South Chicago Artists' Garden
The South Chicago Artists’ Garden is a remarkable community garden that flourishes because of the talents and foresight of community groups and neighborhood families alike. In 2004, the South Chicago Arts Center asked Angelic Organics Learning Center to help transform four abandoned city lots into a large community garden two blocks from the Art Center. The Learning Center worked with the Art Center and the surrounding neighborhood to create a unique and safe place to grow vegetables, to congregate, to cross barriers, to paint, and to share.
Today, the Artists’ Garden is tended by a community of youth and adult gardeners. In a neighborhood with a high incidence of diet-related disease and limited access to fresh produce, the garden provides an important source of fresh, healthy food for the gardeners and their families. The annual harvest has included radishes, green beans, squash, cucumbers, tomatoes, mustard greens, collards, peanuts, sun flower seeds, garlic, potatoes, raspberries, chiles, tomatillos, and honey from two bee hives tended by families neighboring the garden.
Yet the most important aspect of the garden is not the yields of vegetables, fruit, and flowers, but the interactions and relationships forged between neighbors. In South Chicago, where gang violence is prevalent and may divide people who live on the same block, a safe space to gather in the middle of it all is rare.
By transforming a blighted space into a safe, neutral spot for teaching, learning, and celebrating, the garden fills a vital gap in positive activities in the neighborhood. The garden stimulates the imagination of youth at the South Chicago Art Center, as they do watercolor paintings of the plants or make artwork for the garden, and connects them to a source of healthy food and nature in their own neighborhood.
The garden is now permanently protected from development by NeighborSpace, a city-affiliated nonprofit that helps neighborhoods protect and manage city land as open space. For local residents, the garden has become an important symbol and stronghold for the possibility of a healthier neighborhood.
