Floating Garden, Erie Canal, Medina, NY, photo by Amanda Reis
Mary Mattingly Featured in The Observer
Agnes Denes, Mary Mattingly, Maya Lin and their peers plant eco- and climate-conscious art in civic spaces to raise questions about land, food and who has access to both.
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It’s work that naturally and intentionally blurs boundaries. Mary Mattingly’s installations have included water filtration systems and floating gardens like Swale, a barge of edible plants launched next to a concrete plant in the South Bronx in 2016. As the artist told Observer, “An activist campaign often needs a clear demand, and education generally assumes that something known is being communicated. Art can remain unresolved. It can be contradictory, symbolic, impractical, beautiful or strange. And art gives me permission to work differently. Swale, for example, wanted to make a contradiction visible: food was growing abundantly in front of you, it was freely available, and the fact that this felt unusual exposed something about how we organize public space.”