wild plants queer landscapes
2017-2023
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 was a series of weed walks that explored the connections between Maria Thereza Alves’ work and New York City’s weedy 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, we explored areas where gardeners left “existing self-seeded plantings, celebrating the urban landscape that emerged on the High Line after the trains stopped running in 1980”.
During a one-mile walk in the Weeksville neighborhood of Crown Heights with artists Andrea Haenggi and Ellie Irons of the Environmental Performance Agency, we collected seeds around the Weeksville Heritage Center, a site where James Weeks, an African American stevedore purchased the land in 1838.
In Red Hook, Brooklyn we explored the former ballast dumping site of Atlantic Basin, where introduced and original salt-loving marshland plants still thrive near the New York Harbor’s edge, in cracks along sidewalks and beneath sewers.