Christine Kuan
Wildness in Art
By Christine KuanFollowing staggering and traumatizing recent events—George Floyd, COVID-19, voter suppression, storming of the Capitol, #StopAsianHate, abortion bans, the war in Ukraine, Will Smith at the Oscars—combined with the avalanche of microplastics, landfills, deforestation, billionaires in space, mass species extinction, and industrial agriculture, it seems to me that the destruction of freedom goes hand in hand with the destruction of nature. In 2022, it feels like all the earth, democracy, and wildness itself is endangered.
In Conversation
Jordan Weber with Christine Kuan
In 2015/2016, JoAnna LeFlore-Ejike, now-head of the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation, and I started a conversation about extracting earth from the site of Malcolm X’s birth home. It’s seventeen acres of prairie and wetland; nature and life found a way around this neighborhood that once had a healthy Black community. We came up with the idea of a decompression space that acts as a greenhouse for seedlings to be transferred to the Shabazz Gardens, but also a space for spiritual reflection within a green zone.
