This week on Arizona Illustrated…Tucson Village Farm is growing healthy food and community; Splinter Collective’s humane approach to the housing crisis at Estevan Park; Make Way for Books is fostering readers and authors alike and an exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art exposes us to contemporary photography’s many creative manifestations.


Tucson Village Farm

Tucson Village Farm is a multi-agency effort between UA, Pima County Cooperative Extension and other groups that focuses on children and sustainability, healthy foods, and education. There is a Little Farm and a Big Farm, and the Big Farm is the focus of this story. It is located northeast of the intersection of Roger Road and Campbell Avenue, creating a rural setting in an urban area. The land provides space to grow vegetables and fruit, and provides a meeting area for community gatherings, cooking classes and a ropes course. TVF also holds a weekly market each Tuesday from 4 pm to 6 p m at its location, 2201 East Roger Road.

Estevan Park Project– Housing Crisis

Splinter Collective is a housing and community gathering space located in the Barrio Anita and Dunbar Springs neighborhoods in Tucson. It's also adjacent to Estevan Park, which in recent years has become a nexus for a local encampment for people experiencing homelessness and a symbol for Tucson's growing housing crisis. While the city has regularly responded to the challenges of managing the park with a top-down approach that manifests as regular sweeps of the encampment, Splinter Collective is trying out a different, bottom-up strategy: by envisioning what a community-based response might look like; by building relationships, offering humane services, conducting beautification projects in the park, and treating community members experiencing homelessness as fellow neighbors rather than trespassers.


Make Way for Books

Make Way for Books has had a tremendous impact over the past 25 years promoting literacy in our community. Now they are finding creative ways to development a new app that will encourage a younger generations of readers.
Since 2016, every fall semester Professor Stephanie Pearmain’s ENGL 389 class (Intro to Publishing in the Children's and YA market) partners with the Make Way for Books app team for 8-weeks. Here students have the opportunity to not only learn aspects of writing for children and publishing, but the value in community engagement. To date nearly 20 stories written, for this class have been illustrated and published on the app.

Contemporary Photography at the TMA

Photography represents nearly one-third of the Tucson Museum of Art’s collection of contemporary art. Artists increasingly began to work in an interdisciplinary and pluralistic fashion since 2000. As a result, the medium of photography has expanded in scope, scale, and content. This exhibition invites us to explore contemporary photography through the works of Mark Klett, Kate Breakey, Judy Miller, Benjamin Timpson, and Paho Mann.