Contrary to popular wisdom, change is not constant. Change is uneven. We may live through long periods of equilibrium and autopilot. And then compressed transitions take hold. Many years of daily and seasonal routine are upended by adjustment or, as in the case of Donna Neuwirth here, redefinition. Stepping back from a publicly recognized co-founding leadership role in the dual fishbowl context of a small but nationally known arts organization situated in the intimacy of a rural community begs the question: what will be the new condition of an ongoing creative life if neither public nor private?

Before the stakes were high, I thought of myself as one who could roll with the punches—not effortlessly, but with an internal readiness to adapt to the next thing in a new place. Growing up in a military family that moved frequently (never to the midwest) is likely part of it; a Jewish family may add another punch or two. My sense of home was continually updated and my misfitness was, and remains, my friend.

How interesting then to still be here, in rural Wisconsin on the eastern edges of the Driftless Area, with life partner and Wormfarm co-founder Jay Salinas for over 30 years. Having fled the gray of Chicago, lured by the green of a former dairy farm, my adaptation response was in high gear, fueled by the sensuous living landscape that would come to teach, feed, and inspire us for the next three decades. Our working farm and integrated artist residency program served as the foundation for what would become the Wormfarm Institute. The farm-based residency led to many public-facing projects, spilling from art to farming and back again daily, as the Latin root of the word culture (

 by Jongil Ma installed at the 2024 Farm/Art DTour. Photo by Eric Bailles.


We came to this fertile place as fully formed adults raised in two very different democratic (liberal) urban/suburban households. My father was a Brooklyn-born WWII veteran, later an Air Force colonel and member of the National Space Writers Association. Jay’s was a Chicago-born half-Mexican air traffic controller who was a founding member of PATCO, the union Reagan busted as a frontline assault on organized labor.

As ground-huggers, our launchpad was different: a 6,000-square-foot former ballroom between a traveling zoo and a quinceañera shop in Pilsen, then a lively and emphatically ungentrified Mexican neighborhood on Chicago’s near South Side. Our transition to the Driftless in the early 1990s was pulled by beauty, curiosity, affordability, our dog Shemp, and a readiness to dive into unknown terrain: growing food. And pushed: after making our sprawling live/work space habitable, our Chicago landlord (the zookeeper) chose not to renew our lease (and then moved in).

Plans were sketchy at best due to significant life changes. We had no clue how our fragile identities as artists would acclimate, or whether one or both of us might find a suitable day job. We had an unwritten escape clause if it didn't work out past the honeymoon period.

Our new farm was known locally as “The Old McNamara Place”: forty acres of rolling hills on the edge of what may have been glacial Lake Wisconsin; ravines studded with the bones of rusty equipment from a time when milk from fifteen cows supported a family; nine buildings in various states of disrepair, filled with objects that led us down countless rabbit holes of wonder: teat slitters, stanchions, skulls, and a rare arrowhead from earlier inhabitants, to name a few.

Wormfarm garden with resident artists, 2025. Photo by Donna Neuwirth.


Our travels from innocence to experience unfolded: a gradual discovery that we two resident 

 share the land with a fathomless interdependent biotic community. Our infatuation grew into a deep, complicated love, one that could withstand the regular “slings and arrows” of unending toil, accelerating disrepair, questioning our life choices.

Identification works both ways—we didn't know that we were “an immersive life practice” until we showed up in a 

. Our personal enthusiasms, fascinations, and discoveries found a home, and the impulse to share them felt like, still feels like, a generous one. Seasonal waves of resident artists echoed our inspiration from daily interaction with the soil and fueled public-facing programs that would come later: Reedikulous Puppet Fest, The Reenchantment of Agriculture, Fine Art and Curiosities, 

Fermentation Fest: A Live Culture Convergence

The site-responsive nature and land-centric approach to projects allowed for a home in the discourse and practice of creative placemaking, a world that offered support for just such an odd hybrid as Wormfarm. Collaboration across sectors happened organically as we—two artists—were, like it or not, out of the arts silo. We did like it. We still do.

, collaborative artwork installed at the 2014 Farm/Art DTour. Photo by Paul Gaudynski. 


We described what Wormfarm does as “social sculpture” à la Joseph Beuys when we still straddled that somewhat limiting monoculture of Art. That’s not to say that artistic rigor isn’t critical to our work, but now it feels more like being part of a centuries-long lineage of evolving harvest celebrations and fertility rituals. And even deeper—the ecology of it all. Worms, our namesake, are literally subversive: under our feet they loosen soil, break down decomposing matter, and excrete fertility so roots can grow deeper and stronger, creating pathways for rain and nutrients, ready for the next necessary crop.

At this fertile intersection of culture and agriculture, we’ve found a “cover crop” of sorts, which may shield our scrappy nonprofit from much of the hostility that would find easier targets, while slowly and conservatively building fecundity. We’re arts and culture, yes, but farming and rural prosperity, too. Our public programs include both visible and invisible life-forms, and welcome a diverse audience, folks who come for art and trip over farming, or come for farms and trip over art. Visitors to Wormfarm events from near and far may casually meet on the edge of a hay field and discover that one aspect of an experience enhances another. Us and them, across divisions real or imagined, may find a glimpse of a lost “we.”

Years ago a trusted colleague who worked with the 

 shared the concept of the “radical center” in the context of ranchers and environmentalists working together, and it felt like where we wanted to be. It may be time to revisit this position without blowing our cover (crop).

by Sara Black, Amber Ginsberg, and Lia Rousset installed at the 2014 Farm/Art DTour.

Wormfarm’s public programs are seasonal and reflect what Plant Hardiness Zone 5 (verging on 4) will allow, roughly May through October. The programs change, but they continue to respond to both place and time. So, too, must a growing organization. And so we transition from the often challenging and much derided … 

On the cusp of our 25th year and after a rambunctious board meeting, we faced a choice between One, a spectacular funeral, or Two, planning for a post-founder Wormfarm, continued with a thoughtful transition and new leadership. The funeral lost. Staff and board are considering what that leadership-shape—and the next life of this subversive experiment—might look like.

An unlikely benefit to doing it now is that any 

 associated with an uncertain future, both organizationally and personally, will be drowned out by much global keening or rejoicing. It’s interesting that after 30 years in rural Wisconsin, in a swing township in a swing county in a swing state, in a time of staggering unraveling, that our urban Milwaukee, Chicago, and Mexico connections have never been stronger. United we stand, or wriggle if necessary.

“I find myself at once saddened that those 50 rural miles of art and learning will likely never be again, and at the same time overcome with gratitude for all the political and cultural punch those biennial years of literally outsider art brought us.”

– A DTourist upon learning that 2024, Year 10 of the Farm/Art DTour, was the last.

Wormfarm Institute co-founders Donna Neuwirth and Jay Salinas visit artist Leonardo Linares in his studio in Mexico City. 

It is a phrase we learned from our neighbors early on, one that signals an upcoming leave-taking. The fragment almost never becomes a sentence—it hangs as a gradual and friendly mosey-on.

 it’s time for me to reengage my rootless cosmopolitanism and let fresh blood, sweat, and tears have a go. As executive director (and accidental administrator) I will be emeritized by the end of 2026. Co-founder Jay will follow a bit later and will have his own version of the immersive life practice story to tell. Once a slur targeting Jews across Europe, 

suggested disloyalty and divided allegiances. I claim it proudly as multicentered with cross-sector and cross-border alliances. Released from the admin desk and visible leadership, my introvert self can quietly return. Then (

, I love that word in Spanish), I’d like very much to add another 

Jhani Randhawa, 2019. Randhawa created this sign along the Wormfarm driveway during their residency. Photo by Donna Neuwirth.

 suggests that a graceful exit is more difficult than I might expect. What will I miss? After the long-mosey, my guess is: not much. At what will I cringe? Plenty, I expect. How will I handle not being 

? Badly, maybe at first. But my leadership style is woefully out of fashion. Colonel’s-daughterhood, and then the theater, prepared me to somehow still expect a crisp salute. Alongside missing, cringing, identity shuffling and ego monitoring related to leaving a self-made position, there is a complicated pride akin to seeing one’s child grow into an adult. How will I respond to stepping out of a public-facing/quasi-maternal role?

My current thinking is formed by two things: One—as half of a couple living an immersive creative practice, the public/private dichotomy is a continuum, an ongoing challenge to keep the board room out of the bedroom. On a typical Sunday morning, Jay reads 

 aloud as I make breakfast from our resident chicken eggs with a break for a quick, loud disagreement about the upcoming Decomposium planning meeting before taking our dog Moxa on a long walk. There is no crisp salute. Two—after 25 years, I am still surprised that anyone knows who I am, or even, despite the silly name, who and what Wormfarm is. The shift from titular head of a subterranean legal entity with a board, bylaws, and a couple bank accounts to a footnoted private citizen may go largely unnoticed, leaving plenty of wiggle room for the next public figure. Perhaps tending to an “undercover crop” is the last duty in managing my case of founder’s syndrome.

In the meantime, our shifting and beloved team will “make hay while the sun shines,” featuring the 

, planned with brilliant choreographer Sarah Gordon Butler for September 2026: a rough-hewn polycultural public spectacle that grew from years of DTours. Framing everyday farming practices within a classical dance aesthetic, the Ballet pays homage to the inherent craft and significance of family farm-scale agricultural practices forging quiet unexpected alliances, so joy- and respect-ful it could very well be dismissed. But it is damn hard to hate.

Donna Neuwirth is co-founder and Executive Director of the Wormfarm Institute, based in rural Sauk County, Wisconsin. Seduced by life in the soil, and struck by parallels in process between farming and artmaking, Donna and co-founder Jay Salinas formed Wormfarm in 2000 and launched its foundational residency program, inviting artists to get dirty, eat well, and make art. From that seed, a range of public facing projects have grown at the intersection of culture and agriculture.

An evolving laboratory of the arts and ecology and fertile ground for creative work, Wormfarm explores the links between rural and urban communities within and beyond the food chain. For thousands of years, farmers in cultures around the world have interwoven dance, music, and art through rituals of planting and the harvest, in celebration of the land and those who care for it. Through a contemporary approach and within this timeless context, Wormfarm continues that tradition.

Donna is currently guiding Wormfarm’s transition toward post-founder leadership while beginning to organize its archives and plan for longer stays in beloved Mexico City.

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Donna Neuwirth

The site-responsive nature and land-centric approach to projects allowed for a home in the discourse and practice of creative placemaking, a world that offered support for just such an odd hybrid as Wormfarm. Collaboration across sectors happened organically as we—two artists—were, like it or not, out of the arts silo.

No Privacy, No Public

Advance and Retreat, or Milk from Fifteen Cows

 is A Blade of Grass’s outlet to collaborate with practitioners and learn through their perspectives. While we understand that our communities have long been in a state of crisis, the inauguration of the current political administration accelerated these crises with a strategy to overwhelm constituents. With the ground shifting rapidly throughout the first half of 2025, our conversation with artist and writer Dan S. Wang reminded us that moments like this are not new to communities and elders who have long engaged political struggle.

As guest editor of this year’s issue of 

, Dan brings a rich history of organizing with artist collaborators and collectives and contributing to social movements throughout the Midwest and beyond. Dan has produced work with artist groups Compass, Madison Mutual Drift, and Red76, and he was a founding member of Chicago experimental space Mess Hall. Dan’s recent residency and exhibition 

 at Dartmouth College explored political memory, revolutionary strategy, and leftist failure. In 2022, Dan co-edited with Anthony Romero and Daniel Tucker the book 

Lastgaspism: Art and Survival in the Age of Pandemic

, a collection of interviews, critical essays, and artist portfolios that—in their words—“offers a framework to help us make sense of the interlocked crises of the unfolding present and asks with critical optimism what can happen in this time of transition.”

 contributions that will continue to unfold throughout the rest of the year.

At the quarter mark of the 21st century, more than two decades after the Patriot Act and now at the dawn of ubiquitous AI, privacy is nothing but a bad joke and our encrypted browsers won’t save us.

Which is not to say that the public sphere is healthy. In the United States, between Clintonian neoliberalism and Trump’s crony capitalism, everything “public” has been heavily degraded, disfigured, shut down, or shut out. Most public services are on life support. Public sector workers are the go-to punching bag for conservatives. Public education has one defender for every hundred critics. Public lands will be sold to real estate vultures for a song if the Republicans get their way. And public expression? Forget it. Circulation is so uneven and attention so fleeting that any given public gesture, message, or display might as well be private—in which case, refer to the bad joke above.

Over a three-part rolling release, this year’s edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. By addressing this condition directly and obliquely, the hope is that the conversations, essays, process notes, and other contributions amount to a genealogy of “private” and “public” while grappling with a world in which it is no longer possible to hide, and yet in which the spaces of mutual visibility and common communication continue to fracture and shrink.

The wish is to create forms of social engagement untethered to the outdated dichotomy, but that can realistically contend with inherited systems and distributions of power that were built on those presumptions of public versus private. If this edition of 

makes strides toward that end it will have been a success, all the more so as a project completed under a totalitarian regime on the ascent. It must be said, the events of 2025 and beyond—today, yesterday, any day you are reading this—temper our plans and expectations. Whatever adjustments we make as the year unfolds will stand as a record of this time. Progress is the hope, survival the goal.

This editorial platform was created in collaboration with curator and writer Risa Puleo, who served as an advisor and thought partner to A Blade of Grass in 2024. 

 is guest edited by Dan S. Wang with support from ABoG Program Directors Allie Linn and Lee Heinemann with Executive Director Lu Zhang. ABoG’s board is ashley sparks, Elissa Blount Moorhead, Diya Vij, Gregory Sale, Michael Premo, and Michael Quattrone. Rebekah Kirkman copyedited these contributions and Team designed the identity and interface for 

Dan S. Wang

Over a three-part rolling release, this edition of 

 seeks to make sense of the collapsed public/private scheme, once a workable distinction, now an ideological wreck. 

No Privacy, No Public 

The final contribution to this edition of 

 comes in the form of a letter of appreciation and advice. Informed by a Gen X past and addressed to the Gen Z present, it concerns our shared future and the future belonging to those not yet born. Janet Sarbanes sends this edition of 

 into the books by reaching for the Castoriadis's third space where the public meets the private, where the brute power of government meets the immanent energy of the governed, and where individuals own their singularity in a context of collectivism.



Dear Z,

I’ve always thought generational differences were the least interesting and meaningful ones, popularly attributed as they are to technological innovations or parenting techniques, but now it feels urgent to say something to those who will be alive long after we are gone. For the record, I am Gen X, caricatured on social media as the fierce products of latchkey childhoods, casualties of the Great Divorce brought on by the sexual revolution. As with all caricatures, it contains a kernel of truth. But we were also the smallest generation (relative to Baby Boomers and Millennials, and now Gen Z and Gen Alpha), the “alt” generation (holding onto the notion that it was still possible to sell out—and still possible to criticize those who did), and the last analog/first digital generation. That means, while we have lived most of our lives under similar political and social dynamics as you, we remember a time when things were different.

For starters, things were funkier. Literally. Bodies took over in the seventies. When we were kids there was no taming of the hair, polishing of the skin, continuous eliminating of odors. Sweaters were knobby. Denim was cool. Kids ran in rainbow packs. Our everyday lives were gritty, but that grit had meaning. Post-Nixon, it was all about truth content. Post–Great Society, there was still a sense of a public interest, though that would soon be eradicated by Reagan and Thatcher’s neoliberalism. And of course, there was no social media. There weren’t even personal computers. There were corded wall phones, and there was TV, but you spent a lot of time just hanging around other people, taking them in.

Fast forward through the dawn of the internet, Web 2.0, and the COVID pandemic to the current moment, and being with other people, without filters or “likes” or stories or followers, has become a 

. This technology was sold to us as radically democratic, with no gatekeepers and nothing to get in the way of us broadcasting our lives and thoughts to the world, no barriers to communication with one another—or with the powerful. But of course, the public sphere is only as democratic as you make it. The era of neoliberalism is often associated with the collapse of the public sphere into the private sphere—with “private” defined as the market economy. And certainly, transnational corporations exert enormous control today, but the public sphere—the state—has not gone away. It still exists, only now it is wholly concerned with regulating to protect business, rather than (at least occasionally) regulating business to protect the common good. It is the distinction between public 

 that has collapsed, no more so than with Trump’s crony capitalism, which shamelessly manipulates the levers of government to enhance the fortunes of the nation’s top billionaires.

How to counteract this, as ordinary people? Cornelius Castoriadis provides us with a different formulation, dividing society into three rather than two spheres: the private (or intimate) sphere, the public (or governmental) sphere, and the private/public sphere. All three are independent of each other—or should be, in a free society—though still interrelated. To Castoriadis, the private/public sphere exists wherever and whenever people emerge from their homes into community, potentially in places of business—at the store, in a restaurant—but also in schools, universities, organizations, unions, community groups, clubs, leagues, etc. It is where we 

where we discuss the society we want to live in,

but it is not where political decisions are made.

Political decisions are formulated and carried out in the public sphere—ideally with the meaningful participation of all (and this extends to economic participation as well—in a free society we would decide how we work, and to what end).

Castoriadis was a believer in direct democracy, which is not our (current) system of government; nonetheless, his foregrounding of these three spheres helps us understand how far we are from direct democracy and how we can get closer to something like it. The fact that the public sphere today is controlled by the economic and political elite has rendered it in large part private: “decisions are made behind closed doors, [and] the little that is brought onto the public stage is masked, prefabricated, and belated to the point of irrelevancy.”

 Meanwhile, as the private/public sphere becomes more and more dominated by consumerism and the dictates of the market, it, too, is depoliticized. Even the private (intimate) sphere is mediatized and commodified by companies like Meta and X to generate profits for those aforementioned billionaires (on their way to becoming trillionaires).

Was anything more heartbreaking than when we withdrew into our houses? In the hours before the official COVID lockdown was declared in LA, I remember hearing my ten-year-old tell her best friend: “My parents won’t let me come over because they say there’s a virus,” as if we were just being weird and mean. COVID had dramatic social effects: it made the public sphere public again, with the government (for a time) acting on behalf not of the market but of the common good—life itself. And when everyone eventually emerged from their homes, it was not to go shopping or eat out but to engage in a newly politicized private/public sphere: the George Floyd rebellion that put not just police brutality but the entire edifice of white supremacy under immense pressure. That was you, Gen Z. And it was you who restored evacuated university campuses to the private/public sphere with the student movement for Palestine.

Another term people often use to describe the private/public sphere is 

, but that’s a slightly different concept. The private/public sphere not only abuts the public sphere, it can 

, demanding transparency, action, justice, power. The toppling of monuments, the occupation of quads—those were manifestations of the private/public sphere, powered by the “eros effect,” which is how George Katsiaficas describes “moments when the basic assumptions of a society—patriotic nationalism and the authority of the government; hierarchy, the division of labor, and specialization—vanish overnight” and there arises a “spontaneous cathexis between human beings.”

 This is not mob mentality, but a state where individual and collective freedom become mutually reinforcing and transformative of society.

Other manifestations of the private/public sphere don’t have that mass dimension but are equally powerful. Take today’s community defense patrols against ICE kidnappings—literally just neighbors coming out of their houses to help neighbors, but they’re the primary bulwark we have right now against fascism. And then there are the usual civil society formations—no harm in adopting those and making them your own. Or better yet, create new ones. Small solidarities give life meaning—they fend off loneliness and bring joy. Under the right conditions, they can grow exponentially into something resembling another world (that eros effect).

So hold onto this private/public sphere. Find each other again IRL, analog-style. There’s a reason we’re attracted to that old technology. Don’t accept their substitute social reality. It’s impoverished, otherwise they wouldn’t have made it addictive. Hold onto your privacy, too, or at least try not to participate in its wholesale commodification and algorithmic manipulation. Surveillance is everywhere, yes, but self-surveillance we can do something about—self-surveillance we can limit. Use your socials to organize, as you did in Nepal, but remember that except under unusual circumstances, whatever you say in that space is swiftly buried under piles of cats, celebrity interviews, and novelty dessert recipes. To really connect with other people, you need to brave their physical presence—the grit, the funk.

Through this revitalized private/public sphere you will pressure governments to do the one thing you need them to do so that your life on this planet can continue, the one thing that, in their deeply privatized state, they will not or cannot do: end fossil fuel production. But I don’t need to tell you that, Z. You have looked into the face of climate catastrophe, and as a result you already have the planetary as your horizon, a world beyond nations, beyond profit and extraction, beyond domination and exploitation. You’re good.

With gratitude and admiration,
X

Janet Sarbanes

And then there are the usual civil society formations—no harm in adopting those and making them your own. Or better yet, create new ones. Small solidarities give life meaning—they fend off loneliness and bring joy.