99 Acres of Land
Zoe Scruggs is building a Historically Black Art School to help us plant our own futures
A Beat Tape About White Women (Video Still, 2019)
[Layered black and white images of the artist’s body making different dance poses inside of a room]
Making the commitment to keep something alive right now is a radical act. The choice to breathe, to cultivate, to attain ownership and assert care--these are simple gestures that feel that hardest to achieve when we’re now seven months into a year plagued by collective loss. My one house plant, which I jokingly named Kylie Jenner, has stubbornly survived under my aid for nearly nine months. I was a self declared plant killer in college, and as someone who was raised working class in big cities, my knowledge for plant life has always been very limited : I can identify Ginkgo Trees by their smell and properly pick out ripe fruit at the grocery store, and that’s about it. If you’re like me, Zoe Scruggs would advise you to keep trying.
In between running a book club and holding a multidisciplinary art practice, Zoe tends to her own garden at her parent’s home in Delaware-- a place where she was raised having mud fights with siblings and watching trees grow in the backyard. She was raised by parents who loved watching HGTV and landscaping. Despite the family’s shared relationship to plant care and being outdoors, her own desires to explore farming didn’t come into play until she left home for college. “My dad told me and my siblings this story about how his family had this huge plot of land, and his great great grandfather or something was a sharecropper. He was that sharecropper in Virginia or somewhere. He had like 99 acres of land, and then the family was fighting over it. They just gave it away because it was causing too much family tension”.
While taking a class at Brown University called, “Race, Gender, Ethics and Environmental Justice”, Zoe became interested in further investigating her family history. More importantly, she was interested in exploring the outside pressures that would push Black people to fight over a resource like land. After falling short on Google search attempts to find her grandfather’s farm, her professor advised her to research stories centering Black women farmers. “I discovered Soul Fire Farm and other farm projects where Black women are at the forefront and being like, ‘We're trying to reclaim land. We're also trying to create alternative systems or communities to exist in because of racism and all this other shit’’. By engaging specifically with Black farming communities, Zoe was introduced to an intersectional framework that was actively working to dismantle structures of capitalism and systemic oppression. Today, Zoe is applying her knowledge from these spaces and her own history into practice as an artist, farmer, and educator. Last summer she led a workshop for BUFU’s WYFY School called “Fruiting Bodies : Black Labor in Art & Agriculture”. Her virtual book club for “Freedom Farmers : Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement” is currently taking place through Brioxy.
Zoe’s great (great?) grandparents, Zealia and Thomas.
[A drawing of two people standing next to each other in yellow, green, blue, and red hues]
[A a black and white photograph of two people standing next to each other. ]
🌴 : Why is it important for Black people to develop a positive relationship to land and plant growing?
I think it's two things: The first is that farming and gardening is so healing for me, and I get so fucking happy doing it. There have been so many times, even like this summer, where I've been taking care of my own little garden. It's been the first time where I've been in charge of picking out the seeds, planting the seeds, starting the seeds, transplanting them, growing them. It's like a 3% success rate for me, but it's been so healing and brings me so much joy. I think that it satisfies my absurd amount of Virgo placements. There've been so many times where I've been so frustrated and pissed about something, and I’m like “Hmph! I’m gonna go outside”. I'm weeding, and as soon as I touch the dirt, I forget. Like, I'm just happy. There was a day where I found out that if you just allow broccoli to keep growing, it'll flower. Like all the little heads of broccoli will turn into flowers. I shed one tear and was like, “What the fuck is wrong with me? I love farming so much. Plants are so cool”. It's just fucked up being alive, so something that is that powerful and can overcome your body with joy -- I think that's important to at least figure out if it also works for you
And then part two: I think that [farming] is super vital if you are trying to think about Black liberation and what it means to try to exist within all the current systems as well trying to create something outside of it, and then dreaming up the next world that people could live in. It's just better for all people who are currently oppressed. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King both pointed out the significance of land ownership to Black liberation. Political movements, and a lot of civil rights shit that happened was in tandem with people who were owning land. That is the point of the book [“Freedom Farmers”], which is why that's at the top of my head. A lot of people who are thinking about how we fix the world are thinking about land, so I think that it's important for other people to be engaged with their relationship to land. So much of the trauma that black people experience are related to land, like slavery--that was about agriculture.
Garden of Oprah (2019)
[A series of three drawings in different media depicting Oprah Winfrey holding baskets of harvested food]
🌴 : This re-connecting to land seems to push beyond Black people’s previously forced relationships to agriculture during slavery. Does this work also serve as a way to reclaim these environments that hold such a traumatic history?
I would push back on the word forced because the enslaved people that were brought to America were specifically brought [and exploited] because of their knowledge of agriculture. White people weren't teaching Black people how to do agriculture or pick cotton or take care of the crops or whatever. That was already knowledge that they had even outside of slavery. Black people were using their agricultural skills to keep themselves alive and have their own gardens outside of [plantation fields]. Slavery is so confusing, and I don't know why this country is like, “We want to simultaneously kill Black people and keep them alive to do stuff for us”.
🌴 : Your artwork heavily references farming and land while also reflecting on images from pop culture and media like the NBA. What is the process behind merging all these images onto a single surface?
[“When Land Met Fate”] were sketches that became their own pieces at a time when I was making work trying to deal with this feeling of guilt and profound gratitude. It’s so difficult to be a Black person in academic art spaces and it feels like I am my parents' dream. Certain kinds of success start to frame all of Black existence in this way where it's like,“ First we were slaves, and then there's Jim Crow, and now my daughter gets to go to art school. That means so much!”. Like, just feeling that energy in my relationship to my parents and in a general relationship to what it means to be able to do something that makes me happy and to exist in my body.
When Land Met Fate (2019)
[Camera stills of a basketball game mid-match layered over images of green trees and fields]
I was thinking about my parents first date. My parents are from New York. My dad loves the Knicks, so their first date was about this basketball game. It was the Bulls versus the Knicks. My mom loves the Bulls, and they had done a bet: If the Knicks won, then my mom had to do my dad's laundry. If the Bulls won, my dad had to wash my mom's car. The Knicks won, which like now, being the daughter of somebody who loves the Knicks, it's the hardest thing to watch ever because when do the Knicks win?? So, I was just thinking about that as some moment of fate; my parents coming together and that being a step, and then the Knicks winning being a moment of fate. Whoever was the first wave in my family lineage that survived and that next person in the family line survives, and then that next person survives, and on two different sets [of families]....like somebody who was a slave and all of their descendants all survived, and then I'm just like, alive in this art space, and thinking about fate.
4th Quarter (2019)
[A work of art showing a black and white cut-out of basketball players in motion layered on top of green and blue abstract textures and images of trees]
Me being born is out of a certain story. There's also this element of basketball and all-Black teams and white team owners being its own thing. Then there's pictures of agriculture and me being Black and farming that has its own connotation to a lot of people. I'd be like, ‘Oh, I'm going to Soul Fire Farm”, then [people I know] would look up the website and see pictures of Black people working on the land, and be like, “Ooh, that reminds me of slavery”. I was just trying to think about all these different circumstances and moments, but building up to how I can even navigate this world in a certain way and what happens when I try to flatten all that time onto one surface.
🌴 : You work across a lot of different mediums in your art. Do you find yourself gravitating more towards one mode of making these days or is it always varied?
I'm drawing now but my work has a way of building into other things. There have been periods of time where I'll draw a lot and then maybe two months from now, I will scan all those drawings and make them into like a 3d space, or I'll fuck with them and make them like a video thing, but it always starts with drawing. Then that stuff gets manipulated or becomes a jumping off point for other things. I also make music and I feel like I wouldn't in the same way if I didn't draw. I really like texture and color and smearing things right off the tube, and that's just like a big part of the physical stimulation and fun part of it. I think that drawing is the first step to any future projects and I feel like none of this shit I make is ever done. And it's always gonna build into it.
🌴 : Your Instagram bio solicits Venmo donations to help you to build an Art and Agriculture School. How would you design this learning space once you secured the funds to create it? What would it look like in an ideal scenario?
For the past two years I keep talking about how I want to start a historically Black Agriculture school. I’m thinking about how fucking disparaging education was in high school and in college for being spaces that caused me a lot of harm. It would be a huge, huge, huge plot of land, and there'd be all these little buildings for people to learn different art. I'd be paying everybody to get a full ride to their Black art school of their dreams. Half of the curriculum would be about farming, half of it would be about art and how they intersect; and how gardening is a form of art, but also it's just its own thing and is valid without even being seen through the lens of art.
Farming While Black (2019)
[A drawing of a book with text that reads “Farming While Black” using a variety of blue and green marks]
I think that [the idea of a school] is just flowing through my body all the time. Like every time I get a book about farming and Black people and art, I'm saving it for this eventual art school where they'll be a shared library of books. Maybe there will be a land trust and people have their own plots of land. It’s just this utopia where people can get all the healing benefits of both art and farming in one space and I can live out my dream of being the teacher or whatever the fuck. It's interesting because that idea is also an escape. Like I'm never imagining it in a way where it's like this post-oppressive system and always the place where people are going to escape. Maybe now that next iteration has to be about trying to get the world to be that environment. That is the utopia in my head.
[A pastel drawing of a hand holding a packet of flower seeds]
The first farm I ever worked at was Harmony Homestead and Wholeness Center in Hillsdale, New York with this amazing woman, Elizabeth Blackshine, who also has the sickest last name. My best experience as an employee was working under that woman, waking up every morning, and drawing the hills. I'm trying to recreate that, and I'm indebted to that experience and my week at Soul Fire Farm doing the immersion while hearing other Black people talk about their favorite tomatoes and people saying, “this is like PoC summer camp”. These are healing spaces where people are crying and they're like, “Where am I supposed to go in the real world?” I just wish that I could have that space all the time for myself. If that means I have to build it, and build that community for other people, then that's what I'll do. But those are definitely things that are inspiring that vision, making me feel like that's possible in real life.
Zoe Scruggs can be found on Instagram and on Venmo @zoweethefarmer. You can also check out her website to see more images of her artwork.