From November 3 to 27, 2017 the Vera List Center hosts a series of bi-weekly lunchtime readings in the context of Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York— A Botany of Colonization. These readings, organized in collaboration with The High Line, activate and amplify the metaphors and relations embedded in the exhibition.

Patricia Klindienst joins us for the reading on Thursday, November 9th, guest curated by The High Line. Patricia will be reading from the chapter “Freedom” in her book The Earth Knows My Name: Food, Culture and Sustainability in the Gardens of Ethnic Americans, which won the American Book Award for 2007. In the context of Seeds of Change, a long term project Maria Thereza Alves initiated in 1999, the artist situates the presence of ballast flora in the contemporary landscape as evidence of alternative histories and ways of knowing the land we are inhabiting. In her words “The earth you think you’re standing on is not, it is someplace else, the only way you would know the place is from the flower.”

The readings in this series address the variegated intersections of Alves’ project and those of contemporary writers including: Wendy S. Walters, Patricia Klindienst, Jennifer Kabat, Alex Smith (Metropolarity) and M. Téllez (Metropolarity). To expand on these connections each reading draws out specific narrative threads over the course of this month long reading series engagement.

Writer, teacher, scholar, and public speaker, Patricia Klindienst has made the American immigrant experience her subject for more than a decade. Her first book of nonfiction, THE EARTH KNOWS MY NAME, tells the stories of fifteen ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens. She received an American Book Award for 2007. Her new project is a traveling exhibit of the same title, NO ONE REMEMBERS ALONE: MEMORY, MIGRATION, AND THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN FAMILY. Patricia lives in Guilford, Connecticut with her husband, Louis Mackall.

The Seeds of Change Lunchtime Reading Series is organized in collaboration with Melanie Kress, Eric Rodriguez, Jasmin Chabla and Andi Pettis at The High Line. These readings draw on a community of elected affinities responding to the exhibition and look to the future it promises in the summer of 2018 when the plants are re-sited in ballast flora gardens around New York, including the forthcoming installation at The High Line, as well as Pioneer Works and Weeksville Heritage Center.

Hyperallergic is the exclusive media sponsor for the International Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018.