Tag Archive
Operation sunshine
Latoya and her two daughters moved with a small band of “guerilla gardeners” down the block from the URBAN ART RETREAT (UAR) gallery to this lot, to give back to the worms and transform neglected patches of land on May 1, International Sunflower Guerrilla Gardening Day. »
Betting the Farm
Darion Crawford, compost manager, is pointing down the length of Iron Street Farm. I’m standing with him on the roof of a warehouse in industrial Bridgeport, just across the street from PepsiCo Chicago and just across the river from the smokestacks of some industrial plant. »
Finding Common Ground
Benjamin Murphy wedges his cigarette butt into the gray planks of a picnic table and squints, surveying his sanctuary. In the fading light of a late-May Thursday afternoon, the 65th and Woodlawn Community Garden resembles a living patchwork quilt—some plots in this roughly 1000 square-foot space are lined with misshapen bricks, others are freestanding... »
Creative Ecology: Environmental artist Nancy Klehm tries to keep up with her own work
“My work is context specific. It’s about social context. It’s about place. Place refers to more than land; place is about land that has history. It feels more alive,” explains Nance Klehm, an artist and activist based on the South Side. This particular morning, Klehm is in a motel room in Tucson, Arizona. It’s... »
Home sweet homegrown
Erika Allen, Chicago project manager of the urban agriculture nonprofit Growing Power, Inc., spoke last Friday at the KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue about the organization’s recent efforts to increase food quality and food literacy within Chicago communities. Growing Power was founded in 1993 in Milwaukee as an urban agriculture development and youth outreach program... »
Green Revolution: Low-income communities declare economic independence through agriculture
We talk a lot about urban agriculture at the Chicago Weekly. It’s become an office joke that no issue is a real CW issue without an urban farming piece (spoiler: expect another next week), and even our staff shirts feature a farmer. Some of it is tied to our role as an arts and... »
Golden Eggs: Angelic Organics Learning Center teaches chicken care and more
On Saturday, March 21, chicken enthusiasts from all over Chicago flocked to Woodlawn’s Angelic Organics Learning Center to attend a free workshop on basic backyard chicken care. It was the Center’s second such workshop and, like the first held in Lakeview last November, reservations for its thirty spots sold out quickly. The crowd that... »
