Chicago artist Joanne Aono creatively captures the intersection of art, community history, and social commentary in a new exhibit, “Harvesting Ethnic Roots.” The installation is on display at boundary, a visual arts project space in Chicago’s Morgan Park community, through June 5.
Aono, a holistic farmer as well as a visual artist, addresses identity, immigration, and the environment in her works. “Harvesting Ethnic Roots” explores the cultural identity of three distinct groups who established themselves in Morgan Park through the foods they gathered or harvested on the land.
“When boundary invited me to exhibit, my interest in food sovereignty led me to research the history of Morgan Park,” Aono said. “I identified three groups — Indigenous peoples, European settlers, and Black Americans — who gathered and cultivated food from the land, specific to their cultures. This exhibit symbolizes the harvest and sharing of traditional dishes.”
The concept of food sovereignty was introduced in 1996 by members of Via Campesina, an international farmers’ organization. It’s defined as the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods, and their right to define their own food and agriculture systems. In contrast to the present global system dominated by corporations, food sovereignty emphasizes local, culturally appropriate, and sustainable food availability.
The exhibit is composed of three rows of large-scale, elegant drawings depicting food plants. The back row of drawings depicts the foods gathered or cultivated by Indigenous people who predominated in the area until the 1830s. These include wild rice, strawberries and onions as well as cultivated corn, beans and squash.
The second row depicts the foods raised by the European settlers who arrived beginning in the 1830s. The crops include celery, squash, rye and cabbage.
The front row depicts the food items grown by Black Americans — collards, turnips, okra and sweet potatoes. Black Americans started settling in Morgan Park in the 1880s, and the Great Migration from the southern states led many more to move here beginning around 1915.
“My project is about harvesting food, not just through farming,” Aono said. “The Indigenous peoples were largely hunters/gatherers. They gathered the wild rice, strawberries, and onions, and cultivated some crops like the Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash. The Europeans created farms, and more contemporary residents have small gardens in their yards and community gardens.”
Aono did some of her research through the Ridge Historical Society in Beverly/Morgan Park, utilizing the expertise of RHS historian Linda Lamberty.
“Joanne had already done considerable research before reaching out, and I enjoyed learning about some of the sources she’d used,” Lamberty said. “Those of us who are hooked on history approach historical research through our own interests. The fresh perspective which both Joanne and her unique project brought to the table — no pun intended — opens up new insights all around.”
The images were created in pencil, colored pencil, and marker on sheer material that is regularly used to cover crop rows. The panels are hung to overlap and sway in the breeze as the viewer walks through them. The delicate drawings and sheer white material create a ghostly, dreamlike experience of days past when the Blue Island Ridge area was natural and rural, and parts of the land were used for food gathering and farming.
A second part of the exhibit is an outside installation called “Harvest,” which consists of a base covered with seeds. Nature — squirrels, birds, wind, and weather — will scatter the seeds and eventually reveal a quote underneath, by Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and civil rights activist. The quote states, “If you give a hungry man food, he will eat it. If you give him land, he will grow his own food.”
Aono and her husband, Brian Leber, run Bray Grove Farm outside of Morris, where they engage in holistic farming, down to using two draft mules, Emmylou and Loretta, for work in the fields.
The farm offers home delivery of their produce (or pick up at the farm) throughout the west and southwest suburbs through a Community Supported Agriculture program in which purchasers contract to receive “share boxes” of the vegetables grown on the farm.
Aono has her art studio at the farm and manages an alternative art exhibitions program, Cultivator — Chicago Art Exhibitions & Farm Art Projects, that holds exhibits at Bray Grove Farm and various locations in Chicago.
The visual arts project space hosting Aono’s exhibit, boundary, is located in a renovated garage at 2334 West 111th Place, Chicago. Gallery hours for Aono’s exhibit are from noon to 4 p.m. Saturdays, or by appointment, which can be booked by calling 773-316-0562 or emailing boundarychicago@gmail.com.
Susannah Papish, owner and director of boundary, established the space in 2017, in support of bringing art out of downtown and into neighborhoods, making it more accessible and less intimidating. Aono’s exhibit expands that concept, using her art to bring the history and culture of the neighborhood right into boundary.
Carol Flynn is a freelance writer for the Daily Southtown.
