An Unblighted Area 

An Unblighted Area

August 19 to October 11, 2024​

Heartland College Joe McCauley Gallery 

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An Unblighted Area was an exhibition about what used to be. In 2009, I helped turn an abandoned lot across from our bar on West Main Street in Peoria into a community garden. In 2015 my husband and I sold our business for...reasons.

In 2020, in the middle of a pandemic that had everyone scared and confused, city leaders decided that the garden needed to be demolished. This action was taken without any communication with the volunteers who had built and taken care of the garden for years. As they bulldozed the garden to the ground, they said it was because there were too many homeless people using the space, and they promised there were new plans for new businesses to inhabit this lot. Those businesses never materialized, we still have homeless neighbors, and the space where a garden used to be has flaunted a “No Trespassing” sign for years now. In 2023, I moved my art studio back into the same building where my bar once was. Across the street from that faded sign. I was asked not to plant a garden.  In response, I began creating a garden of my own, using paper flowers to tell this story.