Every Row is a Garden
Alec Barrett
View Project
Every Row is a Garden is a series of data portraits depicting five community gardens in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The portraits show data from a variety of sources including the city’s open data portal, the U.S. Census, and the artist’s firsthand visits to the gardens and conversations with volunteers who tend them. The portraits use experimental graphical forms inspired by ecological and botanical shapes to visually represent qualitative and quantitative data.
When indoor spaces and close human contact present new risks and digital media consume an ever growing share of our time and attention, community gardens offer an escape outdoors to experience something local, natural, and real. Thanks to the Parks Department, land trusts, and small nonprofits, these plots resist—to our collective benefit—the tendency in NYC real estate toward privatization and profit. Community gardens, like the rest of us, contend with pests, noisy neighbors, bureaucracy, and demographic change. Most gardens have cohorts of members who pay dues, but rely on the dedicated, thankless labor of a handful of core volunteers.
The five gardens depicted in this project are just a small sample of the roughly 550 in the GreenThumb Garden dataset. Exploring the gardens and talking to the people who care for them is a delightful experience that cannot be fully captured in data or images. This project encourages New Yorkers to find comfort and community while connecting to nature, and to spend time in and volunteer with their local community gardens.