JOAN BANKEMPER
While in residence during the spring of 1999, garden/installation artist Joan Bankemper conceived of creating an herbal, healing garden that would become a permanent part of the Museum’s neighborhood. With the assistance of curatorial and education staff, she located a site for the garden in Boston’s Fenway Victory Gardens and found two partners willing to take on the challenge of maintaining the garden on a permanent basis. A 5th grade teacher from the Farragut School saw the garden as a learning opportunity during the school year, and a group of seniors living in the Fenway neighborhood, all having gardened in the past, eagerly agreed to help maintain the garden during the summer months.

In late September 1999 Bankemper returned to work with students on the garden’s design and to prepare the plot for spring planting. The healing-garden project provided the Farragut School 5th grade class with connections to classroom and Museum learning throughout the year. Classroom projects included researching the healing properties and care of herbs and designing seed packages that reflected this research. The students also kept journals and created illuminated manuscript pages for hand-made books. They also toured the greenhouses, talked about plants with the gardeners, and examined art works in the collection that contained botanical decoration.

Bankemper returned again in the spring of 2000 to complete the garden design and to do the planting with the students and seniors. She also created an installation, A Gardener’s Diary, for the special exhibition gallery. Both the garden and the installation were celebrated at an opening reception in June that was attended by Museum members and staff and by Farragut students and families.

So far this has been the most ambitious and far-reaching of any school program involving an artist-in-residence. As such, it is a model for future collaborations, one that will enable the Museum to expand its physical and programmatic reach beyond its four walls and into the community.