Contemporary Artists
Explore Chicago-based artists about their previous green practices in soil and garden
Nance Klehm
Nance Klehm has been an ecological systems designer, landscaper, horticultural consultant, and permacultural grower for more than two decades. Nance is internationally respected for her work on land politics and soil health. She currently splits her time between Little Village, a densely packed, diverse urban neighborhood in the heart of Chicago, and fifty acres of land in the Driftless Region of northwest Illinois, where she cultivates and forages medicinal and edible plants, keeps bees and a fruit orchard, raises chickens and quail, and grows for a seed bank.
Free Exposure: 3 holes, 5 heaps (2018)
Soil Ear – A hole for listening
Soil Cubby – A hole for feeling
Soil Well – A hole for gazing
Agricultural system in an abandoned airbase site
Transforming post-consumer materials into biological rich soil
Jenny Kendler
Jenny Kendler is an interdisciplinary artist, environmental activist, naturalist & wild forager who lives in Chicago and various forests. She has been commissioned to create environmentally engaged public art projects locations such as Chicago's Millennium Park for the Art Institute of Chicago, The Lincoln Park Conservatory fern room for Experimental Sound Studio, The Arts Club of Chicago, the 606 elevated trail, Philadelphia's Fairmount Park, the Louisville Riverwalk, a remote desert in Arizona and a tropical forest in Costa Rica.
Sculpture--->Garden (2015-2017)
Venus X in the studio.
Venus XII on the day it was installed in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.
Venus I has biodegraded and become a favorite perch for birds on Northerly Island.
Kid-sized “planter-chairs”
Seed bomb workshop at UIC Earth Day Fair
Vertical garden for American Indian Center
Claire Pentecost
Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of food, agriculture and bio-engineering. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while her longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Her work has been interrogating the contested line between the natural and the artificial.
Soil-erg (2012)
Proposal of a new value system based on the living soil
Unique paper bills with historical figures
Vertical growing systems
Living canary
31 vintage coal miner’s cages
Human breasts made by petroleum coke
Research assembled by Yunyao Que