On a recent late summer afternoon, a monarch butterfly sits on an orange zinnia in North Minneapolis. The monarch—now an endangered species—is joined by crickets, bumble bees and other pollinators, vines heavy with grape tomatoes, sticky tomatillos, towering sunflowers, Brussels sprout towers, and medicinal herbs organized in tidy wooden raised beds. In the center of these beds is a gathering of black obsidian boulders. Book-ending each end of the garden lot are gleaming chrome rain catchments taking the shape of bent basketball hoops. Like funhouse mirrors, these catchments reflect back in swirls the bounty they are helping nourish. Step back and observe the garden parts as a whole, and its sum takes the shape of a basketball court.
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.
"Prototype for poetry vs rhetoric (deep roots)" is a mitigating garden, he says, with plants chosen to counter neighborhood pollution, particularly coming from a shingle factory and metal scrap yard nearby.
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.
Marcus Kar, the director of North Minneapolis Programs for Youth Farm, says the project gave the kids and teens of Youth Farm, as well as the community at large, a safe space to express anger and sadness during the ensuing uprising sparked by George Floyd’s killing.
“It was about letting them know, ‘You’re not alone,’” Kar says. “This project was a huge part of that. It gave us a home to go to; a very unique and healing process during some of the worst times the city has ever seen.”
Weber has long activated gallery spaces, neighborhoods, landscapes, and the built environment through artthat engages with urgent issues such as the climate crisis, systemic racism, police brutality, and the health and healing of communities. He’s been inspired by landscape architect and urbanist Kongjian Yu and large-scale environmental artists like Seitu Jones (who is from North Minneapolis) and Mel Chin.
“He’s the first artist who ever used plants to mitigate toxins from the soil, phytoremediation as an art form,” Weber says of Chin.
One of Weber’s first built-environment art projects to attract attention was “LV Trap House” (2014), where he painted Louis Vuitton logos on what he calls a boarded-up “crack house” in Des Moines. Then there was “American Dreamers Phase 2,” (2015) in which, after the killing of Michael Brown, Weber planted a garden inside a decommissioned Ferguson, Mo., police car. The regenerative landscape and environmental focus of Weber’s work grew with “4MX Greenhouse” in Omaha, Neb., an ongoing project that features a greenhouse as permanent programmable sculptural artwork that takes the shape of Malcolm X’s first home. In 2018, Weber and the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation erected the greenhouse, which grows Indigenous crops.
“In the arts and institutions, too, with social practice or this direct-action aspect of art—and now we see it in landscape architecture and architecture in general—it's the community approach first. So, how do you build a project from the ground up that's extremely inclusive with the community that you are building the relationship with?” Weber says. “The community, especially at the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, wanted a greenhouse.”
With a 2021 Creative Capital grant, Weber is now collaborating with members of the Ponca Tribe and Osage Nation of the Midwest to cultivate a Three Sisters garden—planted with the symbiotic crops of squash, corn, and beans—on the 17 acres of native grassland around the structure.
The artist has taken the same approach with the “Prototype for poetry vs rhetoric (deep roots)” garden in Minneapolis. After dozens and dozens of community meetings with community stakeholders and consultants, including a team from Youth Farm and the Walker Art Center, artist and film director Missy Whiteman, environmental justice activist Roxxanne O’Brien, and local firm Aune Fernandez Landscape Architects.
“It was a lot of site visits to see what industry was harming the community the most and how we could counter it most effectively with a community art project,” Weber says. And the basketball court shape?
"I'm a former jock and my entire identity is folded in with being biracial in the Midwest and being accepted as a young Black teen by being really, really good at basketball," Weber says. "And what comes with being really, really good at basketball in the Midwest, especially in Iowa, as a biracial kid, is acceptance with one's Black community. So, I know that with landscape architecture and with architecture and community activations, we have to construct things that appeal to the young Black teen community that wouldn't otherwise approach urban gardens. [The spaces] have to be visually striking in a way that they want to approach it.”
The garden, on a site leased by Youth Farm, has become a filter for the soil on what was before an empty lot, and the river rock used at the site filters gas and chemical runoff from the street. Kar, an urban farmer, says the garden is a reflective space where local residents can “take a load off.” He points out that the area only has two grocery stores and a lot of neighborhood folks don’t own cars.
“[Residents can] stop and grab their produce if they need onions or eggplant and tomatoes. All the trees and bushes are all edible berries and fruits. The goal was just to have a place where people can just stop and graze,” Kar says. “The impact of that space on that particular community is massive.”
And not only did kid and teen members of Youth Farm help build and cultivate the garden, two neighborhood teens from the organization have been hired as its current stewards, Kar says. They have led group activities, like making lip balms using garden ingredients and hosting cookouts with the garden’s bounty.
“Anything that’s wrong in our society you can find solutions for in nature,” Kar says.
Black obsidian is a material Weber employs often in his projects across the country. In addition to the boulders that sit at the center of Minneapolis garden, two more can be found beneath each rain catchment. They feature bronze plaques that say “inhale” and “exhale.”
“I love the historical context of obsidian as a tool, as a tool for self resilience,” Weber says.
