Rhizome’s Community Supported Art (CSA) initiative works like its agricultural counterpart. To join, supporters pay an upfront fee (from $200-$500, on a sliding scale according to income). Over the course of three pickup dates — the first is Aug. 7 — they will receive nine artworks from nine area artists. In the same way a participant in a Community Supported Agriculture program might receive a vegetable they aren’t quite sure how to use, the art — ranging from CDs to scripts to prints — will be a surprise to shareholders.
Community Supported Art shares have been cropping up around the country since at least 2013 when they were popularized by Minneapolis’s Springboard for the Arts. The Rhizome CSA, the first of its kind in D.C., comes at a time when artists have been seeking alternative funding models, after a year that has laid bare the shaky ground on which the arts economy is built.
The Rhizome CSA is not just a way to acquire interesting decor for your wall. With interactive offerings like a score for walking through nature by Peter Redgrave, or a tool for “future telling” by Xena Ni, many of the Rhizome artists invite participants into their artistic practice. They share not just different ways of seeing but different ways of being.
Julia Marks’s project “Seeds” casts the shareholder in a two-character play, one of whom is a plant (the work’s subtitle is “a conversation between me and my dead fig tree”). Printed on handmade paper embedded with native wildflower seeds, the playwright’s 10-page chapbook re-creates theater’s sense of ephemerality in a very different setting. Through the ritual of performing and planting the script, if so desired, Marks hopes recipients will find themselves newly attuned to the natural world.
“I’m hoping that someone who’s reading it will just be able to look around and be like, ‘Oh, I never noticed a tree across from my window has these amazing giant leaves,’ or ‘I never noticed that my neighbors have irises blooming in the yard,’” she says.
That hyperlocal focus extends to the whole CSA program. “A model like this creates so much care on both sides,” Marks says. “We’re not creating a play that’s going on tour to 50 states. We’re creating projects from artists in this community for other people in the community to enjoy. It’s a really accessible model.”
Layne Garrett, program director at Rhizome, hopes that the CSA will create lasting relationships between artists and potential local patrons. “We are trying to model social arrangements that benefit all parties involved in the face of social norms that are rooted in often-unacknowledged exploitation: ‘loving’ art without making sure those who create art can actually afford to live,” he wrote in an email.
In return for their contributions, CSA artists, who were selected by a panel of jurors, will receive a $1500 stipend and a six-month membership to Guilded, a new initiative of the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives that offers support for freelance and gig-economy workers, including tax-filing assistance, a course on managing finances, and — a major incentive for participating artists — health insurance.
Ajoke Williams, program manager at Guilded who initiated the collaboration with Rhizome, positions the CSA within what’s known as the solidarity economy, which promotes grass-roots economic practices and long-term investment in the community over state-sponsored policy.
Beyond helping artists make ends meet, decentralizing the art ecosystem could also lead to more creative freedom, Williams says. “Art is supposed to speak to some of those unsaid and unknowable parts of us. When there’s limited opportunity, artists [can] get boxed into trying to speak to just a few people, and that limits the breadth of art,” she explains. “If you have more people supporting and validating artists, you feed the soil of artistic creation.” It’s a model that takes the long view — and so do some of the artists.
For his contribution, poet Fargo Tbakhi envisions utopian futures for the Palestinian territories that are occupied by Israel, in one-of-a-kind poems printed using two old-school printmaking processes: cyanotype and wood-burning. Futurism gives Tbakhi a way to step outside the common discourse that focuses on international policy and Palestinian statelessness. “Imagining a free future gives me the energy to keep going,” he says.
Xena Ni’s project also seeks rejuvenation by looking forward. In her project “D.C. 2121,” she illustrates “future telling” interviews she conducted with local community activists. Asking such questions as “What shoes are you wearing?” or “What does the air feel like?” Ni aims not to create a grand, sci-fi vision of the future, but to conjure high-resolution, one-day-in-the-life details about the District 100 years from now. She’ll also provide a tool — most likely a deck of cards — to help CSA shareholders do their own future telling.
During the pandemic, local resources have popped up to meet material needs, but as we emerge from this period of tumult, an ideological need appears. So much discussion revolves around the return to normal, but what if there is no normal to return to? Who will guide us forward? In imagining a way forward, the artist can be an essential guide — a leading light in the darkness.
For Ni, like Tbakhi, there is a therapeutic element to futurism, especially today. “It can be very healing,” she says, “to imagine ourselves as simply existing in the future, and perhaps, in fact, flourishing.”