Seeds InService

In the summer, Seeds InService offers artistic interventions and free programs to the public to learn how to grow their own food, support sustainable agriculture, save and distribute seeds, and the untold histories of Chicago's diaspora communities.

Link to the 2016 Events

Symbiotic Colony of Bacteria and Yeast (SCOBY) is the living "mother" that produces the beverage kombucha when fermented with sweet black tea. Known for its medicinal qualities this material can also be made into paper. This year Seeds InService is collaborating with a scientist at Illinois Institute of Technology to discover how SCOBY can be used as an alternative fiber. Check back for more images and information about our SCOBY paper experiments. 

The problem: The pathogen that led to the Irish potato famine, Phytophthora infestans, is still plaguing potato farmers worldwide. The microorganism begins by attacking the leaves of the plant before descending to the tuber, leaving it shriveled, small, and inedible. Separating the vine from the potato a couple of weeks before harvest is one way to reduce the amount of the pathogen that ends up in the soil, ultimately affecting current and future harvests. But what to do with the vine? Agricultural waste is a significant source of usable fiber and a serious store of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases fueling climate change.

With a donation from the Department of Plant Pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, SIS planted four cultivars of potato for fiber experimentation.

First Course: Charlotte Perkins Gilman Parthenogenesis Salad

Spinach, nasturtium salad with marigold dressing

Charlotte Perkins Gilman divorced and left her family behind, afterwards she lived at Hull House for a few months. Her main feminist treatise was that sex and domestic economics went hand in hand; for a woman to survive, she was reliant on her sexual assets to please her husband in exchange for financial support. This philosophy was the genesis of her novel, Herland. The book describes an isolated society composed entirely of women, who reproduce via parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction). The result is an ideal social order: free of war, conflict, and domination.

The spinach in this salad has both male and female plants. When there are not enough males available, the female plants can change sex, and pollinate themselves via parthenogenesis, hence the name of the salad.

Second Course: Pre-Colonial Mankiller Sagamite Stew

Corn, beans, and squash stew seasoned with chili peppers, ground pumpkin seeds, and cocoa, topped with toasted pepitas and served with hopi red dye amaranth cornbread

This thick stew is made solely from New World ingredients, plants unknown to European colonists before their invasion of Turtle Island. It is based on the sacred trio of Native American crops: corn, beans, and squash, also known as the Three Sisters, which provided a balanced diet of carbohydrates, protein, and vegetable fats. It is seasoned with chili peppers, toasted pumpkin seeds and cocoa.

Pre-colonial Indigenous women were traditionally responsible for much of the planting, tending, harvesting, and cooking of foods. Without their efforts over 10,000 years of domestication of wild species we wouldn’t have any of the thousands of corn, beans, or squash varieties available today. Unfortunately, in the 500 years since colonization the indigenous population of Turtle Island has plummeted due to genocide and disease. Similarly, in the last 100 years 75% of crop diversity has disappeared. We must make the effort to preserve, unearth, and protect indigenous culture including plant species and agriculture knowledge.

This dish specifically honors the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation, Wilma Mankiller, for her incredible efforts to preserve and protect her nation’s culture and people.

Corn: Oaxacan green dent, bloody butcher, rainbow Inca sweet, Cherokee white eagle; hominy

Beans: calypso, Christmas Lima, Cherokee trail of tears, Shackamaxon blue, ojo de cabra

Squash: butternut from radical root farm; 35 miles from chicago

Pepper: ancho, guajillo

Served with Hopi red amaranth cornbread

Three Sister’s Myth

Different people told different versions of this story. Here is a Cherokee version:

Once upon a time there were three sisters. The first sister was very tall and strong; her name was Corn Girl, and she wore a pale green dress and had long yellow hair that blew in the wind. Corn Girl liked to stand straight and tall, but the hot sun burned her feet and hurt her. And the longer Corn Girl stood in her field, the hungrier she got. And every day more weeds were growing up around her and choking her.

The second sister was very thin and quick and fast, and her name was Bean Girl, but she wasn't very strong. She couldn't even stand up on her own. She was good at making food, but she just had to lie there stretched out on the ground, and she would get dirty and wet, which wasn't good for her.

The third sister, Squash Girl, was short and fat and wore a yellow dress. She was hungry too.

For a long time, the sisters didn't get along. They each wanted to be independent and free, and not have anything to do with the other two. So Corn Girl stood there with her sunburned feet and got hungrier and hungrier. And Bean Girl lay there on the ground and got dirtier and wetter. And the little fat sister Squash Girl was hungry too.

So Bean Girl talked to her sister Corn Girl and said, "What if I feed you some good food, and you can hold me up so I don't have to lie on the ground and get all dirty?" And Corn Girl thought that was a great idea. Then little Squash Girl called up to her tall sister, "How about if I lie on your feet and shade them so you won't get sunburned?" Corn Girl thought that was a great idea too.

So the Three Sisters learned to work together, so that everyone would be healthier and happier. Corn Girl helped Bean Girl stand up. Bean Girl fed Corn Girl and Squash Girl good food. And Squash Girl shaded Corn Girl's feet and kept the weeds from growing up around them all.

And that's why the Iroquois and the Pueblo people and the Aztecs and everybody in between planted their corn, their beans, and their squash together in the same field - the Three Sisters.

Third Course: Rosario E.’s Vulnerable Squash Melange

This dish is inspired by a report by Human Rights Watch titled “Cultivating Fear: The Vulnerability of Immigrant Farmworkers in the US to Sexual Violence and Sexual Harassment”.

“Hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the United States today work in fields, packing houses, and other agricultural workplaces where they face a real and significant risk of sexual violence and sexual harassment... A 2010 survey of 150 farmworker women in California’s Central Valley found that 80 percent had experienced some form of sexual harassment, while a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that a majority of their 150 interviewees had also experienced sexual harassment...

Victims of sexual violence and harassment are often reluctant to describe these experiences...

Sexual violence and harassment in the agricultural workplace are fostered by a severe imbalance of power between employers and supervisors and their low-wage, immigrant workers. Victims often than face systemic barriers—exacerbated by their status as farmworkers and often as unauthorized workers—to reporting these abuses and bringing perpetrators to justice...

Many more farmworkers reported incidents of humiliating, debilitating harassment in the

form of unwanted touching, pressure to engage in sexual relations, and verbal harassment.

A woman in New York stated that she had picked potatoes and onions with a supervisor

who touched all the women’s bodies, and if they tried to resist, he would threaten to call

immigration or fire them…

...sexual assault and harassment were serious problems, with one worker referring to one company’s field as the “field de calzon,” or “field of panties,” because of the number of rapes that had occurred there.”

Fourth Course: Jane Addams Tart

Caramelized onion tart

A New Conscience and an An Ancient Evil by Jane Addams lays bare the race and class problematics of the anti-prostitution movement. At the same time, Hull House workers studied the Papermaker's Garden area where many Italian, Irish and Eastern European immigrants worked at prostitutes. In their wage map research, Hull House workers could not determine wages for these women, or whether they were free at all. But they did mark the location on their maps with white boxes, a ghostly bookmark in what would become a future debate for “sex work is work.” You are eating on a cloth made from sunflower and corn plants, grown in the garden on the same location where these women worked. The tablecloth will become a mulch for our new beds next year, exploring Zapatista activism, Incan/Andean agricultural methods (vertical archipelago concept), abortifacient plants, and Bosnian women’s herbal magic and medicine.

On July 29 Seeds InService joined forces with the UIC Heritage Garden to make paper embedded with seeds of plants which are beneficial the the monarch butterfly. Climate change, milkweed habitat loss, and illegal logging threaten the survival of the insect. Learn more about UIC Heritage Garden.

On July 17 Seeds InService collaborated with {she crew}, a multidisciplinary journaling to performance empowerment program for girls in Chicago, ages 12-14. Together we made recycled handmade paper with found poetry and practiced making instant books. Learn more about {she crew}.

Controversial eco-feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva ushered in 2015, the UN’s International Year of Soil, with a powerful message: “We are all Seeds, that for a while we might lie underground, but at the right moment we germinate and burst out with all our potential.”[1] SIS is part of this grassroots movement that’s beginning to germinate, preparing to burst forth. Jane Addams, a Nobel Prize winner, and underrepresented American historical figure who founded The Hull House in 1889, combined social engagement with feminism, inspiring projects like SIS to continue her vision working toward social change. “In the soil and the seed we find answers to every one of the crises we face” Vandana Shiva said. “The crisis of violence and war, the crisis of hunger and disease, the crisis of the destruction of democracy.”

[1] "We Are All Seeds - A New Year Message from Dr. Vandana Shiva for 2015." Seed Freedom RSS. 28 Dec. 2014. Web. 05 Jan. 2015.

On July 16 Seeds InService joined forces with Live Station Project at Columbia College's A+D Gallery for a Seed Exchange. Providing seeds, packets, boxes, labels, and art supplies, the public was encouraged to create their own seed libraries or collections. Learn more about Live Station.

Inspired by the indigenous planting method of the same name, Three Sisters Collective unites artists/activists Jillian Bruschera, Melissa Potter, and Maggie Puckett in a mutually beneficial collaboration. Our inaugural event was held outside the Logan Square Comfort Station and hosted by Three Walls, a contemporary gallery in Chicago.

“Seed Bomb” workshops arm community members with the knowledge and materials needed to help identify and transform local empty lots and overlooked patches of soil. The “bombs,” collections of pulp and seeds, are thrown over fences in order to get to hard-to-reach places. For this form of guerrilla gardening, Seeds InService carefully selects native seed varieties that provide food and habitats for local and migrating animals and help to beautify blighted urban areas. Additionally, heavily polluted soils are detoxified through the growth of plants called hyperaccumulators, such as sunflower. Sunflowers absorb lead from the soil, eventually making the soil safe for human interaction. 

A pedagogically-based collaboration with the Guerrilla Girls engaged Columbia College Chicago Interdisciplinary Arts graduate students to create limited editions.

Over four days in July I worked with The Mobile Mill's Jillian Bruschera as an artist-in-resident during th Chicago Parks District event Sandtastic. Youth campers from across Chicago participated in beach-side papermaking workshops using recycled and local fibers. To highight ecological concerns I chose to make paper from recycled materials, onion and garlic skins, and algae from Lake Michigan. Some of the resulting paper will be bound into a 12-foot book highlighting socio-economic inequalities across Chicago's 77 community areas.

In May 2011, Potter and Puckett collaborated with artists in Caracas, Venezuela, including Yanomami member Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë, for an intensive, month-long residency featuring hand papermaking.