Skate and Grow: A Culture of Care

By Amara Thomas

Walker Publishing Filed to Learning · Part of Creative Care

Courtesy Amara Thomas

Gardening is all about care. It's about creating the necessary variables and conditions for your plants to thrive. It requires tending and listening to the land. The care is active and intentional. My local community garden is a long, narrow strip of green space stuffed between two large New York City buildings. At the peak of summer, it’s overflowing with eggplants, tomatoes, and other assorted vegetables ready for harvest. Among the green is a handmade windmill and a set of picnic tables, often occupied by neighbors and locals. The garden is a destination for neighborhood gossip, leisure, and afternoon sun. The labor and love of my neighbors are evident in the lush, green abundance that shows the care that bore it. Establishing the garden took neighbors coming together to advocate for the transformation of a vacant lot in our industrial neighborhood into a green space for the community. Collectively, they cultivated the land, navigated city bureaucracy, and birthed something of a refuge for myself and many others.

I must admit I am a terrible gardener, but I enjoy being part of this community. I enjoy watering plants and plucking weeds on Saturday mornings while I listen to people talk, share, and complain about what's going on in the neighborhood. Through the garden, I have made friends and intergenerational connections. And the same can be said about community gardening, where you are not only caring for your plants, but for your fellow gardeners. It’s about respecting, listening, communicating, and collaborating with others to maintain and steward a space open and available for everyone. It's about creating the necessary variables and conditions so anyone off the street can stroll into the garden and feel encouraged and equipped to participate. As a teen programmer at the Museum of Modern Art, I take a lot of inspiration from the garden. I strive to build learning spaces that are open and accessible. I work to put into place the right variables to create nurturing spaces for youth to create and develop self-expression, advocacy, and tools for self-reflection, bringing lessons from the garden into the museum.

I am an educator and an artist, a gardener, and also a skateboarder. A culture of care threads these varied interests.

I will never forget the first time I ollied off a ledge, jumping over four steps. To any onlooker, this feat was nothing impressive—a small jump from a two-foot ledge, over a few steps—but for me, a year into skateboarding, it was everything. When my board hit the ground and I realized my feet were where they were supposed to be, I immediately heard the screaming and shouting of my friends who stood nearby. Their skateboards pounded against the hot concrete, cheering me on, followed by big smiles, sticky sweaty hugs, and cheesy high-fives. We had been at this “spot” for a few hours. Each of us tried to accomplish what at first seemed utterly impossible, but as the hours passed, we grew more and more confident. With each successful land, the cheers got louder, and so did the slamming of boards on the ground. We were amped, and angsty, sweaty, and exhausted from the July sun, Midtown’s reflective buildings providing no shade or protection. I had never felt so good in my life, and it was all a direct result of the people and community around me.

At that spot, encouraging me and one another on, were the other skaters in my life, who, similarly, were existing on the margins of the New York City skate scene, holding identities that were not CIS straight males. We all had found skateboarding later in life after finally finding the courage to participate in a sport that for so long had felt off limits to us. Within that margin was something special, and the thread holding us all together was real care and love. There was a real intention to center our experiences as queer women and BIPOC folks, and to build a safe space for us all to explore, exist, and experience joy. We could be silly, goofy, and so incredibly bad at skating. And in the same breath, we could be amazing, dedicated, and committed to progressing and developing skills. There was room for it all. There was real care for one another. There was caring for someone after bailing and falling. There was care that manifested as encouragement and support. There was care delivered as understanding and holding space. During those years, my goal was not to get better at skating but to simply enjoy myself and be curious about a newfound hobby. But due to the nurturing and supportive nature of the community I was a part of, I tried and landed tricks I never thought I could attempt. I was able to gain a taste of a kind of leisure—loitering, passing the time— I thought was only accessible to men. Skating in such a safe space empowered me to overcome fears and push my body in ways I didn’t know was possible. It allowed me to be daring, and silly.

Skating and community gardening have taught me many things. My fellow community gardeners integrate care into not only tending to the land, but toward one another. With my skate peers we practiced collective care by centering our experiences as marginalized folks. As an educator and programmer, I bring these lessons and experiences into my work. I craft, design, and develop museum programs for New York City teens that prioritize and center care. Beyond the preservation that comes with collecting artworks, museums aren’t typically considered sites of care. They’re often perceived as cold, austere, and pathologically white (not just referring to the walls here). For museum teen programs to be successful, and appeal to young people, they need to feel decidedly un-museumy. They need to instill a feeling of friends cheering you on after skinning your knee, or the gentle advice from a seasoned gardener. Looking outside the museum field for models to design care is essential. Care is the vehicle to build authentic spaces for learning. I am grateful for these spaces for providing the care and for teaching me how to extend that beyond the garden and skate park. By doing so, my hope is that the museum can be, for teen program participants, what the skate park and my community garden are for me.▪︎