Urban Farming Reflections

Growing Power Iron Street Farm
Photo by Meghan Moe Beitiks

The past several weeks I've been doing a lot of urban farming and wondering what it means to farm, in a cultural sense.

There's a number of projects in Chicago that are farms or farmer's markets with cultural extensions of themselves. There is The Plant, a dusty former meat-packing facility with an aquaponic farm in the basement that one day will include an art gallery amongst the bakers and brewers of the building. There's the Jane Addams Hull House Museum, which besides being a memorial to the social programs of a very motivated woman, also cultivates an heirloom garden, which fed its Rethinking Soup series, a weekly cultural discussion of food and larger social issues.

At the Experimental Station, the Farmer's Market has a social imperative—to provide double-market-value dollars to customers who use the LINK food stamp program. And at Growing Home, the farm is a base for job skill training, a way of employing folks who are otherwise difficult to employ.

I've been volunteering at these places the past several weeks and wondering what my contribution is to them as an artist, if I can be said to have one, beyond my physical labor. I've been thinking about their cultural imperatives beyond food. I'm doing this as part of a class on Social Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. So, I have been asking myself what it means to my artist's statement that I am pulling weeds. And, if it's ridiculous that I'm asking what it means to my artist statement that I am pulling weeds.

I've worked as an honest-to-goodness gardener and farmer before. In between grad school in Chicago and an undergraduate degree in theater, I set out to work with plants, deliberately, to learn about growing things. Now this work feeds my creative process and passion for the environment.

There's enough examples of gardens-as-art. Mel Chin's "Revival Field." The bulk of Susan Leibovita-Steinman's work. Agnes Denes' "Wheatfield: a confrontation." There's a lot to be said for weeding as a meditative practice. I will continue to contemplate for the remainder of the summer. By then I may have pulled more questions from the ground.

View Meghan Moe Beitiks' work

Contributor: Meghan Moe Beitiks, Artist