Artists invoke urban food security: Nature-based solutions when everything is imaginable

Art is an amorphous field of operations that continuously sheds revered traditions and adds unprecedented innovations. It is, therefore, primed to offer original solutions to entrenched problems, such as those associated with urban foodways. Assessing the significance of the novel forms of expression that artistic license often entails entering uncharted cultural territories, then surveying the new terrains for the insights they contain. The five contemporary artists who are featured in this essay affirm this observation. The artworks they produced bypassed traditional still lifes and rural landscapes. Instead, they interrogated the particularities of current urban foodways.

I treated these artworks to two concurrent paths of inquiry. One involved assessing the content of the artists’ urban food anxiteies and solutions. The other involved relating this content to the unconventional art strategies they employed to convey their creative food-generating initiatives. Methodology, therefore, constitutes an essential component of their creative practices. Their innovative strategies offer pragmatic solutions regarding urban food dilemmas that far exceed the cultural arena of art.

For example, although all five artists live amid urban abundance, their focus zeroed in on food insecurity. Their artworks not only expose potential shortages and citizen vulnerabilities; they also propose security-bolstering solutions. Significantly, those solutions are not vested in broad-scale systems of production and distribution. Instead, the responsibility is entrusted to individual citizens. Their artworks introduce schemes for gaining food security that are both modest and innovative. They are modest because they are scaled to individuals, neighborhoods, and communities. They are innovative because these domestically scaled initiatives offer novel nature-based urban food solutions. For this reason, the artworks discussed on the following pages could contribute to future NBS urban food approaches. Some seem suitable for scaling up. Others demonstrate the need to relax regulations that inhibit experimentation. A few might bolster broad-scale institutional policies designed to facilitate independent food production. All replace stress with confidence.