DUMPSTER-diving, garden-tending. Which is on your to-do list this week? Well, at the Brewery, the cluster of artists' studios and residences wedged between a freeway and rail yard downtown in the heart of old industrial Los Angeles, both are part of life.
"There's a joke that nothing ever leaves the Brewery," says Gretchen Zalkind, resin artist, gardener and resident since 1996.
"The theme of the Brewery is finding industrial things, making then pretty -- and making them your own," she says, surveying her pocket-sized garden with its painted cobalt-blue bathtub (inherited) planted with hot-pink and creamy-white bougainvillea. To the right of her lipstick-red front door is a rusting sculpture (rescued) that she and her husband, David, think of as the headless garden goddess.
This artists village practices a gift economy: Currency (read: rubbish) is deposited in public places and awaits withdrawal. It's an intriguing formula: One-part community-making, one part art-making.
Plant rescue, though, seems to be the source of the fiercest pride among the artist-gardeners. Zalkind credits her husband with "moving the garden forward," but when it comes to plants, she says, "David goes to garden stores, but I go to the Dumpster."
The Brewery container gardens -- and they are all in containers, sitting on tiny aprons of concrete -- seem to belt out an unexpected song of passionate and inventive ways of gardening.
These gardens -- many open during the Brewery Art Walk this weekend -- aren't just expressions of art from living material or a relaxing hobby. They seem to be planted and nurtured in hot opposition to the loud, edgy surroundings of the Brewery.
"One of the lessons in my decades of research into gardens is that what might be ordinary in one situation becomes extraordinary in a different context," says Kenneth Helphand, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Oregon.
"The more dramatic the contrast, the more we become aware of gardens as works of art because they are in an inhospitable environment."
"So what looks better to a person living between two Dumpsters: concrete, or a forest?" asks sculptor and painter Bruce Gray, standing on the threshold between his live/work industrial space and his garden. When you take a hard look, you can see his point.
