#CrossingBrooklyn features 100+ works from 35 artists who work in virtually every medium, including painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and performance, linked only by place and by an engagement with the modern world. Over the next several weeks, Brooklyn Magazine will be rolling out profiles of ten artists who appear in the exhibit.
A few years ago, the documentary filmmaker Linda Goode Bryant was working on a short film about the impact of the 2007-8 global food price crisis on low-income communities in the United States and developing countries. During her research, she saw footage from Haiti of people eating mud and pebbles, spiked with honey, for lack of other subsistence. Desperate vendors were selling dirt pies at market. The images reduced her to tears. She thought, “what type of world it is we live in, where people are forced to eat mud because the price of food has risen to a level completely beyond their means?”
Not long after, Bryant realized that the food situations in New York and Haiti were more alike than they might seem. “They are similar in their dependence on food that is grown and shipped form other places,” she told me. “It was then that I realized how critical it is for people to be able to grow their own food. There should be models for urban farming designed to produce sufficient yields to feed people in their neighborhoods and throughout the city.”
So Bryant founded Project EATS, an art project-cum-social justice program that uses urban agriculture as its primary medium.
More on Linda Goode Bryant and Project EATS here.
