Hana Ward

Provision Gardens, 2024

The painting titled Provision Gardens (2024) references the gardens that enslaved people kept for their own food and nourishment. Provision gardens were cultivated for subsistence rather than profit, so they often contained a diverse array of vegetation, unlike the monocrop fields of large plantations. Often located on land deemed unsuitable or inconvenient to the owners of a plantation, common crops including sweet potatoes, yams, plantains, tubers, cowpeas and other legumes, vegetables, medicinal plants, and fruit trees. The first documented sightings of cowpeas in the US were in the provision gardens of the enslaved. Legend says that the cowpea traveled to the Americas aboard the slave ships as seeds braided into the hair of those taken from the African coast. Gardening on their own time, enslaved people were able to reclaim a small measure of autonomy by supplementing the food supplied by the plantation—one of many survival techniques practiced during this time. In this painting, Ward reflects on the concept of having your own little plot for your own nourishment and enrichment.

Inquire