As part of the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018 and as an extension of the exhibition Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization, WILD PLANTS, QUEER LANDSCAPES is a series of weed walks that explore the connection between Maria Thereza Alves’ work and the New York City landscape. Each walk explored a site relevant to the movement of ballast through New York City’s ports; at the Western Rail Yards of the High Line, where gardeners left “existing self-seeded plantings, celebrating the urban landscape that emerged on the High Line after the trains stopped running in 1980,” a one-mile walk collecting seeds around the site of the Weeksville Heritage Center (James Weeks was an African American stevedore who purchased the land in 1838) in Crown Heights with artists Andrea Haenggi and Ellie Irons of the Environmental Performance Agency, and a walk exploring the former ballast dumping site of Atlantic Basin in Red Hook, where many salt-loving marshland plants thrive in cracks along sidewalks and beneath sewers.
Links:
A ballast weed walk at the High Line Western Railyards, Nov 5, 2017
A ballast weed walk at Atlantic Basin / Red Hook, Nov 12, 2017
SEEDborder CrossWALK in Crown Heights with Ellie Irons and andrea haenggi, Nov 19, 2017
