In the quintessential summer show, the Center offers more than 150 photographs celebrating Chicago’s neighborhood vegetable and flower gardens, and the people who cultivate them with devotion. Shot by the gardeners themselves, the images are divided between studies of the flourishing plots and their produce, and environmental portraits of their proud temporary possessors who hail from all of the city’s ethnic groups. By eliminating any vestiges of concrete and steel in their framing, the anonymous photographers convey the impression that our sweet home is a rural paradise, and an exceedingly dense one at that. Some of the shooters have sharp eyes as well as green thumbs; a thick bunch of gnarled irregular carrots colored purple, red, and every shade of orange overflows and cascades with vitality, showing us the wild profusion of shapes and sizes that Mother Nature provides when she has not been made ready for the supermarket by agro-engineering. In another section of this lavish exhibit, wall plaques offer informative text and illustration that tells us everything we never even knew we might want to know about the manifold forms of urban gardening. (Michael Weinstein)
Through September 19 at the Chicago Tourism Center, 72 East Randolph
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