fieldfaring

Temescal Amity Works was a multi-year project (July 2004-January 2007) sited in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, California. We have lived in the neighborhood since 1999, and when we conceived of the project, we saw it as a way to localize our attention and to restructure our practice to work in a community that we were not external to. Temescal Amity Works was funded by grants from The Creative Capital Foundation, the Creative Work Fund and the Oakland Arts Commission. We considered the project to be a social sculpture that also drew upon historical models of mutual-aid societies, barn-raisings, DIY collectives and urban communism. We were (and still are) interested in how a specific community built relationships through personal and casual economies. To accomplish this, we created two interlocking programs, The Big Back Yard and Reading Room.

The Big Back Yard built on the history of the neighborhood as an Italian-American, immigrant community that was planted with citrus and fruit trees. Today, these trees still bear fruit while the culture that planted them has dwindled. Much of the harvest rots on the ground or is hauled away by the city. The Big Backyard was based around a hand-built, steel pushcart that we made to collect surplus fruits and vegetables from neighborhood yards, which we gave away fresh or re-distributed in the forms of collective marmalades and fruit butters.The Reading Room, located at a storefront space just off Telegraph Avenue, contextualized the ongoing experience of the Big Backyard through casual contact during open hours, as well as through a series of public events, film screenings and a small resource library. We also invited local artists, historians and others to create projects that overlaid themselves onto Temescal Amity Works in a productive and complicated way, making available our space and resources, including modest re-distributions of our funding. These collaborations included a Yellow Car Parade, a seed-exchange board, a marathon bread-baking workshop and a Broom Mending walk.

Over the course of the project, our storefront was open most weekends. We harvested and redistributed thousands of free oranges, lemons, apples, and other produce from local yards. We made and gave away many jars of marmalade, fig conserve and apple butter. We published a series of postcards documenting local groups and collectives, venerable fruit trees, and the local landscape. We also produced a neighborhood resource map that was given out to all of the residents of the neighborhood and continues to be distributed through local businesses.

While the project could have continued indefinitely, in January of 2007, we decided to close the storefront. We had observed that the longer the storefront remained in operation, the projects identity as a service became more ingrained in the neighborhood’s “consciousness”; which worked against our own interest in jump-starting a network, wherein residents would begin to circulate their backyard surplus amongst themselves. The tension between these two endpoints became clearer during a final discussion with neighbors that we hosted in the space on the closing weekend. While many who attended felt that the dialogue and concepts generated through the storefront and programs had been of real interest to the neighborhood, there were also residents who felt that the project didn’t fully create a harvesting service for the neighborhood on a scale large enough to address issues of food justice and community health. While this was not really part of our intent or interest, such feelings highlighted some core issues about practicing as artists in a community context; what makes for a successful art project can often seriously diverge from the expectations placed on activist and non-profit services, and this divergence can be heightened when the art project borrows some of its outward form from such organizations.

This past summer we have come across two separate efforts in our neighborhood that involve foraging and crop sharing. One is called Forage Oakland, while the other is called Urban Youth Harvest. For our part, we are currently working on our own follow up project with the neighborhood, building on our growing interest in the creation of tools and models rather than services. This project, called "The Green Language" will continue to focus awareness on neighborhood micro-economies, sustainable living, cooperative social networks and local history through the insertion of free harvesting tools into the local tool-lending library, linked with after-school curricula in the neighborhood primary schools. These tools and their use will be publicized through a series of free illustrated pamphlets that will be distributed through the neighborhood newssheet and will form the basic curriculum for the school program. In this project, we are collaborating with two other neighborhood residents (one is an artist and chef and the other is a nutritional and environmental educator) who we met through Temescal Amity Works. One of the ideas behind this phase is to work directly through pre-existing organizations, rather than through “creating” a new one. The intent is to continue to craft an ongoing consciousness around the “big backyard” and its potential within a local casual economy.

Sonoma County Preserves was created for Hybrid Fields: Artists Exploring our Food Systems, a group exhibition at the Sonoma County Museum in Santa Rosa, California in October 2006. Ranging from jams and pickles to vinegars and salmon jerky, the project presented a wide variety of home-preserved foods that residents of Sonoma county had grown, foraged or hunted for, which they had preserved for future use. Participation was free and entries were solicited across the county through newspaper advertisements, email lists and bulletin boards.

Participants were asked to include two entries of their preserve, and to write a short text, memory or story that related to it. All of the preserves were displayed on shelves in the gallery, and the display grew over the course of the exhibition. The submissions ranged from jams and jellies, to cured olives, hot salsa and fig vinegar.

Sonoma County Preserves culminated in a day-long “opening”, an event where each of the entries was opened and tasted by both museum visitors and a panel of five judges; a museum trustee, a local dealer of antiquarian cookbooks, a radio talk show host, and an art collector. After a two hour tasting, sun-dried heirloom tomatoes preserved in olive oil were chosen as the penultimate preserve. Their creator, Vincent Valentine was awarded a cash prize of $100.00 and the preserve was accessioned, along with a portrait of its creator, into the Sonoma County Museums permanent collection.

The over-arching situation of an art museum exhibition about “art and agriculture” was a central point of context for Sonoma County Preserves, which builds on a basic act of juxtaposition. The Sonoma County Museum is, similarly, a container for collecting, storing and preserving the products of cultural industry, a location that exercises judgment, taste and selection. While preserves and preserving generally speak to both sustenance and memory, a museums’ economy of cultivation, which builds on concepts of rarity and
selection, contrasts strongly with the personal and social economies of home food preservation, based, as they are, upon conditions of momentary bounty and surplus. In the exhibition space of a museum, Sonoma County Preserves creates a situation where two separate cultural traditions of preservation overlap.

Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves create social art projects that investigate the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. They ask questions about the nature of people and place as seen through social economy, history and local ecology. The collaboration began with a two and a half year public project (2004-2007), Temescal Amity Works, which facilitated and documented the exchange of backyard produce, conversation, and collective biography within the Temescal Neighborhood of Oakland, CA.

In addition to their collaborative practice, they are both professors at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Ted was the founder of the CCA's MFA Area for Social Practice, and continues to be one of the lead professors for the central workshop within that curriculum.

They have received a Creative Work Fund grant from the Elise and Walter Haas Foundation, a Visual Arts grant from the Creative Capital Foundation,  an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, as well as support from the Oakland Office of Cultural Affairs and California College of the Arts.