Resilience Grows on a Minneapolis Urban Farm
Regenerative land artist and 2022 Harvard GSD Loeb fellow Jordan Weber collaborated with the community to create a space for food sovereignty and pollution mitigation. In the wake of COVID-19 and the policing killing of George Floyd, it also became a place of healing and self-resilience.
By Alex V. Cipolle
Architecture MAgazine
Sept 23, 2022
Excerpt:
The thriving, three-acre garden, which had its grand opening a year ago, is a project called “Prototype for poetry vs rhetoric (deep roots).” It is a community landscape collaboration between local nonprofit Youth Farm, which teaches kids and teens food sovereignty, and regenerative land artist and activist Jordan Weber for a residency he did with the Walker Art Center beginning in 2018. Weber is a 2022 Harvard GSD Loeb fellow, a 2022 United States Artists fellow, and this fall, he will begin what he describes as the inaugural environmental humanities Artist-in-Residence at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book Library, where he will is researching and proposing a potential public land project with the Yale Black Student Alliance and Yale Native American Cultural Center.
Weber is now based in New York, but he’s from Des Moines, Iowa, and Weber would travel to Minneapolis to work closely with the community to create a healing project in a city that is still grappling with the police murder of George Floyd and its aftermath: a process that has continued through the pandemic.
“It almost made it a more hyper-focused project, on what it means to build resilient landscapes, and these architectural landscapes and the arts together,” Weber says, “because one of the most important things that we found with healing for ourselves as a team, was to put our hands in the soil together, and with the community members we aspired to help.” Weber recalls how protesters would even come onto the site from the streets and would start helping cultivate the plot.
