are, we want to know who we are.

And it's effective to create a definition of ourselves based on what's around us.

This project is practical - we're seeing where the food is grown.

But it's more than that.

Together we're creating a definition of ourselves.

We're making a sketch of where we come from and who we are because of this beautiful place.

Check out the Green Map Project. It is one of many projects in this vein that have influenced me.

When the summer is over, we'll have to create a Green Map for our town.

Jail Birds

2010-06-19T17:10:00.000-07:00

We are all connected by food.

I really believe that.

People come together to grow it and eat it and celebrate it.

My project is in part an effort to figure out where the food is grown, to collect stories about the land and people that produce it, and to make our agricultural systems visual.

Because in some ways we are disconnected from where our food is grown, and in other ways agriculture is our rich heritage, the lasting legacy of this valley, a connection we can't avoid.

July 17, 1917, Utah State Prison Garden, Salt Lake City

Published by the Utah State Historical Society

At the farmer's market, I learned that the Utah County Jail has a very prosperous gardening program.

Last year they harvested over 50 tons of produce.

These are the kinds of wonderful bits of information that are so effortlessly gleaned while talking to people at the market.

The jail's gardening program is part of their Jail Industries Program, which is a hands-on training program that gives inmates skills to be competitive in the job market when they are released.

The garden is also therapeutic and community building.

The County Jail's website describes the program:

"The inmate's first level, after our orientation that explains the rules and expectations of each inmate, is to work in our seven acre garden. We produce a multitude of vegetables, have a small orchard, grow flowers and work with a small hive of bees. We like to call our garden our Zen Garden. It is a peaceful place where the inmates can get some sun, enjoy the panoramic mountain view and work in the soil."

First, I'll say that people need to experience beauty. Inmates need it as much as art students do. Also, both art students and inmates feel the satisfaction that comes from creating something from raw materials, from making and shaping and producing something with their bare hands.

I've written before that art is symbolic - it means more than what it actually is. The work is physically made up of materials, but generally it is not valued because of what it's made of, but because of what it means, what it represents. The deep symbolism in gardening is made abundantly clear when seen within the perimeter of the county jail.

"Each year we produce approximately 100,000 pounds of vegetables. These vegetables are donated to the jail kitchen, to give fresh organic vegetables to the inmates to eat. We also donate to the Food and Care Coalition and to various senior centers. On one occasion after dropping off a truck load of vegetables to a senior center, one of the inmates was very quiet. When he spoke he said, “That is one of the coolest things I have ever done.” We often talk to the inmates about this being their opportunity to give back to society for the crimes they have committed and to walk out of our jail with confidence that they have done well. This is not only a productive time for growing vegetables and fruit but for growth and self evaluation from the inmates."

These prisoners are in jail because they didn't take care of themselves properly. They probably tried to fulfill a basic need in an unhealthy, illegal way. But in prison they are working to nourish themselves, and are learning how to care for their bodies and their minds and their spirits in a better way. And in the process, they are providing for other peoples needs as well.

One article about the program wrote:

"It is the intent of the Sheriff's Office to continue this program each year in an attempt to reach out to the poor people of our community. Many prisoners that are incarcerated for non violent offenses are permitted to work in the garden. They feel this is a great opportunity to give back to the community as well as help people who were once in their position. This has given each inmate a great sense of pride in taking ownership of the garden. Inmates seem to work harder in the garden because they know they are helping others who are in need. This also creates a great work ethic that helps them when they are released from the county jail and it appears that they transition more successfully back into the community."

In 2007, Orem experienced a debilitating infestation of Japanese beetles. The city was sprayed with pesticides, but people were not able to grow crops that summer. That year the jail was expanding their kitchen, and the construction prevented them from being able to prepare their own produce, so they donated all of their crops, every tomato, cucumber, and pea, to charitable organizations.

Talk about sharing.

Most years, they use about half of the produce in the jail kitchens, and the other half is given away, but that year 41 tons of food were donated. And during this particular season, the food was not only convenient and welcome, but desperately needed due to the beetle infestation and ensuing food shortage.

The community was enhanced because of this gift.

An article by Becca Stranger (which is entertaining and worth a read) on Slow Food USA's blog describes the benefits of jail gardens:

They help inmates develop essential social and life skills.

While planning the garden together with organizers and other prisoners, inmates learn how to work cooperatively.

The garden allows them to nurture both their mental and physical health.

Learning gardening skills helps prisoners prepare themselves to find jobs and support themselves upon their release.

Garden produce helps cut the cost of feeding prisoners, "which is not insignificant," writes Stranger, "considering prison costs are rising and states spend nearly 7 percent of their budgets on corrections after only health care, education, and transportation."

Large amounts of garden produce are also sent to nearby food banks, which have proved crucial to organizations across the country during this economic crisis.

The therapeutic and emotional benefits of growing food are universal - from Michael Pollan to Barbara Kingsolver to the Utah County Jail's blog, people write regularly about this phenomenon. It seems to have to do with what the act of gardening represents - a connection to the land and the powers that created it, freedom and independence, emotional and physical wellness, abundance and health, personal and community growth.

But there is face-value as well, immediate benefits that are tangible and delicious.

One article in the Daily Herald said that the inmates love eating the food that their garden produces. "When they can get tortilla chips, the inmates have been known to pick the ripe tomatoes, onions and jalepenos and make homemade salsa in the field."

What a great way to eat.

God Bless the Whole World

2010-06-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

I saw this sign on my walk to the library. It's on 700 E and 200 S.

I hope that God does bless the whole world. Starting with my dog and chickens and garden.

The secret to a good garden is praying. A lot.

That’s what I really think.

I wake up every morning and the first thing I do is say Please Bless.

Because I love these plants and animals, and I think that at a certain point I am not totally capable of caring for them properly.

I mean, I do my very best.

But I think God cares about my pea plants and potatoes and puppy, too, and wants to help.

So I ask for a little extra goodness to come my way.

This has become part of my ritual, my routine.

Here are some thoughts on the ritual of gardening by Jessie Eyre, a Provo native and contributor to the Utah People's Post

How Does Your Garden Grow?

I think that art and gardening are connected by ritual,

and Jessie's gardening practices are a lot like my art-making practices.

This article is beautiful and definitely worth reading.

Marks and Larks

2010-06-14T20:43:00.000-07:00

I walked to the library today, and passed this sweet little painting.

It's on the sidewalk at the intersection of 200 East and 200 North.

I imagine that it was first just a paint splatter, like someone dropped a paintbrush or spilled some paint. And then someone else came along and added other markings that transformed the drips and spills into something quite pretty and with a little more meaning.

It looks like a lark. Or a bird of some kind.

I quite liked that little image. It made me think about how human beings have been making marks like this for a really long time.

As you can see from the text at the bottom of the image, this cave painting dates back to somewhere between 15,000 B.C. and 10,000 B.C.

I mean, that's a really long time.

What is it with people? Why do they feel compelled to draw with burnt wood and squish up berries and like spit ink on walls and stuff?

I took these images in Moab last year.

No one can be sure how old these carvings are because people have been vandalizing this area for a long time. But they're probably older than pioneers and America and whatever we think of when we think of Native, and possibly Jesus, even.

Apparently Marty and Dick had to get in on the action, too.

Where does the need to make marks come from?

Scholar and author Ellen Dissanayake claims that art is actually a biological imperative. That the need to "make special" as she calls it is just as fundamental as eating food or finding shelter. That it is literally hardwired into us.

People have been changing the materials and tools around for centuries.

Ash and animal fat, berries and clay, carvings and sculptures, paint and bulldozers, sharpies and laminated maps.

It's all essentially the same.

Human beings need to make marks. We need to describe the world around us, and demarcate it as something other. We need to set certain things apart from the every-day, to make them special.

Carvings and tattoos and bunches of rocks piled in a certain way and tiny blue paint-larks all point to the fact that human beings from all times and in all places have felt compelled to do essentially the same thing.

We all just need to make art, people!

Local Chocolate

2010-06-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

So Utah is home to a world-class chocolatier.

Who knew?

Amano Artisan Chocolate is located in Orem.

I can now rest in peace, knowing that my favorite food is made so close to me.

Chocolate may seem antithetical to this project - I'm interested in locally grown food and its lovely local growers and consumers.

Cacao is not grown here. It's grown really far away.

But I love it. Chocolate, I mean

So I guess in my efforts to support food culture in this area, the best I can do in this case is support a local business.

"Amano" means "by hand" in Italian. It also means "they love."

Both meanings resonate with me.

I will be visiting them soon, and will take pictures.

Just FYI, they're having a contest. They're coming out with a new chocolate bar, and all you have to do is guess the origin of the new cacao bean they're using.

A years supply of chocolate is totally worth a quick stop at their blog.

Just saying.

Proud and Full

2010-06-09T21:55:00.000-07:00

I ate from my garden last night. I picked baby lettuce leaves, and they were delicious.

Lettuce seeds are just so dang small, so instead of planting them one by one, I just sprinkled them along the row. They're all really close together, and are now big enough that I need to thin them. Which means I get to eat them. Which is fantastic.

When I pick my lettuce, I have a feeling that is unique to gardening.

There is something almost indescribable about picking something that you are responsible for producing, which will in turn nourish you.

I rarely feel so completely involved in a process, especially one that is so essential and necessary.

I must eat.

I have to.

And participating in the cycle of planting, growing, and eating food nourishes me in deeper ways than just physically.

I feel more gratitude, and I feel more complete, somehow.

I imagine myself connecting to something larger than myself - there is a history and a tradition surrounding food, and gardening makes me feel hooked in to this age-old practice.

I feel more like my mother.

I imagine other people who have kneeled and planted tiny seeds, like my grandparents and pioneers and Adam and Eve.

I'm not sure it will make sense to say I feel more love when I garden. It may sound a little unreal. But when I pick those plants, and I think about the miracle that they are, I do. I feel more love.

Gardening comes as close to a religious experience as, well, a religious experience.

When I eat the food grown by the sweat of my brow, I feel proud of my accomplishments.

And then I feel full.

Proud and full.

What an excellent combination.

Alice Waters

2010-05-28T22:33:00.000-07:00

Alice Waters is a fabulous woman. She's basically responsible for the way I think about food and agriculture.

Well, her and my mother.

She's the Vice President of the Slow Foods movement, and has been a voice for local, organic, sustainable growing practices for decades. Those are all words I hate, by the way, they sound so political and trite these days. So I'll try it again: her work has carved out space for people to eat food that was grown near them, without poison, in a seasonal, practical way.

There.

I'm reading an interview with her about her work as an educator and a restauranteur. She founded a restaurant in Berkeley, CA called Chez Panisse, and also developed the Edible Schoolyard (link to a 2 minute video) at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School.

This project is completely wonderful. It's relatively self-descriptive, but basically they transformed a schoolyard into a garden that the students participate in growing and maintaining. I won't be able to do it justice in this post, but I will write more about her and her work another time.

She said:

"We all eat. We all eat every day. And if we're eating with intention, and we're eating real food, and we're connecting with where that food comes from, and we're involved in the process of making it and offering it to our classmates, cooking for our classmates, and gathering around the table, then these ideas of community just emerge very naturally. It's about giving and receiving. 'I'm dependent on you for my nourishment.' That's a deep message. It's about generosity."

She also said:

"When you're pulled away from that beauty and meaning, the rhythm of life - the life and death of a garden - you're really deprived of the most important thing in life, which is that ability to feel connected to the bigger world outside yourself. You're not just your own little person who has to figure out how to live on the planet."

Okay.

So.

When I started writing down my thoughts on the intersection of art and agriculture and its place in this town, I wasn't sure I'd know what to say.

And I wasn't exactly sure where I was going.

But as I've started putting my thoughts on paper, and by that I mean putting my thoughts on my computer and then into the vast nothingness that is the interwebs, I've started to understand what I hope for this work

I hope to provide people with a doorway, a portal of sorts: a way to connect with and enter a large and complicated system. The whole network that produces our food is quite vast, and generally speaking we (myself included) are disconnected from the land and the people who grow what we eat.

This connection can begin by making a mark on a map.

My map.

At the Provo Farmers Market.

It will develop through conversations and interactions with people.

This project is intended to gather information about our system, our town. But the act of collecting data is just practice; it's just rehearsal. The grand finale, the real triumphant culmination to all of this, is what we will do with this information.

In the end, the process of describing the world around us is just a way of defining ourselves. The process of defining what's around us really only illustrates where we are, and ultimately what we are because of that location.

And I think what we'll find as we define and describe and collect, is that we are part of vibrant, beautiful, mighty community.

We are just so lucky.

The Hunt

2010-05-27T11:27:00.000-07:00

I'm completely obsessed.

I don't think I'll be able to rest until I find asparagus.

No, this is not an image of wild asparagus. I did not pick these lovely green stalks. They're from Costco. From COSTCO.

And yet they grow, or so I've heard, like weeds.

Brent and Ralph, the guys who sell eggs at the Provo Farmers Market, also sell wild asparagus that they pick in Spanish Fork.

They refuse to tell me where.

They say it grows in ditches and along rail road tracks and old gravel roads. It's planted by birds (you know, when birds eat seeds, they, like, deposit them), and it grows where there's not a lot of disturbance and a ton of water.

So I did my research about what asparagus looks like, and then went on an adventure with some friends.

There are railroad tracks several blocks from my house.

In fact, sometimes, in the summer, when my windows are open, I can hear the trains.

It's a surprisingly pleasant sound.

There is a ditch that runs parallel to the tracks as far as the eye can see. The water looks like it gets diverted to several of the fields along the rail road.

I thought it was bound to be full of lovely feathery asparagus plants.

Nope.

The ditch was really pretty. But no asparagus. My friend talked to one of the people who lives near the tracks, who said he hasn't seen any asparagus there.

I guess they call it asparagus hunting for a reason.

And so, the search continues...

Relations, Aesthetics

2010-05-20T12:32:00.000-07:00

Contemporary art is constantly evolving.

This is no surprise.

The field of art seems to be in a constant state of expansion. It continuously opens its doors to new materials, methods, and theories. We used to talk about art in terms of how it looked and what it was made of and how much it sold for. We still use that language, but there are other ways of looking at work that see art from completely different angles: What does it do? What is its context? How does it relate to art, and what does it mean on a broader scale?

Basically what I'm saying is this: everyone is comfortable with a painting and a sculpture being art. No one would really question it, and everyone would like one or two for their homes.

But people become less comfortable with art when it expands out of black frames and off of pedestals and out of galleries.

And then, even less comfortable when it overflows out of the safety of a physical object, existing instead on a conceptual, ephemeral level.

And then, when it no longer has a price tag, we loose our grasp completely.

If art isn't something, and you can't always see it, and you can no longer buy it, what is it?

Welcome to the expanding field of contemporary art.

I am constantly asked why my work is art. This is not a stupid question; not even close. Even my professors and the chair of my department ask me this question.

This blog is partly a vehicle for my work, and partly an explanation of my work.

I want you to understand that my booth at the farmers market, and the meals I host, and the assignments I'll have you do, and the maps we make together are not just part of a social experiment, or a research project.

They are art.

A good place to start explaining my work is with the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija.

It's pronounced Rick-rit Teer-a-von-it.

Good luck with that.

That's him.

He was born in Buenos Aires, raised in Thailand, Ethiopia, and Canada, educated in Chicago and New York, and works in Berlin, New York, and Chiang Mai.

What a guy.

He started out cooking Pad Thai in galleries for people. He'd take over galleries, really up-scale, well-known galleries, too, and he'd cook for people. For free. Anyone could come in and eat and chop vegetables and talk to him.

According to his way of thinking, what was important about a work of art was not what you see, but "what takes place between people." With that in mind, he changed the gallery space from a place where objects were displayed, to a place where interactions occurred.

He reorganized galleries into temporary kitchens, into dining rooms, even into a full scale replica of his New York apartment. For a summer, his gallery-turned-apartment was open to the public 24/7. People could stop by any time, night or day, for a cup of tea, to read a book, or to chat. People literally lived and ate and worked in this space.

Talk about an expanding field.

We have photographs of these events.

And if we were there, we could have experienced it.

But the question is this: what is the art? Where is the art in all of this?

Tiravanija's work is categorized under the term Relational Aesthetics, coined by French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud. (the link goes to excerpts from his book Relational Aesthetics, which I have if you'd like to borrow it. Yes, it is translated from French. And yes, it's terrible because of it.)

Relational Aesthetics is "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space."

Basically, the material and the subject and location of the work are all human interactions. The work creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. The audience is seen as a community, and instead of the artwork being encountered between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Meaning is created collectively.

Instead of a person looking at an object, the artist's work causes people to interact with each other.

Kind of fun.

So, Tiravanija's work is a gesture. His work shifted the transactions that happen within a gallery. The work was not made by an artist and viewed by a patron. In the case of Pad Thai (where he cooked in galleries for people), the art was not just what they ate, or the tables and chairs that they ate at. The work was the interactions between people. Viewers came to realize that the art was in them.

His work set the stage, and offered an opportunity for interaction and participation.

I am also engaged in building a structure and setting a stage.

And my work is also a gesture.

I am not creating objects for individuals to contemplate, but instead creating an environment where participation and interaction can take place. Meaning will be made by our collective actions.

Nicolas Bourriaud wrote in Relational Aesthetics that

"the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist."

I've chosen the scale. I'm asking the questions. And I'm constructing models of action.

And though I'm not concerned with creating a beautiful, precious object, I'll just say that what we are creating, and what we will continue to create, is indeed beautiful and precious.

for the love

2010-05-17T16:53:00.000-07:00

Success.

I had several friends over for dinner on Sunday.

We wanted to see how much food we could find locally. Ingredients were used from the Provo Farmers Market, the BYU Creamery, Winder Farms, Lehi Roller Mills, one person's family's farm, and from Brent.

Brent (on the right) and Ralph sell eggs at the Provo Farmers Market. You may have seen them there. They haven't missed a Saturday in years.

Their eggs are beautiful, and the two are a treat.

I was in charge of the main dish for this meal, and I thought it be would nice to roast a chicken. I'm not sure you could ever go wrong with delicious, tender, well seasoned chicken.

So I went to Payson, where Brent keeps his chickens.

This is not what I was expecting.

Okay, so I have chickens. I haven't had them for very long, and I'm certainly no expert, but I thought I knew more than I did.

I was wrong.

This kind of chicken is called a naked neck.

Yeah.

It is one ugly bird. I mean, it is really nasty looking. But, according to Brent, they lay really well.

He has 7 different kinds of laying hens: Rhode Island Reds (seen above), Barred Plymouth Rocks, Naked Necks (yikes), Aracuanas, which can lay beautiful blue or green eggs, White Leg Horns, a black kind that I can't remember the name of, and...well, I didn't bring a pen. But on top of the egg-laying hens, he also raises meat hens, bantams, which are really small, doves, geese, and ducks.

Brent gave me a tour of his property, and I couldn't have learned more in an entire week of reading.

Chickens only lay eggs for a few years. I knew this, but wasn't sure how to tell when a hen is done laying. I asked him how he knew, and his answer was, "Because I know my chickens. I know them." He raises these hens from eggs, and keeps a really close watch on all of them. When a chicken starts chicken menopause, she molts, and then grows back a set of feathers that is pristine and beautiful. He can tell when she's done laying because she looks exquisite - not a feather out of place, and they are bright and soft and perfect. According to Brent, there's nothing more beautiful than a hen in her golden years.

I thought that was an interesting insight into aging. I don't think that we appreciate the elegance and grace of the process of aging. Just a thought.

These are meat hens. It's hard to get an idea for their size, but these girls are only 8 weeks old, and they are huge.

Here are my ladies at 8 weeks.

Okay, so maybe it's hard to get a sense of the scale, but just trust me when I tell you that those white chickens are ginormous. They are specifically raised because of how quickly they grow, and how much meat they put on.

Brent gives them feed that he buys in Spanish Fork. It's not certified organic, but he can go to the field and watch the grain grow, and he trusts that the farmer doesn't use pesticides or herbicides on his crop. He also gets grass clippings brought in from the area that the chickens love to eat, and that he leaves on the floor of the coops until he tills it all into his garden. It makes great compost.

Brent loves chickens. He speaks about them with passion, and told me that he's enjoyed birds since he was 3 or 4 years old. I had asked him how he got into the business, and he said he knew his whole life that this is what he wanted to do. He does it for the love.

He's developed a system for these birds that he's perfected over the years, that keeps the ladies happy and healthy without using things that are harmful.

He's a moderately gruff man, not the kind that you'd think of as super gentle.

But his love for his animals and the compassion with which he raises them are apparent in the way he takes care of his birds.

He doesn't use harmful chemicals to treat things like poultry lice. He just gets the coffee grounds from the local coffee shop where his daughter works and sprinkles them on the ground. The chickens roll around in them, and it cleans their feathers in a way that isn't toxic. Other remedies include a malathion bath and "liberal use" of a sulfur-based insecticide dust. Both of these products have sketchy effects on both birds and humans. He opts for a healthier remedy because he cares about his livestock, his land, and his customers.

Also, chickens only lay eggs for 3 or 4 years. In the winter, when there's less daylight, birds naturally lay less frequently. Many farmers keep UV lights on their birds year round to keep egg productivity high, but this will burn the chicken out in about 14 months. Brent gives his ladies a break in the winter, which lets them live for 2 or 3 years longer. His chickens are not pets, they lay eggs and will eventually be food. But he wants to give them a decent life, and letting the birds rest a little during the winter is just a small way that he does this.

Brent will freely sell his eggs and chicken to you.

He also has goose eggs, which are 3 or 4 times the size of a chicken egg and will last for months in the fridge, duck eggs, and dove eggs. His eggs are fresh, laid within the week. Eggs at the store have been sitting in trucks and on shelves for way longer than that.

And his prices are reasonable.

And he knows everything there is to know about the business. He will put up with your incessant chatting and question-asking. Or, I should say, my incessant chatting and question-asking. He let me talk to him to my heart's content.

He is a gentleman.

So go buy a chicken from him, and make some delicious soup.

And have one of these.

It's amazing what kind of information you'll find when you buy food from people, ask them questions, and get together to share.

The Gist and The Difference

2010-05-14T23:09:00.000-07:00

Dear reader -

You may have been reading this blog for a while. I love you for that.

But you may also be reading this for the first time. Did I see you at the Farmers Market? Did I coerce you into reading my blog? Did you accept a slip of paper from me with this website on it?

A word of advice: never take candy, or teeny papers, from strangers.

(this image was shamelessly borrowed from Provo's own Startup Candy Co.)

Well, I'm glad you're here. It probably means that you love Provo. Or you love agriculture. Or you love art. Any way, I need you.

I am an artist. I was trained in printmaking at BYU, and am finishing up my MFA at the University of Utah in Community-Based Art Education. My artistic training has, more than anything, taught me to see the world vibrantly and with passion, and to do something about that vision.

Before, I made prints and hung them in black frames and sold them for money.

Now, I sit in a tent and talk to interesting people.

Both are reactions to the way I see the world.

And oh, it is a beautiful world.

The gist of my work this summer is this: I want us to take a good long look at our wonderful town, and see it.

Seeing is more than looking.

Specifically I'll ask you to take a look at the food you eat and the land that it comes from because I've observed something:

the way people treat their land

and their neighborhoods

is in many ways a reflection of

how they treat each other.

When we look at this land, we will see so much beauty.

We'll also see abundance: this land takes care of us really well.

And we'll see that we share this land with other people, who are pretty great. With our wide open eyes, we might see more beauty in them, too.

(This is a picture of the field behind my house. It shows my neighbors' backyards, as well as my own.

They are lovely, lovely people. We share.)

By looking, you'll have a lovely aesthetic experience. This place is completely stunning.

But by seeing, you'll take away more than the memory of a pretty moment. You'll recognize your place within this whole big system. You'll locate yourself inside the safety of our mountains and our lake; you'll find out how you fit.

This project will map land use and agriculture in Provo. It will identify where the food can be found, who's growing it, and how things like water and industrial machinery and backyard chickens fit within this large system of food production and consumption.

The map should be pretty great when it's done.

But a cool map is not what I'm after.

I'm after genuine connections, and a deeper sense of gratitude. I'm after better sight, and more caring. While you participate in making this map, I hope that you enjoy a little more of at least one of these things, if not all of them.

If you made a mark on the map today, thank you.

If you're interested in doing more, thank you x 2. Or maybe more like 2 million.

The assignment this week is about land use.

I want us to gather as much information as we can about how the land in our area is used. Pick a source of food that is near your home. Pick something that you can actually eat - yes, fungus on tree bark is edible, but it's not food.

First, determine whether the land it's on is private, public, or commercial. If you're not sure, ask these questions: who owns this land? What will the food be used for? Is there a No Trespassing sign? (I'm a terrible disregarder of these signs - I know I should be better, but I'm just so curious!) The private information will go on one map, and the public and commercial information will go on another map that will be made available to the community.

(the view from my backyard)

This week, take a picture of this location and email it to me, along with a description of what we're not seeing in the picture: what does this land mean to you? What is the story behind the land? What will it produce?

(This is a picture of the water that irrigates the apple orchard behind my house. The last two weeks have been a dream out there - it smells and sounds like what I imagine heaven to smell and sound like. The branches have been heavy with gigantic flowers, and the bees have been incessantly inspecting every blossom. I love it there.)

my email address is carlyn.lofgreen@gmail.com

I will post your responses on the blog this week.

Come to the market next Saturday and put the place you've chosen on the map.

Also, if you do this, you will most likely be invited to dinner. Seriously.

Also, I might start displaying your photographs in my booth, so you can show off your photographic skills to the whole town.

But while you're contemplating this place that will produce food, I want you to express gratitude in some way. Say thank you in any way you can think of.

This will make all the difference.

I look forward to seeing you next Saturday!

Animal Estates

2010-05-11T22:11:00.000-07:00

I went to the Whitney Biennial in New York several years ago.

Everything was really big and impressive and unintelligible to me. There was just one piece that I found totally accessible and totally brilliant. It was Fritz Haeg’s Animal Estates.

I was thinking about his work while I was looking at bees this week, and contemplating ways to make art about it.

Haeg didn’t just make work about animals, he literally made work for them.

(The large wooden panel in this image was made for bees.)

The artist created habitats or homes for a dozen different animals that had lived 400 years earlier on the same block as the Whitney, which is on East 75^th and Madison Avenue.

The show didn’t actually include the animals, just the estates. But after the show, several pieces were donated to Swindler Cover Park on the northern tip of Manhatten.

These model homes were built for a bald eagle, barnowls, wood ducks, purple martins, big brown bats, mason bees, opossums, northern flying squirrels, a bobcat, eastern tiger salamanders, eastern mud turtles, and beavers.

Here’s a video of the artist talking about his work.

In Our Lovely Deseret

2010-05-11T21:26:00.000-07:00

The orchard behind my house is in bloom.

It smells incredible. It’s a smell I wish I could bottle as perfume. If I could find it in scent form, I’d wear it every day.

The rows of apple trees seem to stretch forever. A herd of dear live here, and I have a conflicted relationship with them. I love them because they are alive and majestic and quiet, and I hate them because they eat my garden. They ate all of my tomato plants last year and trampled everything else. This year I have a plan of attack that includes a rotten egg spray and what the world needs now: love. I’m trying not to hate them.

I like to take walks in the orchard when the sun is going down. It is completely beautiful. These days my favorite part of the experience is the sound.

The trees are full of tiny honeybees that are hard at work.

Standing in the orchard sounds like what I imagine being inside a beehive is like. It’s full of movement and vibration. It is music to my ears.

Really, this is an experience I wish everyone could have, because it’s not like anything else.

Promise.

I’ve always loved bees. I come from a family of beekeepers: my grandfather, my mother, my brother. My grandfather, and later my brother, sold honey at the Salt Lake Famers Market for years. Bob’s Bees was the best honey in the world to me. I’m working through my last 10 lb bucket of that delicious nectar. Sometimes, if I melt some honey for baking, I’ll melt a little extra and leave it out on the counter to taste every once in a while. Like every time I get up from writing or reading. Which is a lot more frequent when there’s a bowl of honey in the kitchen. I can’t help myself. Whenever I walk by my finger goes straight for that sweet amber sap. Honey is one of my very favorite flavors.

I imagine that the honey made from our neighborhood bees in the apple orchard is delicious: my favorite smell turned into my favorite flavor. I’m not sure there could be anything bad about it.

I think a lot about art. I’ve said this before, and I’ll probably say it again soon. I think about it all day. I probably spend more time thinking about it than making it, which is a shame.

But I think about how making art is a hopeful act. Creating art, even proposing ideas, is intrinsically optimistic. I have all these wishes to make work that is positive and constructive, and I’ve spent the better portion of my education trying to do that alone in my studio. But this summer I’m going to adopt more of a hive mentality, and put us all to work.

We’ll be busy bees, collecting and depositing and creating something sweet and wonderful.

Just for your information, Clifford Family Farms sells honey. And it’s delicious. It’s so delicious that Bell Organic is creating a honey share, which is great. Here’s what they have to say about it.

Spring Dinner: An Invitation

2010-05-03T11:16:00.000-07:00

I'm inviting you to my house for dinner.

It's time to get started on this great summer adventure of figuring out food culture in Provo.

Any project like this must start with a meal.

The Provo Farmers Market begins in two weeks.

May 15th. It's been on my calendar for weeks now, and I look at that date with longing and excitement. I can't wait to see what this happy valley is producing.

You know, farmers markets are wonderful things, on so many levels. Produce that you buy at markets like ours is delicious and fresh and so nutritiously perfect. It was picked in its season, at the peak of ripeness.

I always feel so happy buying things from the people who grew them. I like saying things like,

"Well, these carrots look gorgeous," and "You sure grow a mean pumpkin."

People shopping at farmers markets will have 10 times more conversations than they will while shopping at the grocery store. I heard that on NPR this weekend, and from my experience, it's true.

Now I've never had a problem talking to people in any and all social situations - if I see you in the grocery store, I'll probably knock over boxes and trample other customers in my haste to come talk to you. I'll probably give you a big hearty handshake, maybe even a hug. But at the Farmers Market, it's different. Yes I will run into people I know and spend time catching up with them. But chances are I'll be chatting up the vendors.

Those poor vendors, trapped in their little booths where they can't escape my unending string of questions.

Sigh.

But seriously, the market provides an excellent and unique opportunity to talk with the people who grow the food I eat. The food I eat. I feel like this is something really quite significant.

Wendell Berry said:

"Eaters must understand that eating takes place inescapably in the world, that it is inescapably an agricultural act, and that how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used."

I read that in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and I haven't been able to get it out of my mind since I read it. How we eat determines how the world is used.

There's a good amount of hype these days about "local" and "organic" and "slow" foods. It's easy to be turned off by the hoopla, but try hard not to be. There's merit in it, I think.

The food bought at the farmers market was grown safely within 50 miles of Provo. Most likely it was grown much, much closer. It was driven to our town by a car or truck with 4 wheels. Not 8 or 12 or 18.

It probably wasn't sorted or washed with industrial machinery, but most likely with hands.

In sinks.

By people.

The farmers I know around here are truly concerned about the land that grows their food. They're concerned with what they put in the ground and what they take from it. They talk face to face with the people who eat what they grow, and they try really hard not to poison us. Which is nice.

It seems like if you really care about global warming, or think that our great societal ill is unfriendliness, or are concerned with health and nutrition, or just want to eat delicious food, using your purchasing power at the Farmers Market would be a very good place to start.

And so, for all of you, I have an assignment.

The first part of the assignment is easy: I want you to go to the market the day it opens and buy food.

The next part is fun: I want you to talk to the person you buy the food from. Find out something about them or their produce that isn't readily known. Like how they got started in the business, or what they're growing that's not in season yet, or how many children they have, or where their farm is located.

Next, bring that food home and cook it.

Then, bring it to my house for dinner on Sunday.

You'll get to eat delicious food, talk to interesting people, and hear all the gems of knowledge that were gleaned at the market.

I'm telling you, it's going to be amazing!

My sense of the world tells me this: we need to take care of our planet better, in whatever way we can. And we need to treat each other better. And we need to be more careful about what we put in our minds and in our bodies.

So, for just one meal, let's do these things a little better.

The first 6 people to respond to this post are invited to dinner. You can either write a comment at the end of this post, or you can email me: carlyn.lofgreen@gmail.com

Dinner will be Sunday May 16 at 6 pm.

I can't wait to see you there!

Vignette #2: Another Mighty Fortress

2010-04-22T23:10:00.000-07:00

I rode my bike to my farmer’s house. It was a beautiful spring evening, the kind I dreamt about all winter. The sun was starting to set, and the shadows were elegant and long. The ride to the Allred’s home and farm is along the perimeter of Provo. And you know what I saw along the way?

Beautiful things.

Like wheat just beginning to grow.

Cows grazing on green green grass.

Family gardens with peas just starting to pop up.

Fields tilled into rich brown furrows.

And Dale, holding living proof that winter is over. A tomato plant.

A real, live, beautiful tomato plant.

I started in the safety of our mountains and watched the sun go down over our lake.

And I felt so safe.

This valley is a mighty fortress.

It is perfectly capable of sustaining us and protecting us.

We live in confusing times, I feel. I am an optimist from the inside out, so I feel no need to enumerate the ways in which our systems are failing us because we’re winning in so many ways, too. But the point is this: some of the food we buy at the grocery store is grown with poison. And some of it was shipped from far away. And some of it will cost more than money. And what we eat is not always good for us.

But this land is capable of taking care of us and defending us, like a good mighty fortress does.

Vignette #1: A Mighty Fortress

2010-04-21T23:17:00.001-07:00

It took a complete day and a half to fix the chicken coup.

Being responsible for things that depend on you for their happiness as well as their physical safety and the longevity of their lives is weighty.

When my chickens died last week, I lost 4 sweet pets, and I felt the gravity of my responsibility in the matter.

Before fixing what was broken, I felt a little angry and a little guilty, and a fierce determination to protect my little chickens.

After stapling and reinforcing, covering and mending, drilling and hammering, I felt exonerated.

I've done everything I can think of to keep them protected and secure.

A Mighty Fortress.

I bought 4 new baby chicks who are tiny and delicate, and who will be safe in the structure I've built.

Philosophies and Dead Chickens

2010-04-17T22:00:00.000-07:00

I have a philosophy about meat.

Well, at least I think I do.

The philosophy is that if I can eat meat, I should be able to kill it.

In theory, this makes pretty good sense – I should be responsible for the food I eat.

I plant a garden and bake my own bread and try to make other responsible food choices.

If I can participate so directly in growing my vegetables, I should be at least willing to be just as involved in the other things I eat.

I got chickens a month ago.

I wanted fresh eggs, and thought chickens would be a fun adventure.

When you get baby chicks there’s no real guarantee that they will turn out to be female, and I’ve said from the very beginning that if one of the ladies was actually a rooster, I’d kill it and make a soup.

It sounds terrible, but it’s all a part of my philosophy of responsibility – chicken from the store was killed by someone.

It was.

It’s not something we really have to think about because it’s all clean and featherless and gutless and still and cold. But I should be responsible for the things I eat, and that includes planting seeds and kneading bread and, theoretically, killing chickens.

Tonight, however, I failed the test.

My chicken coup was raided by dogs and 4 of the six pretty ladies were killed. Two managed to survive, and I’m just hoping they make it through the night.

I literally cried the entire afternoon.

As pathetic as it sounds, I’m devastated that my sweet clumsy fugly chickens are dead.

And I’ve come to realize that I could never, ever kill one.

So much for my philosophy.

Handshakes and Art

2010-04-14T12:51:00.001-07:00

This week I met an old friend of my roommates.

You know what, that’s too strong of a word. She was an acquaintance. One who didn’t know that my roommate has been living in Utah for a year. Acquaintance might even be a little too strong.

But when I met her, I did what I do: I shook her hand. This is almost always a mistake. It’s such a formal gesture, it’s so often uncalled for. I’m saying, when I see someone in the vegetable aisle at the grocery store that I know even vaguely, or meet a stranger at a ball game, I will shake their hand. It’s an impulse, a knee jerk reaction, something I can’t refrain from doing no matter how hard I try.

It reminds me of my father. It makes me think of my rural heritage and the formal friendliness of country etiquette.

I think I have a conflicted relationship with this gesture. I would prefer that new relationships or acquaintances begin with some form of physical contact. I like touching people and for them to touch me. Not in a creepy way. And yet the second my hand shoots out to know someone better, and for minutes thereafter, I usually blush and regret it. I regret that this is not something common among my peers, and that it’s perceived as so formal. Because really I just want to know you better, new friend.

So art.

Art is a symbolic gesture. It means more than just what it is.

It’s like a handshake.

It can be layered with meaning, and is different for different people. It changes with its setting, and inherently requires people to interact.

I think there’s something important about the structure that is created by etiquette – it provides healthy entrances into social interactions. It connects us briefly to each other, which in turn hooks us in to the greater network of community.

And it’s like practice – no matter how much you hate your neighbor or don’t want to speak to an acquaintance or just want to be left alone, social etiquette, like shaking hands or saying please and thank you or tipping your hat (this is something I miss) forces you to practice being kind and friendly and neighborly, even for just a few seconds.

Art is like this too.

It’s practice. A chance to act, however briefly, in different ways.

It’s a kind of structure that creates healthy and positive entrances for social interaction.

And I might possibly have an equally conflicted relationship with art as with hand shaking.

Sometimes I feel compelled to do it, and sometimes I just don’t know what it means.

Here is an artist that I adore. Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Truly, her art has been pivotal to my own.

Her work deals with issues of maintenance: all the things that go into maintaining a child and family, a home, a neighborhood, a city. She worked in the 60s and 70s when performance art was all the rage and did things like clean galleries and city sidewalks and accompanied sanitation workers on their routes.

One of her most well-known projects Touch Sanitation (1970-1980), involved shaking hands with more than 8,500 workers in the New York City Department of Sanitation while saying "Thank you for keeping New York City alive."

Her point was that we are all part of a network. We are directly involved in the lives of the people who pick up the trash, and directly responsible for the millions of pound of waste that are deposited in landfills every month.

And she shook 8,500 hands.

I think she is very cool.

Thanks, Mom

2010-04-14T10:10:00.000-07:00

I love gardening almost more than I can say.

This is a gift from my mother.

There are so many reasons to plant a garden.

They are hard to enumerate.

It’s just so fun to be outside and dig in the dirt and feel the sun on your skin.

Plus all that digging and weeding and lifting and moving gives me big muscles. My favorite kind of sore is the after-gardening kind.

It’s heartwarming to watch something grow. It really is. I feel tenderly towards the plants in my home and garden. It may sound strange, but they’re living and growing and beautiful, and totally dependent on me to take care of them. It feels good to keep something happy and healthy.

Plus plants in gardens are just so pretty.

And even more, it feels good to get something for your efforts. Like a little present from the plant that appreciated your efforts. A beautiful, juicy, bright red tomato.

Thank you, Carlyn. Thank you so very much.

My pleasure, tomato plant.

Seriously.

Tomatoes off the vine are a pleasure beyond description. If you have never plucked a tomato from a plant and eaten it while it was still warm from the summer sun, then I’m telling you that you haven’t lived.

The satisfaction of eating something nurtured by your hands is almost as great as the flavor in fresh produce. And I don’t mean fresh from the grocery store.

(this image is from my friend's friend's farm Local Roots in Washington. Their blog is fabulous.)

Fruits and vegetables picked at the peak of ripeness and perfection are more delicious than almost anything else. There are also added nutritional benefits of eating this way – a tomato bought at the grocery store was picked while it was still green. Nutritionally it wasn’t ready. But the tomato or strawberry or apple picked just as it’s turned the right shade of red has been given the proper time to make all the vitamins and nutrients that it was meant to make. It’s full to bursting with all the things that make a tomato good for you. Including flavor.

And a tomato grown in your garden doesn’t have all the things in it that are NOT good for you: chemicals, pesticides, and genes modified to withstand the pesticides. This is a whole can of worms that I might open another time, but I’ll just say this: I don’t like to eat poison. It’s gross.

Also, I love how little effort it takes to get the food from the plant to my mouth. I can just stand right there next to the plant and enjoy peaches and peas and pears without having to walk or drive anywhere. No trip to the grocery store. No standing in line. No 1000 mile drive from Mexico to my town in a truck that gets maybe 7 miles to the gallon and emits all sorts of greenhouse gases and other unpleasant particulates. Which means almost 0 carbon footprint. In fact, my little strawberry plant ate carbon dioxide for lunch, and gave off oxygen, which I happen to love.

I’m just not sure I can say enough good things about gardening.

Thanks, Mom.

Current Work

2010-04-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

In a nutshell, I’m interested in doing three things: helping to develop a healthy food culture in Provo, bringing members of my community together in positive, authentic ways, and making art.

If I could work every day on these goals, I would live a happy life.

If I could accomplish these things, I would die happy.

For my MFA thesis show, I’m going to attempt to do these three things.

At the same time.

At the Provo Farmer’s Market.

I hope it works.

My plan follows thusly:

I will have a booth at the farmers market that I will man (I mean, that I will woman) every Saturday from May to October.

(link to Provo Farmers Market blog here)

At the booth, I will glean information from people who pass through.

On large scale maps, I will have people record information about local agriculture: where the food is, what they’re growing, and what resources are in their neighborhood. For instance, on one map I will record where all the farmers from the market grow their food. On another, people will mark where their own gardens are, and what they’re growing. Others will record resources like orchards, meats and dairy, nut trees, berry bushes, and the like.

This is what one map looks like.

We could even get crazy – we could start mapping where industrial farming equipment is made, or where water sources used to farm/garden are, or where you can find fertilizer. The possibilities are endless.

The information collected will be posted on a Google map for all to see.

And what we see will astound us, I think.

This is a vibrant, fertile, beautiful town full of equally wonderful food and brilliant people who grow it.

The asset mapping is an important part of this project, but that’s probably not the most important part.

What I really want with these maps is to give people the chance to position themselves within this framework. Contextualization is the order of the day.

We all eat food, and we all expend effort every day to finding that food. The maps will give people a visual reference: they can see where they live, and what resources are near them. They get to put themselves on the map, but in the process see that they are part of a larger system.

The hope is that it will stimulate some kind of action or change.

Instead of driving 7 blocks to the grocery store, why not drive 10 blocks to Clifford Family Farms to buy eggs?

(and seriously, with an image like that, who wouldn't want to go there? gorgeous!)

Or why not talk to that neighbor who has those plums down the street. Maybe she has extra, and besides, you’ve been meaning to meet her anyway.

Or maybe you realize that you don’t know what resources are available in your neighborhood, and you start paying attention. That would be a very, very good start.

But besides encouraging people to see where they fit in this community of food-eaters and food-producers, I have a hidden agenda.

You see, I’m convinced that when people start paying attention to where their food comes from, they immediately start paying attention to who grows it.

I’ll just tell you that I love Amy and Dale Allred. They grow the food that I will be rapturously enjoying this summer. And they have these great kids. And they made me delectable cherry zucchini bread delight for my birthday. And they’re completely wonderful.

And the Daily Herald wrote about them. Here's a link. (Keep an eye out for yours truly)

I ate one of their heirloom tomatoes at Pizzeria 712 last year, and it literally changed my life. It was delicious beyond description. And when I started asking questions about where this incredible food was coming from, I found that there were beautiful, wholesome people behind the whole thing.

So my hidden, or maybe completely public agenda at this point, is to encourage people to get to know each other better.

Every week I will post assignments. Once a teacher, always a teacher, I guess.

These assignments will be things like creating a meal with your neighbors made completely from food grown on your block. Or researching water purification methods and creating a diagram. Or going on a walk with at least 3 of your neighbors and mapping out the food that you find. Or eating a fruit or vegetable from the grocery store and then the same fruit or vegetable grown locally and writing a poem or descriptive paragraph about it. If you complete an assignment, I will blog about it. Just email me pictures and your words, and I’ll throw them up on the internet.

Easy as pie. Peach pie. Which I can’t wait to make this summer.

I am literally giddy with excitement for this project to start.

Hives, cocoons, and pods.

2010-03-26T11:55:00.000-07:00

Let me show you some of my work.

When I started graduate school, I had certain ideas about art.

One of those ideas was that art was a product. An object. A thing.

My heart wanted to make work that would be meaningful to people, and that would unpack topics that were important to me.

I wanted my work to be instructive and resonant. I wanted people to engage with the work, and be different because of their experience.

I wanted my art to speak in bold powerful ways about how the world is a beautiful place and we should take care of it and appreciate it and love it, and in turn care for and appreciate and love all the people who live on it.

But it's hard to make an object that can handle so much responsibility.

My first project in graduate school was a series of white sculptures made of paper. These sculptures. The ones in all the pictures.

They look like hives or cocoons or pods. Or grapes. Or q-tips.

They were made of paper pulp that is formed with round kitchen sieves. When the paper is dry it’s peeled out of the sieve, and they’re glued together to make these forms.

I wanted so badly for these forms to take on meaning. So I put them in different locations and took pictures of them.

The locations that I chose were sites of agriculture in my neighborhood in Provo. Poultry farms, family gardens, orchards, barns, all within a 10 mile radius of my house.

I wanted to address the topic of local agriculture.

My thinking was, and still is, that people's interactions with the land that produces their food directly correlates with their interactions with other people.

When we are mindful of and careful with natural resources, we also become mindful and careful towards others who also use those resources.

So if people can interact with the land in new, authentic, creative ways, they’ll interact with each other likewise.

Or so the thinking goes.

But the paper forms kept getting in the way.

They took on different identities in different locations, and they were certainly unique within the different landscapes.

But they weren't doing much to help me reach my goals.

They were just me acting like an artist. I was making an object and using it to put my mark on the world, without providing a way for people to change in any way.

And so, I’ve gotten rid of the object.

I will write about my current work soon, but this is what I want to say:

Art can be used to make the world a better place.

It really can.

Bringing beautiful objects and images into the world can do this. And I still love making things.

But I’ve started to think about art as a process and an experience, and not just a product.

And this has made all the difference in the world.

The Love House

2010-03-24T19:49:00.001-07:00

This week I attended a lecture at the Salt Lake Art Center by artist Alexandra Grant.

And it was completely brilliant.

She's this fantastically talented painter (see her website here) who also works outside of the studio/gallery arena in a project called the Watts House Project (see their website here).

The WHP is an artist-driven urban revitalization project in Watts, CA. The area is known for gang violence, the Rodney King riots, and the Watts Towers, which you can read about here. But artist Edgar Arceneaux wanted to give the neighborhood a new narrative. So he began a project to revitalize the neighborhood through art, and Alexandra Grant became involved with the project a year after it started.

There are 20 houses involved in the project.

(you can watch a short video here)

One of the houses is called the Love House. It was designed by Alexandra Grant.

And I'll tell you why I think it's wonderful.

First of all, this is a digital mock-up of what Alexandra first envisioned. It is an image of one of her sculptures photoshopped onto this house.

But, check it out. It's an artist putting love symbolically and literally onto someone's house.

I love that.

At her presentation, she spoke with real affection and care for the people who live here. They are her friends, and she's using her talent and know-how to enhance their home and their community with her work.

Beyond the great symbolic gesture of putting love on someone's house (that I SO appreciate), it's also quite practical.

There are 7 or 8 people living in this small house. There's not enough room. But when the home is remodeled to accommodate this sculpture, they have finagled things so that an extra bedroom has to be added and used as a "support" for the sculpture. This will circumvent zoning regulations which have kept them from making this much needed addition.

The Watts Towers generate a regular stream of tourists every year. But the neighborhood has not been able to capitalize on this traffic. The addition of this project to the several other houses that have been rennovated/redesigned will bring some of that revenue to the people who live directly across the street from this huge tourist destination.

And the work that has been done, the painting, remodeling, designing, has all been done with participation from everyone on the block. They have come together to paint fences, plant gardens, pave driveways, and share meals. This is work that brings people and communities together in authentic, positive ways.

One of my students at the beginning of my class this semester said after one of my lectures on art for social change, "But art doesn't actually do anything."

Au contraire mon fraire.

Art is a symbolic gesture, yes. It can be figurative and allegorical,

and seem purely cerebral.

And some art is.

But this.

This is something more.

It is art that is both symbolic and literal. It is causing actual, practical, meaningful change to happen in this neighborhood.

In her presentation, Alexandra said, "I'm concerned not only with the work I make, but with its role in society. Artists tend to move in more and more secluded circles. But the question is, how can artists work to benefit a community that's not just the art community?" She believes that artwork should be smart and accessible. It should be deep and address real issues and concerns.

Her work is deeply sincere and unapologetic in an increasingly cynical world.

It strives to make positive changes in the world.

It makes people love each other more.

And I love it.

Flowers and Neanderthals

2010-03-16T21:28:00.000-07:00

I drive a car with a tape deck.

And since I haven’t owned a tape since 1993, I listen to a lot of NPR.

A few weeks ago I heard a few minutes of a piece (click here) that has profoundly influenced how I think about art and art making.

The expert speaking said that they recently found shells dating back to Neanderthal times containing pigments that were used as make-up. The shells had holes bored into them that were used to hang them, possibly as jewelry, and they contained traces of glittery pigments that scientists suspect were used for ceremonial purposes.

Later that week I was assigned to read an article for a class that explained that flowers had been found on Neanderthal graves.

Okay, think about this. Neanderthals were actively transplanting flowers onto graves.

First, this is evidence of deep, symbolic thinking. But in the scheme of things, this was a technological leap. These people weren’t even planting food to eat to survive. They didn’t use this potentially life-enhancing process to grow food – they used it to make symbolic, metaphorical, spiritual acts.

The article was about the evolution of technology, and how every major innovation was preceded by art.

My perception of art through history was that it followed technological advances, but the article said that in fact the advances were made first because of art - art being physical evidences of symbolic thinking. Metal working was developed to create jewelry first, and only later was used for weaponry. Ceramics, photography, agriculture as we know it, were developed first to act in deeply symbolic ways, and then later to enhance life.

This article may be full of gaping holes, but this is what I know: as far back as 300,000 years ago, and probably farther, human beings were making symbolic and aesthetic decisions. They used what they could see and what they could make to represent what they thought and felt.

And we still do that today.

And it's called art.

2010-02-26T17:40:00.000-08:00

It has begun.

The students showed up. 7 of them. And it was a blast.

We threw out slabs and cut 6x6" tiles.

We talked about paths,

and chose a design for these tiles that will create a path.

They came up with a marvelous concept, which we will continue for 3 more weeks.

And they were polite. And engaged. And friendly.

I really love my job.

2010-02-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Yup. Definitely still love this place.

So I teach a class at the University of Utah called Collaborative Art Making. It's about making art. Collaboratively. I have 7 students who are brilliant art educators, and I want to tell them every day that what they do is important! noble! inspiring! They have brilliant minds and great ambitions. Today we are embarking on a

project with kids from Youth Services in Salt Lake, and between you and me, in this intimate and private setting, I will tell you that I'm nervous. We've planned as much as possible, we've brainstormed and discussed and labored over what materials to use, what ideas to explore, what outcome we want to achieve. We took a tour of Youth Services to get an idea of what they do there, and have spent hours deliberating over how to help this project unfold in a positive, cooperative way. And after all this effort, we are now about to take a step into the unknown. The kids, who we don't know, are coming to the U today. We're going to talk with them. We're going to get to know them. And then we're going to make art with them. And after all our preparation, there is absolutely no way to know what's going to come out of this experience.

None.

And that's a little daunting.

On that note, here are some collaborative art projects with youth that are stunning.

Tim Rollins and K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)

There's a movie about this group that is worth picking up from your local library.

Tim Rollins worked with "at-risk" youth from Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx. These kids came from rough backgrounds, and had extreme problems in the class room. They were slated for failure in the public school system, but were selected to work with Rollins in an after-school art program that combined art-making with lessons in reading and writing. Rollins or one of the students would read out loud from classic literature, work like Animal Farm and The Scarlet Letter and Kafka's Amerika, and while they listened the kids would draw or write directly on the pages of the book being read. They connected the stories to their own experiences, and talked about their lives, and then made art about it all.

Each student was required to meet certain requirements to participate in the program, such as staying clean from drugs and doing their homework every day. Many of the students graduated from high school in an area where the drop-out rate is exceptionally high, and some of them even graduated from college.

The work has been bought by major collectors and museums around the world, including an exhibition at the Frye Museum in Seattle, that I'm dying to see.

The film is incredibly moving, and (again) is totally worth tracking down.

Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry

www.mccallumtarry.com

www.mccallumtarry.com/endurance

I met Brad and Jackie when they were here speaking at the U. I was fortunate to be the grad facilitator for their trip, and got to spend a good amount of time with them and their son. They are marvelous people, and their work is completely brilliant.

As there are no decent images, here is their statement for Endurance.

Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry

Endurance is Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry’s series of life-size color photographs and a video that together document a 25-hour endurance performance with homeless Seattle teenagers. The portraits were taken minutes before each youth took part in the endurance performance, and after they gave their testimony during an audio taped interview.

The performance took place on a Seattle public sidewalk from 6:00pm August 5^th, 2002 until 6:59pm the following day. The action was simple: 26 homeless youths stood still looking directly into the camera for an hour without speaking. As each completed the hour-long performance, there was a transitional moment in which the next youth walked into the frame of the camera, and then directly behind the first performer. They overlapped for a few moments and then the initial performer walked off camera while their replacement stepped forward into the same position, again looking into the camera. As they stand still for the hour, the video is rendered with a time-lapsed effect in which traffic and pedestrians pass by and light fades into night and back again; during the transition from one youth/performer to the next, the video is slowed down. The audio tracks on the video combine street sounds with edited sequences of the interviews that were recorded prior to the performance. Each hour of real-time performance is compressed to 5 minutes, creating a finished work of two hours.

Although the performance occurred in a public setting, it was not audience-oriented. The video camera was placed across the street with minimal production equipment so that the general public walked pass the youth without acknowledging their presence. The video captures the theoretical invisibility of the youth and the poignancy of this evidence is accentuated when combined with their testimony.

The goal of standing motionless for an hour is a significant act of endurance for youth that face drug addiction, attention deficit and health related issues. The act of standing still combines two ideas. Each youth that participated in this collective action dedicated their participation to the memory of friends who died from life on the streets, and thus “stood for” those individuals who were absent. They were also engaging in a quiet act of civil disobedience in opposition to the Seattle Civility Laws that make standing or sitting motionless a crime.

McCallum and Tarry were commissioned by the Seattle Arts Commission, Arts Up program to work with Peace on the Street by Kids from the Streets (PSKS), a homeless youth advocacy organization, to create a work that gives voice to the issues that face the homeless youth in Seattle. The artwork has received major financial support from the National Endowment for the Arts.

As the project unfolded, the daily challenges that these youth face became more evident, and thus so did the need for them to have a forum to recount their experiences. A common thread among their recorded testimonies was the loss of someone close due to the nature of living on the streets. Coincidentally, and likewise tragically, on March 20^th, 2002, one of the three audio interns, Steven Greenberg (a.k.a. Filth), whose energy and participation had been critical to the early phase ofEndurance, died of a heroin overdose. Two weeks after Filth’s memorial service PSKS suffered a second loss of Nicholas Helhowski (a.k.a. Rooster), as a result of homicide through street violence. Rooster, a core member of PSKS, was in the final stage of transitioning off of the streets. Their untimely deaths have inevitably shaped the McCallum and Tarry intervention and the underlying metaphor of standing for someone who was lost.

Really, truly worth watching.

2010-02-14T17:30:00.000-08:00

I fall a little more in love with my town every day. This weekend it was a show that did it for me. I went to the Valentines Day Masquerade Ball at Velour where Marlee and Hayley Hernandez, Mudbison, and Book on Tapeworm played. I was impressed by the local talent, moved by the exceptional music, and made to feel a tingly kind of love for this small place that nurtures its artists.

Here's a video of Spencer Russell, lead singer of Mudbison. It was done by Provo Acoustic Sessions, who have done a phenomenal job compiling and recording the work of local musicians.

Here's another, a band called The Archer's Apple.

I can't talk about local music without mentioning a band that I'm particularly attached to, Neon Trees. There are several great videos on their website fameisdead.com that are worth watching. Their album comes out March 16, 2010.

I am surrounded by fierce talent.

Post.

2010-02-02T11:55:00.000-08:00

I am a compulsive hand-raiser. In class, in church, metaphorically in conversations, I am the one that says, "Ooh, ooh! Pick me, pick me!" I always have something to ask and something to say, even about the most mundane of topics. It happened as recently as an hour ago during a group conversation with artist Ernesto Pujol (I couldn't seem to keep my mouth shut), and I have a feeling it can be traced back to the womb, or shortly thereafter. I'm also the student that stays after class to talk to the teacher. You know the one. Think Hermione Granger, only sweeter and with maybe a little less drive. So it's no surprise that when one of my professors suggested starting a blog as a teaching tool, I created one immediately. Am creating one. It's meant for all you hand-raisers: a place to collect ideas and to respond to them. It's for the non-hand-raisers, too. I'll write about artists and events and places and ideas, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

First, I had one of these today.

Stefanie brought them to class this morning, and they were tiny and totally adorable and delicious. I've never been to Mini's in Salt Lake, but I am now highly motivated to go there. I'm just saying.

Second, I want to say something about art. There are a million art works and theories and projects that I'd like to somehow infuse into your brain, like a vulcan mind-melding of creative information. But I don't want to jump the gun. I just want say that I believe in the importance of creativity. We are biologically wired to think symbolically and to act creatively. If you haven't seen this video yet, it's worth watching. It's a TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote Eat Love Pray. And if you have seen it, it's worth watching again.

Be inspired and encouraged.