6B — Thursday, October 17, 2019
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

Climate change as an issue is abstract — we know it’s coming, 
but how many of those issues detailed in the climate report can we 
actually see, in Ann Arbor, right now? Sure, point to trends, rising 
temperatures and the melting ice caps (Iceland recently held a funeral 
for one of their melted glaciers), but has anything changed in our 
day-to-day life here that reflects any sign of climate change? Barely. 
VSCO girls may be touting their reusable straws and campus might 
have hosted a climate march, but how many red solo cups littered 
the ground the following game day? People still use single-use 
plastics, many are reluctant to even reduce their meat consumption 
and others still deny the fact that climate change even exists. But we 
know it’s coming and you’d be hard-pressed to find a scientist who 
disagrees with that fact. 
Beyond the statistics, social media has made it increasingly easy 
to feel like you care about climate change without actually doing 
anything of substance. Being able to like or reshare a story about the 
effects of climate change has made it dangerously easy to passively 
watch the world fall to flames, especially as we sit in a sheltered 
university town in Michigan. Let’s also keep in mind that our state, 
with its access to the lakes we know and love, has been deemed one 
of the better places to reside as our climate becomes more and more 
unpredictable. Pure Michigan is sounding pretty great right about 
now. None of this is to say that it’s entirely up to the individual to 
tackle climate crisis — we know it’s a systemic issue stemming from 
the roots of capitalism, but surely there is something we can do. 
Aside from calling your representatives and other forms of 
political climate activism, one of the first steps, and something we 
should all come back to from time to time, is to put ourselves in a 
situation where we can understand what we have to lose. Ignoring the 
imminent societal collapse that will come hand in hand with climate 
change is dangerous. And what is happening to the actual Earth? 
The coral is dying in Australia and the Amazon is burning in Brazil 
(though that was less climate change and more poor leadership), and 
those are both incredibly important, but when people don’t ever plan 
on visiting either of those places anytime soon, this removed feeling 
has the potential to manifest as apathy. Michigan has some gorgeous 
places to visit to combat this phenomenon, but if you don’t feel like 
driving the four hours to get to Sleeping Bear Dunes, the University’s 
botanical gardens are a one-stop shop for all your climate-apathy 
assuaging needs. 
Located right off of Dixboro road, the Matthaei Botanical Gardens 
are an Ann Arbor staple. This hidden University gem boasts gorgeous 
scenery and houses an absolutely adorable collection of Bonsai trees. 
But what sets the gardens apart and helps connect their patrons to 
the realities of climate change around them is the art exhibits that 
decorate the halls of the visitor’s center and continue throughout the 
gardens. According to the garden’s mission statement and the Public 
Events Coordinator, Alexis Ford, the art exhibits at the gardens are 
meant to “develop a strong connection with the audience in a means 
to foster enjoyment, stewardship, and sustainability.” Impressive 
words, but what does that actually look like? 
As you walk through the gardens, the art becomes apparent. The 
entrance of the Gateway Garden was commissioned to commemorate 
the Ann Arbor Garden Club’s 75th anniversary in 2005 and, walking 
deeper into the complex, you stumble upon gorgeous fountains 
surrounded by insane bursts of colorful flowers. Trees loom in the 
distance, and if you visit in October like I did, the leaves have turned 
from summer greens to vibrant reds, oranges and yellows. Seeing 
the art, surrounded by various plants, evokes a calming feeling. In a 
phone interview with The Daily, Ford spoke to how these pieces are 
chosen and their purpose within the gardens. 
Ford explained that artists can be commissioned to create 
something for the gardens, or come up with and pitch their own 

ideas. Once approved, the art is put up in the gardens and its visitor 
center, which Ford described as a “non-traditional gallery space,” — 
a fitting arena for an organization dealing with the non-traditional 
problem of emotionally connecting people to climate change. In 
thinking about the role of the gardens in combating an indifference 
toward climate change, Ford pointed out that, when selecting the art, 
she’s not looking for “a pretty picture on the wall.” She emphasized 
the importance of instilling a feeling of “why” — why is the garden 
important to visitors? Why are these pieces of art specifically here, 
at the gardens? Eventually, she wants the art to prompt people to 
consider what their role is in this precarious environment. 
The fountains, the gates and the other permanent exhibits, 
however, aren’t all that Matthaei has to offer. Ford talked about the 
importance of working with people in and around the community to 
create opportunities in which visitors can experience art in different 
ways through the Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Take, for example, 
Metthaei’s collaboration with the Center for World Performance 
Studies this past March. Composer Raven Chacon brought “The 
Living Earth Show” to the gardens and performed an engaging 
piece exploring “the urgent but approaching crisis of water shortage 
burdening the region from California to the Navajo deserts.”
“(Art is) not a two-dimensional painting on a wall — it is an 
immersive experience. So, art can often involve video aspects of 
dance or theatrical aspects,” Ford said. 
Ford also mentioned that in the future, Matthaei is trying to 
further the experience of developing art that has a strong connection 
with nature but also “exploring what that means for the particular 
artist.” Matthaei is currently accepting submissions for their 
latest community exhibit surrounding our micro environment and 
challenging our existing views of nature from the human perspective. 
It’s an exhibit meant to explore nature as if we were the small things 
living in it — the bees and the birds and everything in between. 
After visiting Matthaei, I started wondering what goes behind 
creating a garden itself. Once you’ve come to terms with the 
overwhelming “eco-anxiety” that seems to plague our generation, 
it becomes increasingly clear that there are ways to give back to 
your environment in meaningful ways. This past summer, I spent an 
absurd amount of my time scrolling through gardens on Instagram, 
watching as people built the gardens of my dreams. As someone 
whose green thumb is a little more on the brown side, I decided it 
would be beneficial to talk to someone about it. 
In a phone interview with The Daily, Lindsay Wilkinson, a 2002 
alum of the University’s School of Social Work and an avid gardener, 
talked about getting her garden 
started and the nuances behind 
creating 
a 
mini 
botanical 
garden at her home. Aside 
from how beautiful the flowers 
were, the most intriguing thing 
about the garden was the large 
amount of wildlife that seemed 
to always be present. From 
her Instagram, it would seem 
that this was because she had 
decided to make it a butterfly 
garden, 
planting 
specific 
plants meant to attract certain 
butterflies, like milkweed, the 
preferred snack of monarch 
butterflies. 
“When (my family) first 
moved into (the) house, the 
former owners were really into 
trying to establish more native 
species onto the property. And, 
honestly, that was a concept 
that I had not really looked 

at. Why would you plant plants that were meant to be in your area 
versus plants that were ornamental and were considered pretty by 
your big box stores?” 
Wilkinson’s family has always had a vegetable garden in their 
backyard, but this new garden was a product of observing the nature 
around her. “Living the first summer in our garden and just having 
this huge bank of native coneflower growing on the back side of our 
house, all I had to do was step back into our backyard to be witness 
to the fact that … these echinacea are covered with butterflies,” 
Wilkinson said.
The concept of growing native plants isn’t necessarily a 
revolutionary thing to do — once you really think about it, it’s just 
common sense. But that doesn’t make it any less intriguing. 
“Planting native is a neat idea because it’s just going to enhance 
and perpetuate and support what’s meant to be there,” Wilkinson 
said. As a result, her garden and lawn has remained pesticide free. 
She has to contend with certain bugs, like aphids, invading her 
garden, but she advises that if you’re planting things that attract 
ladybugs (a natural aphid predator), then nature, not pesticides, does 
the work for you.
Not only does the garden provide a summer haven, but as 
Wilkinson prepares to get ready for Michigan’s winter, it also creates 
a home for the bugs to stay when the cold hits. While her vegetables 
go into the house, her coneflowers to stay outside and become hollow 
— the perfect home for caterpillars and other bugs to spend the 
colder months. 
The garden has proven to be a community staple. She voiced her 
concerns about having such a prominent garden (Wilkinson counted 
nine neighboring homes that could see straight into the garden). But 
she needn’t have worried. The garden prompted her to have more 
conversations with her neighbors in one summer than in the other 
three summers that she lived in the house. 
Art is just as much of a dynamic concept as climate change, though 
a little less threatening, and the different ways we interact with it can 
affect how we choose to cope with things as scary as a climate crisis. 
For some, gardening is just as much an art as creating a sculpture 
or writing an opera. Creating a diverse, sustainable garden offers 
insight into what it means to be a part of this world. We should move 
towards ways of artistic expression that allow us to understand the 
environment and our local ecosystems better as a whole. While our 
long-term goal of overthrowing capitalism looms in the distance, we 
can find ways to subvert the system and give back to the environment 
by actively questioning our relationship with the world around us.

Weed it out: Gardening to understand the environment

EMMA CHANG
Senior Arts Editor

B-SIDE: SECONDARY

ALEXIS RANKIN / DAILY

It is difficult to describe an archetypal day in the life of Antonio Rafael. In 
his teens, he was commuting from Detroit, his hometown, to a private high 
school in the suburbs. He attended college at Eastern Michigan University, 
where he studied economics. After Detroit filed for bankruptcy and was 
subjected to state intervention, Rafael became increasingly vocal as an 
activist and artist in his community. Most recently, he has devoted the bulk of 
his time and energy to environmental anti-racism and activism and has taken 
on a variety of roles in the process, including outdoor educator, urban farmer 
and beekeeper.
Needless to say, Rafael has worn an overwhelming number of hats, but it 
seems that this process of constant evolution is part and parcel of the life of 
an activist. How else can we expect our leaders to keep leading, amid ever-
mounting burdens of historical oppression and ever-increasing awareness of 
all the insidious ways that structures of oppression likewise evolve and adapt? 
On the subject of his personal evolution into environmental activism, 
Rafael described a parallel development he’s seen in his approach as an 
activist. 
“Changing people’s consciousness is beautiful and rewarding. I love to see 
the analysis and thought of people around me grow and evolve and change, 
but like, I also want to do something tangible, you know?” said Rafael in an 
interview with The Daily. He then went on to describe “Southwest Grows,” 
the community farm he has started behind his house in Detroit, with hopes of 
someday turning it into a market garden.

Rafael is not alone in these efforts to push for the adaptation of agricultural 
practices outside of rural environments. His native Detroit is becoming a hub 
for the nationwide urban farming movement. Farms like Rafael’s are part of 
grassroots campaigns for “food sovereignty” in marginalized communities, 
which seek to reclaim control of the local food system. To that end, Rafael 
has other projects lined up as well. This semester, he is partnering with 
the National Wildlife Federation on a program with an ambitious goal: 
to “create the next generation of environmental and conservation leaders 
from communities that are most impacted by environmental racism.” This 
program will take the form of after-school workshops in three Detroit high 
schools and will feature both indoor and outdoor curriculums in order to 
promote historical, community-based and pragmatic knowledge of the 
environment.
Rafael’s work seems inextricable from the city of Detroit and the metro 
area. Many of his environmental projects of his are literally rooted in 
the city’s soil, and his street art from years prior is often anchored to said 
streets, appearing as murals and graffiti on the facades of buildings and 
even, infamously, on a water tower overlooking Highland Park. Despite this 
rootedness, throughout our conversation Rafael also vigilantly drew parallels 
between Detroit’s situation and those of other communities, historically and 
transnationally. In fact, Rafael described this global consciousness as one of 
the positive markers of modern-day activism. 
“We need to be specializing and working on specific issues within various 
issue communities, but we also need to be looking at the interconnection 
of issues, and I think that’s another thing that’s really unique about our 
generation and something we’re growing and learning through,” Rafael said.
Every so often, his responses to questions would reverberate in ways that 
confirmed this conviction. This 
was particularly resonant when 
Rafael was discussing the colonial 
critique often at the center of his 
artwork, both in the United States 
and Latin America. 
“Everyone’s talking about the 
Amazon forests burning, and 
they’re like, ‘That’s the world’s 
lungs!’ — but the world’s lungs 
were here, too,” Rafael observed, 
in a statement that lived at 
the 
intersection 
between 
his 
community and something larger, 
something interconnected and 
infinite.
In that way, he reminded me 
of other activists who fought for 
change in Detroit throughout their 
lives, like the late Grace Lee and 
Jimmy Boggs, and the still-active 
Tawana Petty. In fact, Rafael had 
attended the latter’s birthday 
party a few weeks prior to our 

interview. And while Rafael spoke with admiration for the work of the Boggs 
and their legacy, he spoke at length and with the greatest enthusiasm about 
his contemporaries in the local activist community. It was perhaps his fellow 
graffiti artists for whom he expressed the most admiration, recommending 
the work of street artists like Sintex and Chaos and calling the city of Detroit 
a “graffiti mecca.”
Images of Rafael’s graffiti and other works of art are surprisingly hard 
to come by online. More often than not, such photos can only be found in 
articles reporting on his public, unsanctioned projects — the ones that upset 
the police. The aforementioned Highland Park water tower, onto which 
Rafael and another artist William Lucka spray painted the words “Free the 
Water” and a raised fist, made a number of headlines, especially when the 
two were facing potential felony charges for it. But that might not be a bad 
thing. I’m starting to reevaluate the importance of context to a piece of art, 
and to question whether or not works of art, especially community-centric 
artwork like Rafael’s, should be excavated from the environs in which they 
were created and, in a way, also had a hand in creating them. 
Rafael was definitely the one who set in motion my reconceptualization of 
art and how it translates across space and time. At one point, I described to him 
a dilemma brought to my attention through my coursework in the University 
of Michigan’s Community Action and Social Change program: That it is easy 
to name what a movement or work is against, but it is much more difficult to 
name what it is for. I asked Rafael for his take on this question, and I did not 
see his answer coming. 
“When my house and farm are done,” he said, “that will be an articulation 
of what I’m for. It’s an ongoing art project that I’m working on, my house 
and farm.” I’d never thought of environmental work that way, as a form of 
speech, as a work of art. But how narrow-minded is that? Perhaps if we saw 
the environment as a work of art, as another being communicating with us, 
I imagine the conversation around climate change would shift dramatically, 
and for the better. I also wonder what Rafael’s garden might say, were I ever 
to see it in person. I imagine something like, This is where it begins, but who 
knows — perhaps I’ll find out for myself someday.

In conversation with Detroit-based Antonio Rafael

JULIANNA MORANO
Daily Arts Writer

B-SIDE: ARTIST PROFILE

COURTESY OF NICK HAGAN

“Changing people’s consciousness 
is beautiful and rewarding. I love 
to see the analysis and thought of 
people around me grow and evolve 
and change, but like — I also want 
to do something tangible, you 
know?”

