US Department of Agriculture Yearbook 2025

I spent a lot of time with my grandmother in Montgomery, Massachusetts. The bedroom I slept in was lined with bookshelves including a complete collection of the United States Department of Agriculture Yearbooks, beginning in the 1800s. These hardbound books were offered to farmers for free by their Senators. They offered statistics on last year’s harvests and weather patterns, and also gave advice about composting, insect troubles, and livestock.

I was fascinated by the subversive books produced in the 1940s-1970s. Titles for the yearbooks like Crops in Peace and War, A Good Life For More People, and Contours of Change brought more radical information responsive to the changing times. In the 1940s, these yearbooks introduced the concept of the Victory Garden. In response to the 1960s Civil Rights movements which called for equal access in an increasingly diverse and urbanized United States, the books began to advise on urban food growing.

I revisited these yearbooks in 2025. Their messages of self sufficiency and social change have long since been diluted away in more recent editions, so I wanted to paint a new one into being. I was thinking about Nottoway, a Louisiana plantation that burned in 2025, generating conversation on how to describe the destruction of a site of suffering, injustice, and slavery. I was also thinking of the Whitney Plantation, nearby, which has been reclaimed by People of Color as the only historic plantation converted to a museum. And I was thinking about influencers, world travel, and our quickly changing climate.

Oil on canvas

30” x 40” (h x w)

All paintings can be shipped

See below for a visual of different sizes paintings above a sofa.