the lucy flower self-reliance garden Launch and tea
Drawing & design by Maggie Puckett & Jeff Levrant
Some people go to priests; others to poetry; I to my friends. —Virginia Woolf
The Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden
Seeds InService: An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank
UPCOMING EVENTS:
Join us Saturday, July 7 at 2 pm for a ceremony featuring calamint, the Bosnian tea of sorrow, which women drank historically with others to heal their sadness.
Transplanted from the original Papermakers Garden, calamint now lives in the Lucy Flower Self Reliance Garden. Bring your favorite cup to sit with plants that give our bodies and minds medicine.
Join us on Saturday, July 21, 1pm-3pm as we celebrate the launch of An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank at Compound Yellow
An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank is a new publication that tells the story of Melissa H. Potter’s and Maggie Puckett’s collaborative work, Seeds InService, a unique Chicago garden project that combines seeds, plants, and papermaking in resistance to industrial agriculture and global patriarchy. For the past five years, we’ve been collaborating on this work exploring feminist and ecological concerns through urban agriculture and the art of hand papermaking. The book blends critical writings, research, illustrations, paintings, hand papermaking, and photography, offering inspiration as well as an informational guide for you to start your own seed revolution.
Tea gathering, tour of garden plan, workshop
The Lucy Flower Self-Reliance Garden, is a garden featuring plants reflecting the theme of self-sustainability. Some of the concerns are practical: how in our busy world can we work together as a group to tend to a garden which provides us life? And they are also conceptual: what does self-reliance encompass? The project will explore the feminist theories of feminized labor (domestic arts, cooking, and teaching) and consider the ways women’s empowerment can work towards a more sustainable system. The garden will include drought-resistant plants, easy-to-grow foods and medicinal herbs, as well as advocacy efforts for seed-saving, community garden development, and even growing indoors.
Seeds InService will also launch the book, An Illuminated Feminist Seed Bank. The project is a look back at our five years in the Papermaker’s Garden in Chicago and the work moving forward with the Compound Yellow gallery. The book includes stories about our feminist curated beds, a catalog of our artworks, performances, and events, and an index of plants we describe as the world’s first feminist seed bank. Commissioned essays by Claire Pentecost and Tricia Van Eck will be included.
Save the dates: details to come!
June
Friday June 1, 8, 29 in residence at CY
Friday June 29 SIS work day and “live studio”
July
Friday 6, 13, 20, 27 in residence at CY
Friday July 20 Salem Witch Day, Srebrenica Memorial Day (July 11)
Saturday July 21 Book Launch Event