A few doors down from Crown Candy in Old North, a small brick building sits on about an acre of land, surrounded by a rambling garden that a passerby might casually misidentify as an absent neighbor’s overgrown yard.
But even with little in bloom on a brisk but sunny February morning, every tree, bush and plant was there for a purpose.
“Leaving the leaf litter, leaving the dried-out plants, having piles of organic matter — this is all habitat for native bees,” explained Juan Williams Chávez as he gave a tour.
Chavez is founder and director of Northside Workshop, an indoor workspace surrounded by a teaching garden divided into a variety of habitats. Visitors learn about bees and ecosystems and make art projects.
He’s also one of 10 artists in an exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum that showcases people who use their artwork to call for a better balance between humans and the natural world.
“Seeds: Containers of a World to Come” is on view at the Kemper through July 28.
A social-practice artist, Chávez complements his installations for museums and galleries with projects involving community members that work toward tangible goals — like encouraging people to start urban gardens.
“It’s about demonstrating how the garden can be an art studio,” he said.
His installation for “Seeds” combines objects referencing his Peruvian roots — ceramics and dried gourds — and artifacts from Northside Workshop, including seeds and old beekeeping equipment.
The exhibition also includes sculpture, mixed-media paintings, films and a seed library fashioned from parts of an old card catalog. Most participating artists imagine a sustainable future, in part, by looking toward the practices of Indigenous people around the world.
A steel sculpture by Salvadoran artist Beatriz Cortez simultaneously evokes a futuristic space capsule and the storage vessels for food and water once carved into the ground by Mayans of the lower Yucatán Peninsula, in present-day Mexico. The piece includes living plants, which museum staff work to keep alive in the inhospitable climate of the art gallery.
Kapwani Kiwanga, an artist who was born in Canada and now lives and works in France, fashioned inflatable sculptures that reimagine the Wardian case, a portable greenhouse developed in the 19th century.
Colombian Carolina Caycedo created a trio of hanging sculptures that evoke the “three sisters” of Indigenous agriculture in the Western hemisphere: squash, maize and bean — all crops that thrive in close proximity to each other.
“Many of the artists are trying to think beyond a Western notion of progress or historical chronology, and as much as they're thinking about alternate futures, they're also thinking about different ideas about the past. It’s all interconnected,” said Meredith Malone, who co-curated the exhibition with Svea Braeunert.
“They're also very much thinking about resilience and the question of who gets to thrive, who gets to survive — not just plants, but also people,” Malone added.
Diné painter Emmi Whitehorse, Palestinian sculptor and film artist Jumana Manna, Mauritanian film artist Shiraz Bayjoo and Chilean filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña also have work in the Kemper exhibition.
So too do Ellie Irons and Anne Percoco, the American artists who created the seed library. They visited St. Louis in October to harvest seeds from vegetation in Compton Hill Reservoir Park in Compton Heights, and the partially burned-out former home of the Karpeles Manuscript Library across the street.
Snow covered the ground when they revisited the park on a bone-chilling February morning. Even still, there were pokeweed, big and little bluestem, dogbane, Virginia Creeper, bindweed and other flora to find and examine for seeds.
Irons and Percoco are evangelists for plants that people often dismiss as weeds.
“It's really easy when you're living in a city to be alienated from the fact that you're part of the ecosystem, and that there are flows of water and soil and energy and sunlight that are sustaining you — even in a so-called concrete jungle,” Percoco said, pulling an envelope from her pocket to hold seeds.
The pair encourage people to take home envelopes of seeds from their piece in the Kemper exhibition, and plant them. It’s one way to start establishing a more reciprocal relationship with nature, they said.
Even a dandelion poking through a crack in the St. Louis concrete is a potential ally as people grapple with the disastrous effects of human-caused climate change, Irons added.
“If you collect seeds from a dandelion, you can reduce some of that cultural amnesia that we have around our ability to be in touch with and collaborate with plant relatives," she said. "I think of it as building solidarity between humans and plants to weather climate chaos. We really, really need to do that.”
![Ai Weiwei and museum curator Sabine Eckmann examine "The Odyssey," a massive frieze in his exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum. In the foreground is a detail of "Forever Bicycle," a sculpture made from 720 bicycles. [11/8/19]](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/6e096b3/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6000x3969+0+15/resize/260x172!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2Flegacy%2Fsites%2Fkwmu%2Ffiles%2F201911%2FJDG_aiweiwei_02.JPG)
