This Land is Alive
Austin, Edgewater, Lincoln Park, Little Village, Near West Side, Rogers Park, and elsewhere
Little Village Public Library
April 21 through Early June, 2026
Visit artiscraftisdesign.com for expanding narratives and collaborations of This Land is Alive.
Though we traverse pavement, cocoon ourselves in plastic clothing, and may live several stories up in the air, Chicago is a living, breathing place. Just because we’ve paved over so much of the land, doesn’t mean the land isn’t alive.
In this moment of climate catastrophe, what do we want to preserve for future generations and what do we want those future generations to remember? This Land is Alive maps overlooked places, people, and plants in Chicago. So that we can treasure what we have now and to preserve a record for future generations.
To date, This Land is Alive led by Mari Miller has published engagements with Elgin Bokari, Shuo Cai, and Starla Thompson, while creating public exhibitions and workshops in Austin, Little Village, and Rogers Park. This project is built on growing interactions with people and places across the City. This Land is Alive is moving slowly, with the intention to give every participant and site the respect they deserve.
Mari Miller (they/she) is a Eurasian Toisanese maker from Chicago. They believe that art, craft, and design are colonial constructs; all creative work is valid, with no one type inherently worth more than another. Though they were formally educated in art and design, Mari credits their early creative education to watching their grandmother invent small things to make her everyday life easier. As an experimental maker, Mari’s work is interdisciplinary, often combining creative processes with science and history. She is interested in experimentation and illuminating the poetic similarities between disciplines. Recurring themes include: DIY as a source of empowerment, the environment, fiber-based crafts, and food. While Mari has worked in a range of media, their recent work has focused on connecting to nature via citizen science. Inspired by Indigenous ways of relating to the world, she uses soil chromatography and cyanotypes to illuminate the spirit, or qi, of the land. Their primary inspiration has been Indigenous Chinese farming and tea culture, as well as Asian animism.