CoVictory Gardens
Sheila Novak
June 24 - September 2, 2020
Cultivating community through gardening
CoVictory Gardens is a socially engaged art project, seeking to cultivate connection and illustrate social solidarity amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This project openly invites all to participate, and is durational, like the pandemic, acknowledging that gardening can provide engagement and healing over the course of the year.
CoVictory Gardens explores how our individual actions can allow us to feel more connected to each other and to the place we live, and celebrates how engaging with the earth through gardening can nurture our spirits, bodies, neighborhood and community.
CoVictory Gardens Nourish
Our Bodies
By placing dirt under our fingernails,
By offering a different posture than sitting, and
By filling our lungs with fresh air, our ears with birdsong, our eyes with beauty and perhaps even our bellies with food;
Our Spirits
By creating daily opportunities for discovery and delight,
By giving us something to cherish and nurture,
By giving us appreciation for and patience with the seasons;
Our Dwelling Places
By creating spaces to learn and grow,
By centering the physical world rather than the world of screens, and
By providing witness to the victory of life;
Our Neighborhoods
By seeding CoVictory Gardens throughout our community,
By acknowledging that although we are physically isolated, we move through this season together, and
By welcoming others into wonderment;
Our Community, Country and World
By creating a source of connection,
By acknowledging history, and
By relating our endeavors into a globally connected effort.
We invite every Gardener to be a CoVictory Gardener, and every Garden to be a CoVictory Garden.
We celebrate the chance to nourish life, witness the seasons and see our place in the world, together, with our CoVictory Gardens.
Because CoVictory Gardens provide nourishment for us all.
About the Artist:
Sheila Novak is an interdisciplinary artist and arts administrator living and working in Boston, MA. Her projects create spaces and opportunities for others to explore how we can grow and connect, how vulnerability can bring us into more authentic relationships with each other, and what healing looks like on individual and communal levels. Currently, Sheila serves as the Public Art Project Manager for the Greenway Conservancy. She has eight years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector intersecting creative practice with public art, creative placemaking and arts equity. Novak is committed to producing and creating art in social and public spaces.
Visit her website & follow her on Instagram @sheila.studios
As an Artist in Residence at Urbano Project, Sheila worked with youth artists in the process of exploring many aspects of socially engaged art practice, as well as the methods and tools to both consider how to cultivate their garden and to create practices that are socially engaged.