Making a turn: Cultureburg as a site for radical gardening

I still believe in what art can do, as I did when I started Cultureburg. I still work with artists and I still make exhibitions.

BUT I’ve been working on other projects, too.

Radical gardening, for me, is a practice of regeneration and connection. The industrial production of food is environmentally unsound and detrimental to health. How can I, a backyard gardener who reads a lot, help to support food justice?

I have been working in my MIT community, teaching workshops on gardening as politics. I have been helping students to build a food and flower garden. I have been teaching, and reading and interviewing people. I have been writing and publishing, with more to come.

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The original (2014) introduction to Cultureburg appears below.

In 1975, Tom Wolfe published The Painted Word, a 121-page skewering of artists and the art world. I’m more likely than Tom Wolfe to give artists a break. But one of his ideas seems precisely right me: Cultureburg.

In 1975, Wolfe estimated that the group of people who knew anything about, cared about, or possessed any power to affect contemporary art was vanishingly small, “approximately 10,000 souls—a mere hamlet!” He called the hamlet “Cultureburg,” and he didn’t like it.

Of course, the hamlet has grown since then. Its population hasn’t been counted for a while. But if the current number is ten times Wolfe’s 10,000, or even 100 times, the former hamlet is a smallish city now—something like Darwin, Australia or Aix-en-Provence, France or Odessa, Texas or Cambridge, Massachusetts or maybe Fes, Morocco or Kyoto, Japan.

Meaning, there still aren’t very many people in the world for whom the art of our time has any direct relevance whatsoever.

It’s too off-putting, it’s too hard, it’s too limited. It’s over-protected. There are too many barriers. There’s too little generosity.

No to pretense. No to obscurity. No to silence. No to the withering gaze. No to timidity. No to closed doors.

Yes to connecting. Yes to rewiring. Yes to catching. Yes to letting go. Yes to opening. Yes to yes.