Survival Blanket (Decolonize the Garden from Seeds to Bees)
Survival Blanket (Decolonize the Garden from
Seeds to Bees), 2024-2025
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
This commissioned artwork is the newest edition in Juan William Chávez’s ongoing series of Survival Blankets, floor-based assemblages that typically include an assortment of plants, seeds, and other objects arranged atop a Mylar blanket. For this iteration Chávez includes a small textile that reads “Decolonize the Garden
from Seeds to Bees,” which sets the intention for the work. Additionally, a monitor plays edited footage from a workshop for local K–12 educators that the artist conducted in August 2024 at his Northside Workshop (NSW) in collaboration with Rico Rose, a St. Louis–based, Indigenous (Diné) community member and horticulturalist
specializing in native plants and seed saving.1 The NSW is both pedagogical and aesthetic, attuning visitors to the subtle temporalities and collaborative, sculptural dimensions of garden cultivation and holistic land management. The relationship between the NSW and Chávez’s artistic practice is symbiotic. The garden represents for him a huaca—a place or object that is revered, typically a monument of some kind or a natural location, in the Quechuan languages of South America—while his Survival Blankets function like a mesa—a portable version of the huaca, around which people may assemble and commune. Using reflective Mylar, a material associated with contemporary migration, as the ground for these
mesas, Chávez transforms his itinerant gardens into portals for creative placemaking and imaginative modes of present and future survival. A zine produced by Chávez and Rose, exploring the impacts of colonialism on land management in the United States, is available for visitors to take.