More than 80 years ago, Virginia Woolf insisted every woman needed "a room of one's own" to do her creative work. If you ask Detroit artist Kate Daughdrill, though, a whole farm is better. Daughdrill is an artist, teacher, speaker, and urban farmer who plants her crops in the middle of Detroit. She grows most of her own food on a multi-lot farm she cultivates with her neighbors, and she incorporates sustainable living and farming into her works. Daughdrill spoke with 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.





I grew up all over the South, but for much of my life, I lived in New Orleans. That city has this great energy and creativity, and I knew when I was young that being creative was important to me, but I wanted to be a senator. I really cared about people's lives being enriched, and I thought being in politics would have the biggest impact.

I went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and started studying government and Spanish — the Spanish was to talk to constituents. Then I took an art class and fell in love. I decided to minor in art, and then I took some more classes and thought, Maybe I'll double major, and then I found an interdisciplinary option where I got to design my own curriculum. I designed mine around how socially engaged art could support communities in addressing their own social concerns. Through UVA, I learned to write, I learned to think, I learned to speak, and I learned how to independently do the research and organizing and creating that I needed to do to learn what I wanted to learn.

My fourth-year project was one of the first big projects I did that helped me to discover the type of art-making that was interesting to me: I made five tents, these sculptural spaces, and I invited people into the tents to write letters around different themes: One was write a letter to your parents, one was write a letter to the Virginia Tech students (this was right after the shootings there), one was to write a letter to Charlotte city officials, one was to write a letter to your favorite artist, and one was to write a letter to your conception of God. The goal of the project was to make sculptural spaces that created an intimate environment for folks to reflect on what matters to them and take the time to communicate about it. At the end of the week, I put all the letters into a big mailbox outside the post office — even the ones to God.

Ali Lapetina

I remember walking out of an art class one day feeling so inspired by the powerful conversations that can arise out of art, and I was standing under this bright, orange tree, looking up as the leaves were falling down on me, and I thought, It would be a waste of talent for me to be a senator.

During college, I did one summer internship at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. But I think the most profound experience I had in college was being a part of the university programs council. As a freshman, I applied to co-lead a first-year space called Tuttle Lounge, where we put on weekly music shows. I learned how to organize an event, pay out stipends, and lead community meetings. The next year, I took over as a special events leader of the school, so I got to plan a college-wide concert where we brought in a huge act, and I learned the skills necessary to plan a large gathering.

After I graduated, I lived in Charlottesville for two years and had a fellowship at Christ Episcopal Church. The church owned this tiny one-car garage that opened up into a public park, just a block from the pedestrian downtown area, and I decided to turn it into a tiny art space. I worked with my friend Sam Bush to put in lights and hardwood floors, and we did art shows once a month and music performances every Friday. I also worked part-time at a local restaurant to make some extra money.

Ali Lapetina

The second year of my fellowship I took on a job with Piedmont Council for the Arts, Charlottesville's small arts council. I was 24, the director was 28, and we were close friends. Even though I was working with a friend doing really cool programming for the arts community, I felt restless. It was the closest I've ever come to having a real job, and I realized my priority had to be focusing on what was inside of me.

I also started a project called the Makers series, a monthly event where we'd have an artist, musician, or writer shares their work on stage for 20 minutes, and then people could ask them questions. That was part of the church fellowship as well. They wanted it to be about cultivating your passion and the gifts you had, so I was able to focus on my own creative work. They gave me one of the offices in the church building to use as a studio space. All the other offices were clean and beautiful, and you'd walk into mine and at one point you couldn't even walk on the ground.

By getting to focus on my art, I had enough work to be able to apply to grad school, and I picked Cranbrook in Detroit. At Cranbrook, you have two years of work in the studio, a weekly critique, and a weekly lecture with a visiting artist or critic — beyond that you're free to focus on your own work.

Ali Lapetina

My second semester at Cranbrook I started a project called Detroit Soup with a friend of mine, Jessica Hernandez. It's a monthly soup dinner that funds micro-grants for creative projects in Detroit. We started holding dinners in a loft above the Family Bakery in Mexicantown, and people would apply for a micro-grant and propose a project they wanted to fund. It costs $5 to get in, and you get a soup and a salad and a vote on which project wins. The first few dinners, we had maybe 20 people. Then it started to grow, and we got a unique blend of creative people coming — artists, gardeners, curators, activists, people starting small business, people working in restaurants. We had conversations about how the type of work we made and supported is part of what shapes our city. By the end of the year, we had 200 people coming every month and were awarding grants of $800 to $1,000.

For my final thesis project, I moved a garage from Southwest Detroit up to Bloomfield Hills, where Cranbrook is located, and installed it outside of the school's museum in the parking lot. That helped connect Cranbrook to work I'd been doing down in Southwest with my friend Esteban Castro, who's a leader there. I met Esteban through Soup — he was a neighbor who would come. We would get together outside of Soup in his garage and talk a lot about the people around us who weren't just artists but were rethinking how they use space — people transforming a house into a hub for a community, people doing youth programs two blocks from Esteban's garage, where young people in the neighborhood were invited to do street art on garage doors in an alleyway. People in Detroit find the most creative, scrappy ways to address what's going on in their environment, and people are really using what they have to make their neighborhoods better and healthier. The garage has always been a space where I feel like there's an intimacy but an accessibility; it can close and be really private, or open and be very public. So it made sense for me and Esteban to use his garage for these creative conversations and gatherings. Moving a garage up to Cranbrook was a practical as well as a political way to create a space for similar conversations.

To get the garage up to Cranbrook for my final project, Esteban and my friends James Haddrill and Charlie O'Geen and I cut a garage into several large pieces, loaded it onto a trailer, drove it 20 miles up through the suburbs, and then rebuilt it in the parking lot of the Cranbrook Art Museum. During the course of the show, it was the site for several gatherings and conversations among students, patrons, and Detroiters about the powerful, creative grassroots work happening in Detroit.

Ali Lapetina

When the garage was up at Cranbrook, a Cranbrook graduate named Mira Burack was up visiting and saw it. She was in the process of applying for a grant from Community Public Art Detroit, and she asked if I wanted to collaborate with her. We started dreaming of having the garage be a space where people could come together and cook. Through the grant project, we were connected to the Osborn neighborhood. When we started working on the project three years ago, we went to tons of community meetings and hosted tons of neighborhood potlucks, just listening to people and getting to know our neighbors. After a year and a half of dealing with city bureaucracy, we were finally able to build our project, called the Edible Hut. It's a gathering space in a public park in Osborn, and it has a living, edible roof where we grow everything from cooking herbs like oregano and thyme to medicinal herbs like echinacea to edible flowers. We're trying to create a healthy, healing space in a neighborhood that has really struggled with crime, vacancy, and poverty.

For the first two years, developing Edible Hut was a part-time job, at least 20 hours a week. Now I'm transitioning out, so I'm putting in five or 10 hours a week. I'll continue to be a participant in the group and I'll help as a gardener — gardening is central to my work and my life, and something I learned just by doing it — but the goal has been that the neighborhood will take it on, and the hut was gifted to the Osborn Alliance.

A similar thing happened with Soup. After a year of leading it, I passed it off and it's grown into an incredible nonprofit organization in its fifth year. The garage in Charlottesville is now in its sixth year. It's nice that a lot of these spaces have continued to have lives that have grown into their own thing.

Ali Lapetina

I ended up getting a lot of national press because of Detroit Soup, so by the end of grad school, I was getting invited to give talks and lectures, and I started developing PowerPoint presentations and ways to talk about the creative work happening in Detroit. I also teach at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. Initially I taught one studio class and one liberal arts class each semester, and while it was really meaningful to connect with students, it was overwhelming for me. Now I teach one class a semester, which is a bit more manageable, and is also a little bit of income.

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.

Ali Lapetina

There's so much space here. It used to be a city for 2 million people, and now there are 750,000 people. There's a lot of land sprinkled throughout homes, so when people have lots next to them, they take the initiative to garden it. After you've gardened land for a certain amount of years, you can apply to the city to own the land. My neighbors and I started gardening the lots next to me before I owned them, and I was slowly able to buy those three lots and then the lots across the street.

I make money in a variety of ways — it's a big pie with all these little slivers. Part of what enables me to do what I do is that I have decided to live very simply. I have a large urban farm in Detroit, eight lots, so I'm able to grow most of my own food. I have to spend some money in the winter when the garden can't produce as much food, but in the summer I really only have to buy olive oil, salt, and almonds. I bought my house for $600 on auction, so I don't have to pay rent. I don't drink coffee, and I don't drink much alcohol. I cut out the excesses in order to be able to do what I love.

I've been able to put enough money together by teaching one class a semester and through occasional grants. I got a Kresge fellowship this past year, which gives $20,000 to nine visual artists every year in Detroit, and that has been huge in allowing me the space and time to continue developing my work. I've done Kickstarter campaigns for specific projects. When I do artists talks and exhibitions, I'll get small stipends — $500 here and there. And I have a few supporters of my work who have bought pieces or who contribute directly to the farm.

Ali Lapetina

From the time I was a little kid, I cared about what it means to live well and how people can thrive and cultivate well-being for themselves. I was curious about how a desire to live well affects quality of life in a city and in a country and in the world, and I thought I needed to promote that through policy and structures on a national scale. Art taught me that so much of the beauty and the value and the healing and the connection that makes life satisfying and profound comes from within. I've been able to participate in a larger movement that is made up of millions of people doing tiny projects across the globe, and I believe that's how we shape a more beautiful world.

Right now I'm working on the After House, a greenhouse next door to my own house, which will have trees in it that would not be able to survive in Detroit outside of a greenhouse — fig trees, olive trees, pomegranate trees. I'm going to a residency at the Santa Fe Art Institute for two months in the fall, where I'll work with Mira on a publication about the Edible Hut to tell the story of the power and impact the hut had. And I'm preparing an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, which is an installation of shelving with beautiful canned food in jars, arranged in the color spectrum, that will involve homemade tables and areas with medicinal tinctures and teas.

My advice to young artists, or anyone really, is to listen to that voice deep inside of you. Learn to trust it. There's plenty of doubt and fear and expectations of other people or ourselves that get in the way of listening to that. Don't settle, and when you hear the voice, just go for it. What you need will be provided.

Ali Lapetina

I've been lucky to have innately been pretty courageous and to have acted in spite of being fearful. But although I've always been independent and passionate in my work, there was often a good bit of fear. I still cared what people thought about it. Cultivating this healing space and working through the root of some of the things that made me fearful has been so freeing. Fear can be very motivating to a creative practice and to art-making and to organizing, but when you are making work from a place of peace and clarity and connection, it's so much more life-giving. I wouldn't change anything about my journey. The only thing I wish I could have gotten to sooner was looking at those root beliefs that made me fearful along the way. It's hard work, but it's so satisfying.

Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.

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Jill Filipovic senior political writer Jill Filipovic is a contributing writer for cosmopolitan.com.

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