amy franceschini: politics, art, farming and the rebirth of the victory garden

Last Sunday, before leaving San Francisco, I made a quick visit to the Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). There was an exhibition on the influence Picasso’s first New York shows had on American artists of the time, which was quite good, but the thing that had me reaching for my notebook and scribbling furiously was a tiny piece on the gardening-related work of San Francisco designer Amy Franceschini. Franceschini, who teaches at Stanford and heads a design entity known as Future Farmers, was a recipient of a 2006 Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) award, for a project she’d developed to reintroduce the concept of “victory gardens” to the bay area. Here’s a clip from World Changing dotcom (where I also got the attached image):

…Design can be used as an activist tool, and Franceschini uses it adeptly. In the project, she uses good design to organize, and mobilize community activity. The exhibition of her pilot Victory Garden program features, among other works, historical documents, Franceschini’s own Victory Garden kits, posters advertising planting parties, a video of the pilot project in action, and related sculptural elements. The pilot gardens were realized in under-utilized front- and back yards in San Francisco using Franceschini’s vision. She supplied each garden with a carefully designed kit containing seed-packets and other tools helpful in the realization of these gardens…

If you’ve been reading this site for long, you know that I love when projects jump boundaries, and when people find new ways to attack old problems. This exhibition of Franceschini’s work, small as it was, was hugely inspiring. A lot of us think that the localization of food production is one of the critical elements necessary if this country of ours is going to make it in the future, but how many of us actually do anything about it? And, of those that do, how many approach it from an artistic perspective? I was going to wait and post on this after I’d had a chance to touch base with my friend Amanda, who runs the pro-gradening non-profit Growing Hope, but I couldn’t wait… Anyway, here’s more. This clip comes from the “San Francisco Chronicle“:

…Franceschini, 36, lives in an artists’ cooperative in San Francisco and resents agribusiness practices that produce artificially engineered food. She sees the shift in public opinion on the war in Iraq as a signal that now is a time for healing — and a time to mix art, politics and gardens. She advocates “self-sufficiency and living a life that is not harmful to the environment.”

Franceschini found her latest and perhaps most important work through personal circumstance and chance.

“My father was a farmer and had a pesticide company. When my parents got divorced, my mother started an organic farm,” she said. “I saw both sides of the coin.”

Meanwhile, a chance encounter with a neighbor during a visit to Ghent, Belgium, where her husband has a home, led to an epiphany. Franceschini was pulling out a brick in their front yard in order to plant a seedling when the neighbor walked over and informed the couple excitedly that the city would pay for fresh soil and plant material as part of a city-funded program.

The subsidies were available twice a year for planting flowers or food crops, and a family could get as much as 5,000 euros ($6,500) for such “greening.” Greening could be as esoteric as keeping bats (to prevent mosquitoes) or having three chickens in the back garden (for recycling kitchen scraps and creating a mini-farm for eggs and fertilizer).

Inspired, Franceschini proposed her garden-renewal idea to SFMOMA as part of her SECA submission and won a grant of $2,500. She designed a special kit for planting gardens that included a pogo-stick spade and a wheelbarrow that could be attached to a bicycle to transport soil and seeds. The “possible/impossible” prototypes, including drip systems, posters, flags, seed packet labels and other graphics she designed, are on display at SFMOMA.

“During my research I found a photograph of the Victory garden from 1943 in front of City Hall in San Francisco,” she said, adding that 8 billion tons of food were produced in Victory gardens around the country.

San Francisco was among the cities where gardens were most widely planted. Franceschini found more facts and figures documented in the book “City Bountiful” by Laura Lawson. “It wasn’t just individual gardens, but also city parks had gardens. It was a citywide movement, and every city that adopted the city garden did a publication”…

I’m not sure what’ll happen with the initiative now that the $2,500 has been spent, but my hope is that it lives on in some capacity. The materials that Franceschini had put together were really compelling, and I don’t see why other groups around the country who were interested in similar things couldn’t make use of them… Anyway, check out the links and let me know what you think.

(update: I’d like to thank Ed Penet for just reminding me that this is a great post in which to mention people that this spring there is going to be a community garden in Ypsi’s Frog Island park.)