expression
ART
SETTING THE TABLE Gadsden Farm Project captures a legacy by STEVE BORNHOFT
70
January-February 2021
Along the way, she contacted a former student, Diaz, whose graduate research at FSU, she knew, was focused largely on what has come to be known as community engaged artwork. With some expressed reluctance, he admits he is an expert in that area. “I kept asking Michael questions until he was immersed in the project,” Hanessian said. At some point, there was no way out. Diaz lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he does work for his wife’s flower farm, homeschools his two boys and serves his mother as a caregiver. For three
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Michael Diaz
PHOTOS BY MICHAEL AUSTIN DIAZ AND COURTESY OF INDIVIDUAL
T
here are artists whose creative pursuits and processes are solitary. They work alone in studios, produce works and then introduce them to the world. Often, they prefer their art to do the talking for them. Too, there are artists who prefer the kind of projects that result from community interaction and relationship building. Holly Hanessian and Michael Diaz fall into the latter category. Together, they have brought about the Gadsden Farm Project, an exhibit that reflects and presents the stories of 12 Gadsden County residents with close ties to the land. Among them are livestock breeders and vegetable growers, first-generation immigrants and a fourthgeneration tobacco farmer. Coming by those 12 participants, however, would be much more difficult than Hanessian, a professor of art at Florida State University, anticipated when she conceived of the project. Hanessian’s neighbor, as it happens, owns property in Gadsden County and has an employee whose brother, Calvin Davis, is a vegetable grower there. Davis, who is Black, owns property that adjoins a farm owned by Max Van Landingham, a white man for whom Davis started working when he was 16. Owing to coincidences, Hanessian had two participants, but it would be another eight months before she had a third.
