As part of the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018 and as an extension of the exhibition Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York— A Botany of Colonization, WILD PLANTS, QUEER LANDSCAPES explores the connection between Maria Thereza Alves’ work and the New York City landscape. On these walks, led by the Vera List Center’s Horticultural Advisor Marisa Prefer, we will look out for and collect seeds from many of the ballast flora featured in the project.

Volunteer plants penetrate ruderal landscapes, thriving under the harsh conditions of poor soil and post-industrial waste. These spontaneous plants blanket spaces of transition by creeping into slivers of dirt, emerging year after year, far from their places of origin. Wild plants are often coded as threatening, labeled “weeds” or “invasive” but are also opportunists. They are doing the work of queering the urban landscape. Join herbalist, educator, and VLC Horticultural Advisor Marisa Prefer on a walk exploring the former ballast dumping site of Atlantic Basin and Red Hook, where many salt-loving marshland plants thrive in cracks along sidewalks and beneath sewers.

Marisa Prefer is a trans-disciplinary educator, urban ecologist and amateur herbalist who can often be found covered in soil. Marisa works to translate knowledge within plant communities to human terms, through experiential pedagogies and cultivating ecosystems for urban resilience. Part of their work involves bringing to light the marginalized interstitial space between human and plant binaries while building energy around healing bodies. Prefer serves as the Programs Manager for floating food forest, Swale as well as the Landscape Curator at Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and is the Horticultural Advisor for Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York— A Botany of Colonization. Marisa has previously helped to run the Children’s Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden and also makes work as part of the collective non/studio.

Hyperallergic is the exclusive media sponsor for the International Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics 2016-2018.