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San Francisco, à l’ouest d’Éden

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Sophie Vallas
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Richard Phelan
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Sylvie Mathé
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et al.

Culture et société

Growing Public Art from Urban History

Amy Franceschini’s Victory Gardens Project

Meredith Tromble

Résumé

« Comment transformer l’histoire urbaine en art public : Amy Franceschini et les Victory Gardens de San Francisco »

Réunissant art conceptuel, technologie numérique et jardinage, le « Victory Garden Project » initié par Amy Franceschini est une oeuvre qui prend comme champ d’intervention toute la ville de San Francisco. Pour l’artiste, il s’agit d’une « utopie devenue réalisation-pilote qui transforme en zone de production alimentaire jardin-avant, arrière-cour, bac-à-fenêtre, toit et espace urbain en friche ». Tout en analysant le réseau symbolique incarné par les objets créés pour le projet, l’article de Meredith Tromble situe le travail de Franceschini dans le contexte des jardins patriotes en temps de guerre et aussi de l’histoire plus récente de la révolution technologique de San Francisco.

Texte intégral

  • 1 Futurefarmers Web site, Project page, http://www.futurefarmers.com/projects/victorygardens. Accesse (...)

1The Victory Gardens Project combines conceptual art, digital technology, and hands-on gardening in an urban intervention that is unfolding throughout the city of San Francisco. The artist who initiated the project, Amy Franceschini, describes it on her Web site as “a utopian proposal [that] has now become a pilot project that supports the transition of backyard, front yard, window boxes, rooftops and unused land into food production areas.” The mission of this dream-coming-true is “creating and supporting a citywide network of urban farmers by 1) growing, distributing and supporting home gardens, 2) educating through lessons, exhibitions and web sites, and 3) planting demonstration gardens in highly visible public lands; gardens at city hall, schools and Golden Gate Park1.”

2Even the name of the project is growing. It is currently referred to as Victory Gardens 2009+ (VG2009+); the name has been updated each year from its introduction in 2007 as “Victory Gardens 2007+.” In combining a phrase with slightly musty historical associations with an up-to-date counter, the title captures something essential about the work. Franceschini has put urban history to work in an effort to change the present.

The artist and her times

3Franceschini is a native Californian; she was born into a farming family in Patterson, the “Apricot Capital of the World.” But her art practice has been intimately connected with the history of San Francisco. This paper examines two aspects of the relationship between the city and the artist: the way in which the city’s recent history provided the necessary conditions for Franceschini’s distinctive interdisciplinary, collaborative art practice to emerge, and the use of stories and images from the history of San Francisco to frame the current project.

4The words “public art” might bring to mind a bronze statue standing in the center of an urban plaza, keeping alive the memory of an important civic figure. Like such a statue, the Victory Gardens project has a meaning rooted in the city’s past. But it is made of actions and earth and sited in back yards as well as plazas. The original Victory Gardens were planted during World Wars I and II, in response to appeals for citizens to grow their own food in order to reduce shortages. (Fig. 1) San Francisco is a compact and densely populated city, yet during World War II San Francisco’s victory garden program was one of the most successful in the country. According to historian Laura J. Lawson, there were over 250 garden plots in Golden Gate Park alone; Victory Gardens produced up to 41 percent of all the vegetables on San Franciscans’ tables. (181)

5But by the 1990s, as the “digital revolution” swept San Francisco, Victory gardens were a distant, unremarked part of the past. Unlike in Britain, where public allotments kept small-scale urban food production alive, American food gardeners had little public presence. Citizens with first-hand memories of the 1940s were of the age to retire from public life, and the ethos of the times was forward-looking, towards the future promised by the new technologies pouring out of the area’s start-ups, universities and industrial research centers: networked personal computers, mobile computing and telephonics, and the World Wide Web.

6Key-elements of these technologies were developed in the San Francisco Bay Area, particularly in and around Stanford University, a hub of technological innovation since the 1950s. The area had an established base of computer industries: Apple, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and many other high-tech companies were headquartered in the area. When the Internet became available to the public in the mid-1990s, many people with the ideas and expertise to develop it were in the Bay Area. Among the new wave of companies they launched were eBay, launched by a programmer who had worked with Apple in 1995, and Google, which started as a class project by two Stanford students and was incorporated in 1998. Investors were eager to get into business on the Internet—into “dot-coms”—and in the latter years of the decade the new Internet sector boomed. Describing this time for the magazine Art in America, Stephanie Cash wrote: “The 1990s belonged to San Francisco, epicenter of the dot-com frenzy that held the nation in its grasp. The city was flush with new wealth and a bottomless well of optimism.” (46

7Franceschini graduated from San Francisco State University, with a degree in photography, early in the decade. As a young artist in need of employment, she interned at a photography magazine and was given the opportunity to design a related Website in 1994. (The protocols that became the World Wide Web were written in 1990, so this was very early in the history of the medium.) @tlas Magazine, as the Web site she designed was called, established Franceschini’s reputation. The graphics were distinctive: playful, decorative, and often pastel; always constructed with a sophisticated use of color. @tlas offered an about-face for the computer screens of the world which had hitherto featured no-nonsense walls of green text on a black ground.

8As companies raced to create a presence on the World Wide Web, Franceschini started getting calls to do design work for big corporate clients such as Nike and Hewlett Packard. Describing this time, Franceschini told an interviewer, “It was a time of phones ringing off the hook, head-hunters hunting us down, and money being thrown at the most ridiculous projects. While this was all exciting and lucrative, I felt my soul slowly melting and needed a creative channel.

  • 2 Thunder Chunky Design & Illustration Portal, “Farming for the Future with Amy Franceschini,” posted (...)

9I started Futurefarmers as an online space for testing out new ideas and technologies that corporate clients just could not swallow2.”

10At its founding in 1995, Futurefarmers had little to do with food production. Rather, it was a fluctuating collective of artists, designers, educators, and programmers centered around Franceschini. “Farming” was a surprising metaphor for a digital enterprise. The area’s computer businesses had been paving over prime agricultural land to build their new facilities since the 1950s. Literally and figuratively, the tech industry seemed to replace farming, not encourage it. But Franceschini saw a different kind of potential in the tools she was using, the possibility to apply them to making art that was socially, politically, and environmentally conscious. She wanted to integrate new technologies into art to “cultivate sustainable, soulful lives.”

11With her collaborators, who changed according to the needs of the project, Franceschini tackled such diverse activities as a kinetic installation with movement controlled by traffic data streaming live from the Internet, an interactive computer game based on a thumbprint, and public workshops that propose alternative social and economic systems. The Web site www.futurefarmers.com served as public face for the collective and an organizing tool. In a context where the emphasis was on using the Web to promote competition and consumption, Futurefarmers used the Web to promote community and sustainability. The art projects could be funded, in part, by the Web design business Franceschini was bringing in.

  • 3 Rising Tide Conference Web site, Speakers page, http://risingtideconference.org/speakers.html. Acce (...)

12Then the dot-com bubble burst. The Nasdaq, the electronic exchange that primarily trades technology stocks, fell precipitously. Companies began to fold. No one was throwing money at any kind of project any more. Franceschini took the opportunity to go back to school, to Stanford University, earning a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 2002. The same year, a Futurefarmers project was included in the prestigious Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Franceschini has continued to work with Futurefarmers as a multi-faceted interface through which she organizes her art practice and conducts design projects. In another variation on the agricultural metaphor, she recently described herself as a “pollinator working in various media trying to understand the cultural perception of conflict between humans and nature3.”

Victory Gardens

13Historical photographs of San Francisco’s 1940s war gardens provided a bit of the “pollen” that Franceschini has transported from one setting to another to fertilize her work. Such war gardens were planted across the country starting in 1942, when the diversion of resources to the troops fighting World War II led to nationwide food rationing and government-sponsored propaganda campaigns encouraging citizens to grow their own produce. By 1943, these campaigns were so successful that 20 million gardens were producing 8 million tons of food a year. San Francisco’s victory program included gardens in every park and gardens replacing the lawn at San Francisco City Hall.

14Explaining the contemporary relevance of these gardens, Franceschini notes that:

  • 4 Victory Gardens Web site, History page, http://www.sfvictorygardens.org/history.html. Accessed June (...)

The war era victory gardens were a tangible way for San Francisco residents to participate in the most pressing issue of the time—supporting our country’s role in the world war. We feel the most pressing needs today are to respond to the social and ecological crisis that San Franciscans and all urban residents face—the challenge of creating more self reliant, ecologically sound, and socially just urban human habitat... [in this project] Victory is defined as “self-reliance, community involvement, independence from corporate food systems and getting people closer to the natural environment4.

In 2006, Franceschini received an award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoMA) that included a small grant to make new work for an exhibition. Combined with funding from Futurefarmers and the Fleishhacker Foundation, this grant seeded the contemporary Victory Gardens project, which began with a trio of gardens created for the show at the museum, then received continuing funding from the City of San Francisco. The exhibition at SFMoMA in early 2007 combined historic photos, documentation of planting the new gardens, and sculptural tools that gave the project symbolic force.

15In the first stage of the project, between October 2006 and April 2007, three gardens were given away, each to a household in one of three microclimates: sun belt, transition belt, and fog belt. (Although the city is small geographically, only seven miles square, the coastal location and hilly terrain combine to create several distinct climate zones within city limits.) In good digital-era fashion, the households were selected based on an ad posted on Craigslist. The ad was posted on October 10 at midnight; by 9: 30 am on October 11th more than 800 responses had been received.

16In choosing the garden recipients, more than climatic diversity was considered; the final sites were selected with an eye to representing the diverse human cultures of San Francisco. The fog belt garden went to a family of Asian heritage, the transition-zone garden to a family with Jewish heritage, and the sun belt garden to a neighborhood group that serves the African American population. Each group of gardeners received a “starter kit” containing bags of fresh soil, a flat of young plants, and fertilizers, plus a drip irrigation system with a solar powered water timer, and raised bed materials with copper tape to protect plants from snails. The kit was delivered via a human-powered “garden trike;” the plantings were community-building events with neighbors invited by handbills posted around the neighborhood. The Futurefarmers team provided expert assistance with the planting and follow-up advice.

17The City of San Francisco’s Department for the Environment funded the next stage of the project in 2008, with a $60,000 subsidy managed through the Garden for the Environment, a Haight-Ashbury neighborhood group. Fifteen more gardens were established, and Franceschini also curated a Victory Garden at City Hall, of which more below. While each garden is important, the numbers are small in comparison to the citywide effort of the 1940s. But the project continues to spread through a Web site designed by Franceschini and hosted by Futurefarmers, www.sfvictorygardens.org; a book by Franceschini, Victory Gardens 2007+ published in 2008 by Gallery 16 Editions; and international exhibitions. In addition to the SFMoMA exhibition, the documentation, starter kits, posters, and sculptural implements have been shown at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, Canada and the Center for Contemporary Culture in Florence, Italy. The widest impact of Victory Gardens 2009+ is symbolic and inspirational.

Past and present

18In Victory Gardens 2009+, Franceschini both mirrored the historic Victory Gardens and transmuted their symbolism, redefining “Victory” as creating sustainable urban culture by reducing CO2 emissions, saving seeds, establishing independence from corporate food systems, and organizing neighborhoods. As with the 1940s project, printed posters alerted the public and solicited their participation. However, these posters had the imprimatur of an artist, not the government. Adopting a visual form that had patriotic associations challenged the notion that Bush era values of greed and aggression were “American” values and proposed instead a return to American values of self-sufficiency and community action. The need to conserve resources depleted by war became the need to conserve resources depleted by global climate change and a growing human population.

19The project Web site could be seen as a sort of contemporary poster, reaching a global neighborhood. (Fig. 2) Franceschini uses visual parallels throughout the site to make her philosophical point. Each page is headed with a photograph overlaid with the slogan “All Out Food Production!” and the name of the project. On pages discussing history, Franceschini uses images of 1940s Victory Gardens at iconic San Francisco locations such as City Hall and Golden Gate Park. Pages with information on contemporary gardens feature the same layout, but with images of people working together to plant the new gardens. Rolling over each opening reveals a key statement and lights up the “+” sign in the title, emphasizing the ongoing nature of the project. The verbal and visual language of the site is infused with calls to action, just as the 1940s posters exhorted citizens to plant with vivid symbols and direct appeals.

20The physical implements Franceschini designed included the Garden Trike mentioned earlier, created in collaboration with Paul Cesewski, and the Pogo Shovel. Food was not the only resource that was rationed in war time: rubber and gasoline were also in short supply, which led to “Victory Bikes” made of non-essential metals and recycled rubber tires. So the Garden Trike is another mirroring of the past. While sturdy, it has the look of an invented, home-made contraption. The seat and back wheel are from a normal, adult-size bike, but they are fronted by a large wooden box—big enough to carry a starter garden—with its own wheels on the side and and a little “training” wheel poking out in front. The two parts are secured together with a zig-zagging metal shaft and the frame is also fitted with hooks to carry rolled hoses. Should a rider encounter a hill too steep for their thigh power—a not uncommon occurrence in San Francisco—he or she can dismount, detach the cart, throw the back wheel on top, and push the whole thing to the top. As brought into play by Futurefarmers, this unusual object plays a key role in the planting ceremony. Each starter kit journeyed from City Hall, the symbol of civic power and unity and site of a prominent 1940s garden, to the recipient household on this trike. Each journey made a symbolic break with the unsustainable use of fossil fuels in food production, provided living proof of the efficacy of “human power,” and created moments of humor and glee as the trike caught the attention of passers-by.

21Once at the garden, the bouncy Pogo Shovel (Fig. 3) might come into play. The shovel was also a 1940s icon. One widely distributed poster featured a shovel descending from the sky towards a bifurcated landscape that was furrowed field on the left and wavy water on the right. The implied scale of the shovel was huge; it was cropped so that from a distance the shape could also be interpreted as a battleship (a bit of visible shovel handle standing in for a smokestack). Printed across the blade was the slogan “Use spades, not ships.” The poster also enjoined the citizen to “Grow your own food and supply your own cookhouse.” For her version, Franceschini used a real shovel but replaced the shaft with a pogo-stick spring. The kinetic rightness of this combination, which suggests that the rhythm and motion of labor is equivalent to the rhythm and motion of fun, is remarkable. Child-like imagery has been prevalent in Franceschini’s work since her early forays into Web design, but it has never been more effective than in these two implements. Their fantastic quality embodies the enthusiasm that Franceschini hopes the project will release, lifting gardening above the sphere of duty into the sphere of play.

Growing public

22Franceschini is not alone, of course, in advocating for locally grown food, sustainable agriculture, and community action. Rather, her Victory Gardens project flows into a swelling current of people, projects, and organizations with similar aims. In July 2008, she was invited to create a Victory Garden in front of San Francisco’s City Hall for a major Slow Food Nation gathering, This garden recreated, in spirit if not in precise form, the 1940s garden at the city center. Although it was originally scheduled to exist only through the run of the festival (the gardeners created temporary beds, banking them with soil in burlap bags) it was so popular its run was extended and it was in place for three months, through September, 2008.

23Over 85,000 people participated in the Victory Garden and other Slow Food Nation events including a farmers’ market, a food bazaar, workshops and lectures. More than 1,000 pounds of organic food were harvested from the Civic Center and donated to needy people through a partnership with the San Francisco Food Bank. Among the people who worked in the garden were San Francisco’s Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was photographed high-fiving his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, with hands covered in garden mud. Thus the use of symbolic imagery to reinforce a virtuous circle of collective activism and food production traveled from the Futurefarmers’s studio to the political elite of San Francisco.

Victory Gardens 2009+ in context

24Victory Gardens 2009+ weaves material from several cultural trends into an image web that captures an important aspect of the city’s culture today: activism in response to climate change. Franceschini’s work entwines images of the citizen farmer, human-powered transport, and enjoyable work within a matrix of community engagement; each of these images connects with a contemporary trend in the life of the city.

  • 5 Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association Web site, “A Brief History of PCFMA,” http://www.pcfma.co (...)

25The back yard gardens are an extreme form of dedication to eating seasonally available, locally grown food, a trend that has fueled the growth of farmers markets in the area (fifty state-certified markets have been established in Bay Area communities since 19775) and the labeling of fresh foods in markets and restaurants with information regarding their origin. Food critic Michael Bauer, ranking the ten most important developments in Bay Area food culture over the past decade for the San Francisco Chronicle on December 31, 2009, cited burgeoning availability of “sustainable, organic, and local” foods.

  • 6 San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Web site, Home Page, http://www.sfbike.org/?btwd. Accessed January  (...)
  • 7 Richard Madden, “London: How Cyclists around the World Put a Spoke in the Motorist’s Wheel,” The Da (...)

26The emphasis on locally grown produce derives from greater awareness of the costs in fossil fuels for long-distance transportation of food; it is only one of the many concerns that have been raised about petroleum culture leading to a surge of interest in human-powered transportation. Despite the hilly geography, San Francisco has been an epicenter of bicycle activism, with groups such as the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition exerting steady pressure on the city to add bike lanes and organizing Bike to Work days6. The bike ride Critical Mass started in San Francisco in 1992 as a loosely organized monthly ride to assert the right of bicyclists to the streets. It has since spread to over 300 communities internationally7.

27In concert with these developments, a new work culture spread through technology startups, which regarded a playful attitude at work as part of a culture of innovation. The most famous example is Google, which encourages employees to spend twenty percent of their time working on a project of their own choice and provides games, talks, and other recreational opportunities in the workplace. Assistant Professor of Business at Utah Valley University Jonathan H. Westover writes that, “As is the case with many other young start-up tech firms, Google promotes worker creativity and innovation, job autonomy, cooperation and the sharing of knowledge through open communication and positive employer-employee and coworker relations, and an overall laid back work atmosphere.” (151) In this context, the Pogo Shovel could be seen as symbolizing a positive relationship between work and play that goes far beyond the garden.

28After three years and as of this writing, Victory Gardens 2009+ is still a work in progress; other collaborations may emerge in the future. But with the return of the Victory Garden to City Hall, Franceschini created in living color a work of public art that uses San Francisco’s history to grow the city’s present.

Fig. 1: Robert Gwathney, Plant A Victory Garden: Our Food Is Fighting (1943), Designed for the Office of
Government Reports. United States Information Service. Division of Public Inquiry.
Bureau of Special Services, OWI
(Image in the public domain under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code).

Fig. 2: Futurefarmers, Screenshot, Victory Gardens 2008 + Web site (used by permission of the artist).

Fig. 3: Amy Franceschini, Pogo Shovel, 2007 (Used by permission of the artist).

Bibliographie

Works cited

Cash Stephanie, “Report from San Francisco,” Art in America, November 1, 2002.

Lawson Laura J., City Bountiful: A Century of Community Gardens, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2005.

Madden Richard, “London: How cyclists around the world put a spoke in the motorist’s wheel,” The Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.com.uk/travel/729324/London-How-cyclists-around-the-world-put-a-spoke-in-the-motorists-wheel.html. Accessed January 4, 2010.

Westover, Jonathan H., “Impacts of a Changing Global Economy on work Organizations: A Neo and Post-Fordist Look at General Motors and Google Inc.,” Journal of International Management Studies, February 2008.

Websites

Futurefarmers Web site, Project page, http://www.futurefarmers.com/projects/victorygardens. Accessed June 29, 2009.

Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association Web site, “A Brief History of PCFMA,” http://www.pcfma.com/abhistory.php.Accessed January 4, 2010.

Rising Tide Conference Web site, Speakers page, http://risingtideconference.org/speakers.html. Accessed June 29, 2009

San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Web site, Home Page, http://www.sfbike.org/?btwd. Accessed January 4, 2010.

Thunder Chunky Design & Illustration Portal, “Farming for the Future with Amy Franceschini,” posted online October 11, 2005, http://www.thunderchunky.co.uk/articles/farming-for-the-future-with-amy-franceschini. Accessed June 29, 2009.

Victory Gardens Web site, History page, http://www.sfvictorygardens.org/history.html. Accessed June 29, 2009.

Notes

1 Futurefarmers Web site, Project page, http://www.futurefarmers.com/projects/victorygardens. Accessed June 29, 2009.

2 Thunder Chunky Design & Illustration Portal, “Farming for the Future with Amy Franceschini,” posted online October 11, 2005, http://www.thunderchunky.co.uk/articles/farming-for-the-future-with-amy-franceschini. Accessed June 29, 2009.

3 Rising Tide Conference Web site, Speakers page, http://risingtideconference.org/speakers.html. Accessed June 29, 2009.

4 Victory Gardens Web site, History page, http://www.sfvictorygardens.org/history.html. Accessed June 29, 2009.

5 Pacific Coast Farmers’ Market Association Web site, “A Brief History of PCFMA,” http://www.pcfma.com/abhistory.php.Accessed January 4, 2010.

6 San Francisco Bicycle Coalition Web site, Home Page, http://www.sfbike.org/?btwd. Accessed January 4, 2010.

7 Richard Madden, “London: How Cyclists around the World Put a Spoke in the Motorist’s Wheel,” The Daily Telegraph, http://www.telegraph.com.uk/travel/729324/London-How-cyclistsaround-the-world-put-a-spoke-in-the-motorists-wheel.html. Accessed January 4, 2010.

Table des illustrations

Légende Fig. 1: Robert Gwathney, Plant A Victory Garden: Our Food Is Fighting (1943), Designed for the Office ofGovernment Reports. United States Information Service. Division of Public Inquiry.Bureau of Special Services, OWI(Image in the public domain under the terms of Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 105 of the US Code).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pup/docannexe/image/21629/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 71k
Légende Fig. 2: Futurefarmers, Screenshot, Victory Gardens 2008 + Web site (used by permission of the artist).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pup/docannexe/image/21629/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 81k
Légende Fig. 3: Amy Franceschini, Pogo Shovel, 2007 (Used by permission of the artist).
URL http://books.openedition.org/pup/docannexe/image/21629/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 20k

Auteur

San Francisco Art Institute

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