Lady Danni Morinich and tour participants at Iglesias Garden, with a sculpture by Iglesias Garden member and artist-in-residence César Viveros of Resistance Garden in the foreground, May 2023 (pc: Amalia Colón-Nava)
What if the resistance was a garden? What if growing your own vegetables/herbs, or tending your garden was a revolutionary act? For the painted bride Resistance garden project, these are not rhetorical questions.
The project aims to strengthen connections in various urban and/or agricultural initiatives in Philadelphia, and to strengthen community engagement with “local gardening and food culture through zinesforaging tours, youth education, and artist activations at partner sites.” The program coordinator, Amalia Colon-Nava, is a self-proclaimed “child of the earth” who approaches her role with great humility equal and divine sensitivity.
She refers to her father as an “OG” farmer, but Colon-Nava is a serious urban farmer. It is the third generation. “I grew up around gardens and gardening my whole life,” he says. “My grandparents have a plot of land in Mexico that they left because it’s very difficult to live there outside of agriculture, but they love gardening…” For Colon-Nava, the love of his family, and the ways in where gardening and agriculture were part of her education, they are critical to who she is now. She explains why her work with the Resistance Garden project is important to her and the communities she serves (literally).
“Community gardens are places created by groups of people to grow food and community. But more than that, they are places where people come together to make things happen.” – Claire Nettle
Where things happen
The Resistance Garden Project (RGP) is an important gateway for anyone—especially Philadelphians—with even a passing interest in growing their own greens. Since spring 2022, the RGP has partnered with eight urban farms and foragers across Philadelphia. These partnerships are designed to facilitate community engagement with food and garden culture through art, education and urban agriculture.
Cultivating community is key to this resistance gardening movement. For RGP, “resistance means self-sustainable growth, connecting with nature, and celebrating the work of urban farmers and foragers.” In many ways, increasing connectivity in the community and teaching people of color how to secure their own food are revolutionary acts in themselves.
In his book Community Gardening as Social Actionscholar and researcher Claire Nettle argues, “Community gardens are places created by groups of people to grow food and community. But more than that, they are places where people come together to make things happen.”
tea data is clear on this topic. Community gardening is an uplifting force for families and individuals living in (or around) food insecure neighborhoods. It helps improve physical and mental health, increase life expectancy and promote connections. A garden can not replace a shop or eliminate the need for them in any of the many food deserts in a city like Philadelphia. But it can help individuals improve their well-being and develop nutritional habits that are sustainable and affordable.
“Our mission is to raise and highlight the work of urban farms in Philadelphia,” says Colon-Nava, “to connect them, to program more reasons and opportunities for them to bring everyone together and to build more strength in the community” . She emphasized Farm Philly as an important model for the gardening-as-resistance movement. According to Colon-Nava, Farm Philly, the city’s initiative to support urban agriculture projects in various neighborhoods, “is the only urban agriculture program run by the city,” says Colon-Nava. “Urban Agriculture Plan Outlines Goals for Sustainable Urban Farm Network in Philadelphia.”
Gardening is an organic solution to an important problem: concentrated poverty in the city of Philadelphia. People can keep it simple and still contribute to the advancement of a global movement that embraces permaculture in urban environments. For the architects of the Resistance Garden project, part of the mission is to cultivate abundance “by examining and redefining our relationships with nature, agriculture, food politics and the cultural use of plants through the art”.
Uplift is the way
All of this was on display last June at the Resistance Garden Project’s fundraising event hosted at One Art Community Center in West Philadelphia. The urban garden/farm behind One Art was a compelling mix of found/repurposed objects, plants, gardens, vegetation and an actual farm. (One Art is one of the partners with the Resistance Garden project.) In the space of the courtyard where the program took place, many vendors sell their products: food, clothes and information. The mix of vendors, music and community activists reflected the spirit of movement politics in Philadelphia, a sense that something secret but also significant was in the air. People were there to do something. The event raised over $10,000.
In addition to coordinating programs on behalf of the Resistance Garden Project, Colon-Nava is also a co-founder and the artist and community coordinator for Dirtbaby Farm, a creative farm in North Philadelphia that grows fresh organic herbs. Dirtbaby runs a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription service, offering customers who pay at the start of the season — including through SNAP benefits — 20 weeks of produce throughout the summer. Dirtbaby is exactly the type of farming that would benefit from the painted bride’s resistance garden project.
Dirtbaby Farm has its final artist residency event on November 13 from 7 to 9 o’clock at the MASS construction in Philadelphia. It’s a record release party Joshua Marquez, a Philadelphia-based Filipino American composer—a celebration of art as an integral aspect of the community gardening and urban agriculture movements. “Art has been a huge part of urban gardens for a long time,” says Colon-Nava. Urban art and the recovery of public spaces through art projects is one of the tactics through which gardeners and farmers are able to secure land for urban agriculture and generate more community engagement. “All these farms (in the RGP) were already working with artists,” says Colon-Nava. “They already had some kind of arts programming or youth programming and we just came in and elevated the work they were doing.”
Uplift feels like the watchword for the painted bride’s resistance garden project. In just over a year, the RGP has worked on “art and urban gardening with more than 60 black and brown youth, 10 local artists, nine urban gardens and foragers, and an audience of more than 2,300 Philadelphians.”
They support a wide range of efforts to feed Philadelphia in more ways than one. Each garden grown through this resilience project advances the community’s connection to our natural environment and helps nourish the souls of Philadelphians through a combination of art and food.
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