DS+R collaborated with artist, activist and Just Above Midtown gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant on Are we really that different? - a fully operational urban farm that draws from Goode Bryant's work with Project Eats to respond to issues of food equity. Currently, Project Eats has seven farms in four of NYC's boroughs, with the aim of getting healthy, locally grown food to urban communities to support their health and well being. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the 40-foot tall suspended installation hosts plants on life support inside a gallery, redirecting light from the skylight above and water from the gallery's back of house into intravenous drip bags filled with nutrients. A variety of edible vegetables and flowers are harvested every week and mounted on the gallery walls for visitors to eat and share, with an expected yield of 500 pounds of food over the course of the exhibition's two month duration.
Throughout her fifty-year career which includes opening Just Above Midtown, one of the first galleries in New York to focus on work by artists of color, in 1974, Linda Goode Bryant has created spaces that allow Blackness to resonate across personal, official, and public domains. Are we really that different? features an operational farm and a new video that brings together Goode Bryant's work as a filmmaker and gallerist with Project EATS, the urban farming organization she founded in 2009, highlighting the symbiotic, and often parasitic, relationships between humans and nature that arise in the modern industrial world.
The installation was presented by Gagosian as part of Social Works, a group exhibition curated by Antwaun Sargent with participating artists David Adjaye, Zalika Azim, Allana Clarke, Kenturah Davis, Theaster Gates, Linda Goode Bryant, Lauren Halsey, Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Christie Neptune, Alexandria Smith, and Carrie Mae Weems.
