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New Histories: the Gadsden Farm Project included in Call & Response: Craft as a Tool for Activism
The Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco has selected New Histories: the Gadsden Farm Project to be part of “Call & Response: Craft as a Tool for Activism,” a virtual exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design that opens this summer. The Gadsden Farm Project is a collaborative food social justice project created by professor Holly Hanessian and MFA alumni, Michael Diaz.
Hanessian and Diaz’s project grew out of a desire to tell the stories from the Gadsden County, Florida agricultural community, told by people who have lived it, whose agricultural history has migrated from shade tobacco to tomatoes to medical marijuana. A county that, owing to Coca-Cola fortunes, once had the highest per capita income level in the state and now has the lowest. Hanessian approached Diaz to help in the effort of documenting some of the residents’ stories. Diaz had previously worked on community-based projects connected to the iGrow Community Farm in Frenchtown in Tallahassee, Florida, as well as with a homeless population concentrated along Gaines Street.
“We were both interested in working on projects that grew from community interactions and relationship building,” said Hanessian. “I gave each of them individual plates honoring them as a way to exchange my labor for their participation in addition to their archived stories.”
The work will be shown at Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA this fall and travel to other museums in the next two years. Locally, parts of the work will be shown at Tallahassee Community College this October.
Photo by Becki Rutta