Lillian Snortland | 4 Malcolm X Greenhouse’s Empowerment Of Black America Through Spatial Autonomy
The eastern-rising sun shines through translucent walls and a roof, held up by a modest skeleton of wooden beams. This structure is the 4 Malcolm X Greenhouse, a project designed and built by artist/activist Jordan Weber on the foundation of, and mimicking the shape of, Malcolm X’s birth home in Omaha, Nebraska. Light is cast upon life-replenishing edible produce and, inside, reaches community members who attend various activities, programs, art workshops, arts festivals, and meditation to nourish the body and mind.
In function, the greenhouse counters environmental racism and whole food shortage through initiatives like soil and air remediation programs, a medicinal food supply, and access to the greenhouse’s harvest. The capitalistic chain centralizing white produce and distribution is absent from the 4MX Greenhouse. In its place, Weber considers the dedicated role art objects can play in a sustainable future centralizing wellness initiatives upheld by Black communities. In order to begin to heal wounds of intergenerational social trauma and systematic environmental terrorism inflicted on the Black community, one must build.
Weber insisted on the greenhouse’s interlace of functionality and those vital aspects of survival that help a community flourish. This is achieved by prioritizing the pillars of self-preservation, self-determination, and space to clear one’s mind. With the deliberate infusion of those qualities into the foundation of 4MX Greenhouse, the structure serves as a powerful testament to, and exuberant cry for, the true spirit of freedom.
Malcolm X’s legacy of spirituality and self-determination as a source of Black empowerment, to which Weber pays tribute, demonstrated that transformational justice is rooted in intervention by both the physical body and spiritual strength. A respectful ode to this lesson, the 4MX Greenhouse applies a strategy that brilliantly combines the physical and the spiritual through the aesthetic perspective of an artist, allowing the space to exist as a flexible source of service and opportunity for the Black community. The creative touch of an artist is what imbues a structure with soul and longevity, erecting a space where the community can work together to celebrate a heritage of resilience and shape the physical and spiritual well-being of all.
This holistic confluence of functionality and democratization of space recognizes the essentiality of autonomy of space in the midst of Black America’s struggle for self-determination, safety, and wellness. While 4MX Greenhouse creates new environmentally conscious pipelines to confront historic inequities, the greenhouse is most successful because it tackles more than just product or produce, but people as well.
4MX Greenhouse is especially sustainable because it is activated by, and for, the Black community. That activation of space, as both a resource and well of spiritual nourishment, is in fact a sort of revolution unto itself. Writer bell hooks articulates why autonomy of space, which too often falls by the wayside in the struggle for survival, must be urgently addressed for the Black community in America, by stating:
“...black folks equated freedom with the passage into a life where they would have the right to exercise control over space on their own behalf, where they would imagine, design, and create spaces that would respond to the needs of their lives, their communities, their families... I learned to see freedom as always and intimately linked to the issue of transforming space” (hooks, 147).
While being a direct response to environmental and social neglect, the 4MX Greenhouse structure is also representative of Black America’s demand for spatial freedom; the freedom to imagine, express, and design physical and spiritual sustainability. Weber has tapped into the essence of bell hooks’ critique: that freedom is achieved by transforming space, beyond the provision of goods and services needed to survive.
The greenhouse is not a monument of fixed meaning, but a statement of the importance of holding space that is transmutable and responsive to the needs of the Black community. This space has been surrendered to the people. Such avenues have been too long taken away from the Black population, constantly grappling with insecurity and instability enforced by policy or policing. 4MX Greenhouse is a beautifully democratic gift, remaining untethered to the ego of its maker, a sanctuary in constant flux.
America’s history and relationships with Black communities have long been tainted as “racial apartheid and white supremacy altered individuals’ space, overdetermined locations and the nature of structures, created a sense of entitlement for some and deprivation of others” (hooks, 146). This deprivation manifests in myriad injustices that Black America faces today as their daily realities, health, and humanity are molded by systems entrenched in white supremacy. From the very lands passed on through generations, to the sorts of crops that come cheap, to the dismissal of spiritual and medicinal cultures, to the simple fact that there isn’t a grocery store for miles in certain Black neighborhoods, violence against healthy Black life and identity is perpetuated.
The individual’s dilemma observed by bell hooks projects onto the community’s dilemma addressed by 4MX Greenhouse. The greenhouse proves that vibrant self-determination can be forged collectively, in opposition to spaces and systems vulnerable to white supremacy. That it was built by a Black artist, to remain in the hands of Black America, combines activism and artistic metaphor to render the structure more than just a service for survival based on physical needs. 4MX Greenhouse is devoted solely to the growth, enrichment, safety, and health of the Black community; the beginning of an infrastructure that has been systematically torn away and undermined by white-centered capitalistic systems.
In order to grow together as a community, let us enjoy our bodies in the sun as we meditate. Let us conscientiously till the earth and know that it is ours. But let us also create and hold new spaces, like 4MX Greenhouse, that are ours to shape, engage with in harmony amongst ourselves, and activate in opposition to violence. Our relationship to our world, ecologically or otherwise, alters over time, and artists are uniquely positioned to respond to these changes. I look forward to the metamorphoses of the 4MX Greenhouse in response.
*Work Referenced: hooks, bell. Art On My Mind: Visual Politics. New York : New Press : 1995.
4MX Greenhouse, a project facilitated by artist Jordan Weber, was realized with support from A Blade of Grass in partnership with the Malcolm X Memorial Foundation in Omaha. Visit Malcolm X Memorial Foundation’s website to learn more, donate, and plan a visit.
Lillian Snortland, originally from Eugene, Oregon, is a self-taught writer of fiction, poetry, and essays. She has explored themes of fantasy, surrealism, and the imaginative feminine from a young age. At Carleton College, she studied storytelling and material culture of the past—Classical Studies, French literature and media, and art history, and continues to play with a multidisciplinary perspective in her analysis today. She currently works in the nonprofit arts sector to provide opportunities of capacity-building and cultural capital to those in need. Further writing can be found at https://chaimihai.wordpress.com/