THINKS A LOT ABOUT:
Bees, bats, birds, butterflies, nodding onions, Nootka lupines, woolly sunflowers, yarrow.
WORKS WITH:
Urban planners, homeowners, ornithologists, 67 volunteer gardeners, and hundreds of college students.
STUDIED:
Painting.
When Sarah Bergmann took the stage to collect her Genius Award for art Saturday night, she stood in the spotlight for only the briefest of speechesânine seconds, captured on videoâand she said almost nothing except to toast Dan Webb and Amanda Manitach, her fellow finalists in the art category. Webb, Manitach, and Bergmann genuinely like each other so much that four nights prior to the awards, theyâd joined up and pub-crawled their way into the back room at Vitoâs, finishing the night with pictures photo-bombed by the barâs resident taxidermied cougar. Openly anticipating the awkwardness of one winner and two losers, they also pointed out that the nominations helped their art; Manitach poignantly explained that sheâd given up on being an artist for financial reasons when the windfall of attention brought commissions and collectors her way. âIt literally changed my life,â Manitach said.
So on Saturday, after the award was announced, it wasnât weird when another, non-nominated Seattle artist who was perched on the edge of the Moore Theaterâs winding staircase pronounced, âI love Dan Webb and Amanda Manitach!â She then continued excitedly, without lowering her voice: âDan Webb is a personal friend of mine. Amanda is obviously fascinating. Itâs just that what Sarahâs doing is something that could only happen in this city, right now.â Some version of these opinions seemed to circulate throughout the room and ripple out into the city.
âWhat Sarahâs doingâ is The Pollinator Pathway. She started it in 2008 and, when itâs finished in a few years, it will be a stripe down Seattleâs back. It may be the largest art installation ever created here. Itâs a series of gardensâthere will be 60 in allâspanning a mile of Columbia Street, planted in the parking strips. Most of the plants are native, and they will draw insects along a new thruway that links one existing green space to another. (The two dots being connected are the well-tended Seattle University campus and Noraâs Woods, a pocket forest at 29th Street; visit the gardens anytime.) Bergmannâs art is especially social. Before any planting begins, she needs the consent, buy-in, and participation of every building owner along the way.
The Pollinator Pathway is a microcosmic urban solution to the global megaproblem of pollinator decline, particularly colony collapse in honeybees, which help provide most of our nongrain foods. Robin Held, the longtime Seattle museum curator who now leads Reel Grrls, once wrote simply, âThe Pollinator Pathway changes the way we understand our city.â Bergmann is adamant that her gardens are not the âflippingâ of urban land into protected, walled-off park spaces. Rather, they demonstrate the regenerative potential of the city pretty much just the way it is.
Bergmann was trained as a painter, and she graduated from Cornish in 1999. In her early plein air paintings, sheâd capture the light, the views, the birdsâbut, she says, âit was BS!â Missing were the buildings, parking lots, plastic bags. How to capture the entire system? She stopped painting, moved to New York, and found herself at an environmental ad agency working with, of all companies, Walmart, causing her to read up on distribution systems and, by extension, pollinator decline. To create Pathway, she returned to her home city, where her mother had selected her preschool according to how many plant species grew along the walk. The Pathway is a landscape painting made with the broadest brush she could devise.
Tiny yellow âroadâ signs (for insects and bees to read!) dot the Pathway gardens if you kneel down to look. Bergmann hustles for grants and works mostly for free. Back in her basement studio in a North Seattle rental house, sheâs also quietly painting a new naturalist book, after Audubon, but adapted for the so-called Anthropocene or age of humans. âYou know,â she explains, âa naturalist book with semitrucks.â