"Designing to Enable" Matthew Groshek's Case for Community Gardens as Sustainable Food Sources

Inspired and intrigued with the notion of sustainability, Matthew Groshek came to Auburn looking to incite the discussion of sustainable practice on campus and his recommendation is simple. Grow your own.

Groshek, public scholar of civic engagement in exhibition planning and design in the department of visual communications and assistant professor at the Herron School of Art and Design, presented his lecture, “Designing to Enable: a case for civic agriculture and a culture of resistance,” on the importance of community gardens as sustainable food resources on university campuses.

Groshek’s lecture elaborated on his artistic conceptual deconstruction of sustainability and the idea of civic agriculture. Civic agriculture is a trend toward locally based food resources that benefit communities socially and economically.

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“He really emphasized sustainability and that’s something I’ve never really cared about, and just hearing his progress is really encouraging that someone is actually doing stuff about it where all this time I’ve heard a lot about it but I’ve never seen someone taking such measures to actually exercise the idea instead of just thinking it,” said Katie Sturgis, an art major at Auburn.

Green Mapping is another project Groshek has used to take the discussion about sustainability to the next level. A Green Map is a geographical representation of a city that locates sustainable areas around town such as recycling centers, sidewalks and community gardens.

“I would go up to places where people were doing work, a lot of environmental groups, sustainability groups and social justice groups and say, “hey what are you doing? Can you tell me what your story is?” I can’t do this work because I don’t have the capacity for it, but I can tell your story. I can visualize it because I have the skills. I want to bring all this together in one comprehensive place,” said Groshek.

The lecture is part of a collaborative series of lectures and exhibitions sponsored by the College of Agriculture and the College of Liberal Arts and the Department of Art called “Art in Agriculture.” The series aims to connect arts and sciences and create awareness of art and agricultural resources around campus to create a more sustainable community.

"Reclaiming Ground: Ag-Gardens-Art,” the lecture series this spring, focuses on gardening and how it affects everyone socially, emotionally, artistically and environmentally.

Groshek is a strong advocate of gardens as a sustainable food source. He successfully head started a project to revamp a dilapidated landscape garden on the campus of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis to a garden for the university community to utilize.