Campus as Commons: Agroforestry and Shared Stewardship at Tufts
University campuses occupy significant tracts of land with contested histories of enclosure, aesthetic management, and institutional control. At Tufts, the transition from a working agricultural commons to a landscaped campus mirrors patterns documented across higher education, raising questions about what forms of access, stewardship, and shared governance remain possible on institutional land. Drawing on the commons governance framework of Elinor Ostrom and over a decade of large-scale social practice, artist Mary Mattingly will present her work on public food access, including Swale, a floating food forest in New York City's waterways that contributed to the city's first edible public foodway and introduce a proposed agroforestry installation at Tufts. The project would bring edible perennial plantings and participatory decision-making into the campus landscape, asking what it means for a university to act as steward of a living commons rather than as landowner. This lecture is part of the Environmental Studies Program Hoch Cunningham Environmental Lecture Series.
Mary Mattingly is a visual artist whose practice centers on public food access, ecological systems, and the governance of shared space. She is the founder of Swale, a floating edible, landscape built on a barge that docked at public piers across New York City's five boroughs. Operating under waterways common law rather than public land regulations, Swale made free fresh food available to anyone, and contributed directly to the creation of the Foodway at Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx: the first space in over a century where New York City Parks has permitted public foraging in a public park. Her work has been exhibited at Storm King Art Center, the International Center of Photography, Seoul Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, Barbican Gallery, deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and the Palais de Tokyo. Mattingly has received support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, James L. Knight Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, and the Art Matters Foundation. Her work has appeared in Aperture, Art in America, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, The New York Times, Le Monde, The New Yorker, and PBS's Art21, and is included in Henry Sayre's A World of Art (Pearson, 8th ed.).
