Molly Costello uses art, seeds, and story to weave our way back into all the ways that connect us.
By Jennifer Bamberg
(Photo: Samantha Cabrera Friend)
This profile is part of our How a Community Heals series.
Images of luminous gardens, figures gathering under a starry night sky, and an abundance of juicy fruits and vegetables all fill queer illustrator Molly Costello’s artwork.
The Rogers Park resident is a prison abolitionist, a seed saver, a gardener and a beekeeper whose art reflects on the fractal way that radical imagination can cultivate connection and healing. As a cultural worker, Costello sees their life’s role as amplifying messages and movements for radical change and sharing visions of new worlds taking root for the public.
Around 2014, however, they started to feel burnt out. They had been a youth organizer since 2010 and were constantly sitting with what doesn’t work. Once they began asking themselves, “What are we working towards? What do we want? What does that world look like and feel like?” the answers started to come through radical imagination. Making art was a way for Costello to process and move forward in their life. In 2018, Costello transitioned from youth programming to full-time art making.
Costello’s art has a radiant sculptural quality to it. They often use layers of thick paper cuttings to produce depth and shadow and highlight their subjects with a dewy glow. Their art has been a mainstay in just about every house I’ve ever lived in Chicago for the past decade. While we’ve lived somewhat adjacent lives, often working on similar projects and sharing community, our paths have rarely crossed. Still, I feel an intimacy with them on this phone call, and I relish getting to speak with them about healing. Their art has always helped me feel grounded, stalwart, connected to those who have come before us and those who will come after us.
Last year, Costello worked on several poster art campaigns and collaborated with artists and organizations for police and prison abolition like the We Keep Each Other Safe poster series, the Free Them All Care Package, the Black Trans Lives Matter mural in Andersonville, and the Mama’s Day Bail Out campaign in Philadelphia. They also worked on the Coloring Care Package, a free resource for self-care, and the National Week of Mourning for victims of COVID-19 with Lifted Voices. But it’s the practice of seed saving and the experience of grief they want to talk about today during our call.
Costello started the Rogers Park Seed Library with friends Sangi Ravichandran and Annie Rebekah Gardener in the early winter of 2019, hosted at the PO Box Collective. The Seed Library is a collaborative mutual aid project where neighbors can gather together while sorting and sharing seeds.
“[Sharing seeds] is about co-creating with the natural world and working with adaptive plants that are resilient to climate change,” they explain. “It’s an opportunity to share skills and quiet slow time with our hands.”
(Photo: Samantha Cabrerea Friend)
Their artwork has long engaged with grief and loss, and the resilience that comes with healing. Costello believes that grief is an integral part of the human experience. We both agreed during our call that one of the most difficult parts of movement work is to acknowledge and move through the great amount of loss and failures we inevitably collectively experience — losing campaigns, spaces, projects, friends and family.
“We are constantly grieving for the world that we know can exist and are denied,” they say. “We grieve the world that we want.”
Completely stunned, I paused. It brought up my own experiences with loss, especially the intangible losses of longing, in a way I hadn’t prepared for going into this interview. I soon felt an awkward pressure to move the interview along, looked down at the questions I had written, and chose one completely at random: “So, do you draw people you know, or do they come from your imagination?” Grief is a constant companion — or the sister of love as Costello reminds us — and even though it joins us more and more the older we get, it doesn’t mean that we get better at holding space for it.
To help people collectively move through grief, one of Costello’s longtime friends and community circle–keeper, Jennifer Viets, has an idea to repurpose Costello’s calendar art as prompts for future community circles in collaboration with the Seed Library. Community circles are gatherings of three or more people who come together to honor a loss or life, address a conflict or harm, problem solve and find healing. Prompts are used to initiate a circle, and can be a song or a poem, physical seeds, or sharing and tasting a freshly grown tomato. I feel like after a year of the pandemic, social distancing, mutual aid in the face of great inequity, rebellion, and repression, we’re all in need of a circle.
“Seeds can open the door to relationship and story and help us weave our way back into all the ways that we’re connected,” they say. “[In the community circle], maybe we use a prompt like, ‘Let’s all go around and share our fondest memory of being in the garden’ or ‘what’s the first time when you tasted a great tomato.’”
As a white person, Costello relates to seed saving as a way to connect with their ancestry and culture that goes beyond “the broader lumping of whiteness in the United States.” They see food as a way to connect with their roots and “create culture that is not white supremacy,” finding joy in growing some of the same seeds their ancestors grew in Sicily and Ireland. Costello emphasizes that the Indigenous people’s movement to rematriate seeds back to Native communities, often taking them back from settler seed banks, university collections, and museum shelves, is one way to address the many questions of access that seed saving can bring up.
Looking forward, Costello still plans to rely on their imagination and art to bring people together.
“It really is a matter of life and death for us to understand that we are not individuals disconnected from each other, but that we are fully dependent on and connected to each other in terms of mental, social, and physical health and wellness,” they say. “Art for me has been a way to ground into those things, to study them, practice them, and embody them.”
Jennifer Bamberg (she/her) is a welder and emerging journalist based on Chicago’s West Side.
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