Sharecropper
Community Art 2009
Micro Urban Farm growing heirloom vegetables,
15 sites across all boroughs, New York, New York, 2009
This project was initiated while in residence at Eyebeam.
Second Place at Smith
540 W. 21st Street
95 Halsey Street
95 Prospect Park West
47-05 39th Avenue
110 New York Avenue
114 Willoughby Avenue
135-15 96th Avenue
160 W. 85th Street
343 Smith Street
362 Henry Street
514 Grand Street
1000 Richardson Terrace
707 Lorimer
Space to Grow: Women, art, and the urban agriculture movement, Ame Gilbert and Yael Raviv, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2011
The Growing Trend, Nicole J. Caruth, Big Red and Shiny, December 16, 2012
Garden As Gallery, Gina Souders, Mother Earth News, August 14, 2018
Sharecropper takes its name from a system that exploited Black farmers and poor white tenant farmers across the American South for generations, a system that promised a shared harvest while producing debt, displacement, and dispossession. I kept the title deliberately; renaming it would allow the project to sidestep a history it should instead face.
The work asks what shared land and shared harvest might look like without coercion, debt, or unequal taking. Across borrowed growing spaces in New York City, volunteers learned to grow food together and shared the harvest among sites. In a city where land is scarce and growing food can seem impractical, the project offered a small but tangible model of collective cultivation, care, and abundance.