For Black Communities, These Gardens Double as Sites of Healing
Projects including Theaster Gates’s “Black Chapel” and the Bay Area’s Black Sanctuary Gardens show how green spaces can offer comfort and care.
July 5, 2022
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For time immemorial gardens have served as spaces for rest, reflection, and communion with the natural world. But in today’s political climate, with its heightened confrontations of longstanding structural and historical inequality and racism, some gardens—created by and for Black communities—are now serving another, even more necessary and vital purpose: as valuable, active hubs for addressing certain imbalances and injustices, connecting with neighbors, and fostering community. As garden designer and landscape ethicist Benjamin Vogt has written, “Ultimately, every garden is an ideology.”
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