Plant Medicine: Multi-Species Wellness in a Global City

How do migratory human and non-human beings learn to grow and flourish in a city of steel and glass? Through the lens of plants, this exhibition explores the connections between nature, health, and growing roots. 

On the Northside, newly arrived refugees bring their practical knowledge, plants, and aesthetic dispositions to gardens. It’s there that they create familiar smells, textures, and ways of interacting as communities. They work through traumas of displacement, pass on traditional knowledge to children born in exile and sell their produce at the farmers market. On the near Westside, Latino gardeners plant prairie flowers on a remediated brown-site. They tend to Monarch butterfly chrysalis in order to maximize the chances of emergence and trans-migration to Mexico. On the Southside, a neighborhood ravaged by redlining, out-migration and school closures hope to remake itself as the city’s food garden, and a growing network of gardeners and farmers hope to become economically viable producers.

In ethnic pharmacies around the city, plant-based medicines connect Chicagoans to alternative ways of thinking about health and disease. All throughout the city, people otherwise dislodged or in flux—because of changing health, ability, neighborhood or family situation—turn to plants and planting to sow new roots.