Designing with nature & community: an interview with artist Kim Beck

Every afternoon, in a big, sunny corner room at Mastery Charter School’s Shoemaker Campus, sixteen students busily paint away in bright strokes of green, brown and purple. Standing around large, five-foot-square pieces of parachute cloth, they steadily color in sections of a mural.

Though each square appears to feature abstract shapes, when they are installed onto the walls of Conestoga Recreation Center across the street, the end product will be a gorgeous botanical mural. The rec center stands at the heart of the West Philadelphia’s Carroll Park neighborhood, and is the locus of Mural Arts’ Environmental Justice Initiative’s latest environmental project, Room for Growth (other parts of which we documented here in the spring).

The mural, which will wrap around three exterior walls of the rec center, was designed by Pittsburgh artist Kim Beck. Beck’s work has been shown in galleries, sculpture parks and museums nationally and internationally, and often blends urban and architectural “invasive species” (billboards, cell phone towers, electrical transformers) with botanical ones: weeds.

Many of the same students painting Beck’s mural today were involved in the creation of a Field Guide to Philadelphia’s Wild Urban Plants last year, which celebrated the beauty and usefulness of the indigenous plants which are so often called weeds.

Informed by the students’ drawings of local flora—included in that same field guide—and her own photographs, Beck’s mural, as if by magic, formulates a blissful oasis out of the chaos of overgrowth. Brightly colored plant silhouettes overlap one another, ultimately creating a deep, mysterious forest.

In an exclusive interview with Mural Arts, Beck talks about community process and her own relationship with plants (particularly weeds).

MURAL ARTS: How did you get connected with the Environmental Justice Initiative?

KIM BECK: A copy of my book, A Field Guide to Weeds, made it into the hands of Kaitlin Pomerantz [of WE THE WEEDS], who’s worked with Mural Arts, and she recommended me.

MA: Tell us about your process developing this mural.

KB: After speaking with Mural Arts I came out to walk around the community center and neighborhood. I took loads of photographs of plants and weeds to use as sources

MA: A lot of your source material comes from the community’s personal plant stories, and you’ve done a lot of work with weeds in the past. What’s your personal relationship with weeds?

KB: When I moved into my current place in Pittsburgh, the backyard was thick with weeds. Even as I’ve gradually cleared it and turned it into a garden, I’m constantly confronted by new plants and have to distinguish between friends and foes, who stays and who gets pulled.

In overgrown urban lots, I like how plucky weeds are, growing where other things might wither, how dense and lush they can be too. I was influenced by Frieda Knobloch’s The Culture of Wilderness (1996) where she looks at the relationship between plants and people through immigration, colonization and agriculture. It helped me consider these plants as more than they appear to be.

MA: How is this project different from your previous work?

KB: This is the first time I’ve designed a mural covering four walls. It’s also the first time I’ve made a piece for a community center, in a community that really wanted an artist-designed mural, in the context of a program like Mural Arts that facilitated neighborhood involvement. It’s the second time I’ve made a piece that takes some of its content and imagery from the city it’s in, the first being a few pieces I made in Indianapolis last year.