Kate Daughdrill grew up in the South and settled in Detroit after attending graduate school at Cranbrook. She is an artist, teacher, speaker, co-founder of Detroit Soup and urban farmer who lives and works on Burnside Farm on Detroit’s east side. Daughdrill spoke with Jill Filipovic on Cosmopolitan.com about "surviving as a well-fed if underpaid artist, digging into the roots of your fears, and what it really means to live well."
Excerpt:
When I graduated from Cranbrook, I moved to the block where I live now, called Burnside. The house I bought happened to have three lots right next to it and one across the street and two burnt-out houses across the street and another at the end of the dead-end block. I started cultivating the garden that year in the adjacent lots with several neighbors. The neighbors and I built a fire pit and a cinderblock grill, and started cooking out most Sunday nights. We'd make Burnside Pizza by putting a pizza dough down on the grill and people could pick what they wanted out of the garden and put it directly on the pizza. That's when I realized being a gardener was an essential part of my practice, and my work now operates at that intersection of art and gardening.
The second summer we cultivated two of the other lots after the houses on them were demo'ed, so now across the street, there are three lots we're using as a block garden, so everyone on our block has their own garden space. It's a diverse neighborhood called Banglatown, and coming together around food is such a natural way to get to know people. One of the things that's so powerful about Detroit is that people are learning to live in a profoundly different way and thinking about what you really need to live well and be human. We have an incredible opportunity here to secure our own shelter, grow our own food, and have fellowship with other people, which are some of the most basic human needs.
