Grow Greater Englewood

Founded in 2017, Grow Greater Englewood (GGE) is rooted in the Englewood neighborhood. A 501(c)(3) social enterprise, GGE focuses on creating sustainable local food economies, green businesses, and land sovereignty with the goal of empowering residents to create wellness and wealth. Among its ecosystem of neighborhood farms is Getting Grown Collective, which supports three gardens and programs and partners with LVEJO (Little Village Environmental Justice Organization) in its work on food justice and community healing. The Backyard Gardens Program supports small-scale, backyard gardening to help provide residents with access to organic produce, medicinal herbs, and flowers. GGE’s Englewood Food Sovereignty Network is also piloting a program to facilitate hyper-local food delivery in the neighborhood.

 

The Englewood Village Plaza, a former vacant lot on the southwest corner of 58th and Halsted Streets, hosts community gatherings and the Englewood Village Market, a farmer’s market that takes place on select Saturdays June through October and connects residents with fresh produce from local farms, Black-owned small businesses selling food and other goods, and a variety of activities including performances, chef demos, and health and wellness sessions. The Plaza also serves as the entry point to the Englewood Nature Trail (ENT), a a community effort involving multiple partners, spearheaded by Grow Greater Englewood, that will transform an abandoned elevated rail line into a 2-mile linear park providing opportunities to enjoy recreation in a natural setting. The Trail will anchor a flourishing Englewood “Agro-Eco District” and create linkages between the neighborhood’s network of farms to support local food access, community health and wellness, and business and job development.

 

The Backyard Garden Program is collaborating with ReSOURCE to co-facilitate five days of art programming for youth participants to gather found materials for upcycling and repurposing from Backyard Gardens, Community Gardens and Community Farms in Englewood. Participants will then present their artworks at the end of the Fall program that will culminate with a community gathering.

MIXED MEDIA AND STILL LIFE

Works in EMERGENCE are diverse in their subject matter and media, but a few themes reappear throughout. Working in abstraction or in the traditionally peaceful genre of still life, artists like William Carter, Allen Stringfellow, and Jonathan Green express themes of interiority or sociability, history or modernity. Notably, Stringfellow and Ralph Arnold both experimented with media and materials and worked extensively in collage, which allowed them to combine abstract design, figurative imagery, and on occasion political ideas.

Viewers typically expect Black artists to focus on particular aspects of their social and political identities within their work. Where might those expectations come from? Still life, abstraction, and collage may express many different things about artists’ interior lives and their visual and social observation, whether connected to public manifestations of identity or not.

William Carter’s mid-century still life Untitled presents a group of vibrantly colored bottles that invite the viewer’s gaze, set against a similarly colorful background with floral elements like grapes and leaves. They give evidence of conviviality and might be interpreted as symbols of social gatherings, but they could also just be a collection of pleasing forms. We might put Carter’s still life in dialogue with that of Jonathan Green, who became close friends with Carter while living in Chicago. Green’s close-up view of an eloquently simple composition presents oranges, a pear, and a lemon in front of two vessels. Works like this piece call the viewer to examine the objects the artist chose to include, to consider how they interact with each other like bodies in space, and to reflect on their meaning within the traditional genre of still life painting.

Collage might suggest the piecing together of identity from different components that might not usually coexist, giving room for more expansive imaginations of meaning than a straightforward representational image might allow. It could also just be an inventive way of combining colors, shapes, and textures. Allen Stringfellow’s Untitled, a collage from 1962, brings familiar motifs from still life—fruit and flowers, desserts and glassware—together with imagery of artist’s models and performers. Layered with paint and tissue paper that frustrate the viewer’s attempt to get clarity on the subject matter, the bursts of form and colors hint at the splashy abstraction of Stringfellow’s untitled, textured painting made from house paint and particulate on cardboard. Here the artist tests commonly found materials to create new textures and plays with the creation of colors and finishes that diverge from “Western” academic painting methods.

In The Waiting, Arnold constructs a large collage from different paper components, lace, and paint. In the piece, elements of European and African art are placed in dialogue with one another, while some figures appear alone and isolated, others in large groups. Without giving easy answers, Arnold implies questions about social issues. Who is waiting, and for what? In his Love Sign II, which bears the words “Love is Universal,” Arnold asserts the equal validity of all types of romantic affection and love, utilizing collage to convey a more straightforward political message.