Linda Goode Bryant in "Friends & Strangers"

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Standing amid brick buildings and concrete roads, artist Linda Goode Bryant works the land, supplying underserved communities with plant-based food through Project EATS, which she founded. Her work in institution-building began long before Project EATS. In 1972, the artist moved to New York City and began working at the Studio Museum in Harlem, where she spoke to Black artists who continually expressed feeling shut out of the art world. In response, Goode Bryant said, “Let’s just do it ourselves,” and the Just Above Midtown (JAM) gallery emerged from that decision. Committed to showing the work of Black artists and other artists of color alongside white artists, the gallery aimed not to replicate the discrimination of other institutions at the time. Choreographing the community that gathered at JAM was a part of Goode Bryant’s artistic practice, bringing artists from across the city and the country to participate in the project, liStanding amid brick buildings and concrete roads, artist Linda Goode Bryant works the land, supplying underserved communities with plant-based food through Project EATS, which she founded.ke New York City–based artists Janet Olivia Henry and Randy Williams and West Coast artists Senga Nengudi, Houston Conwill, and David Hammons. Goode Bryant made a space for experimentation in Black and contemporary art and became home to vital conversations, like the explosive opening of David Hammons’s Greasy Bags and Barbeque Bones at JAM. 

Artist Maren Hassinger recollects that money was not the objective at JAM, but instead, the goal was that artists would make new and extraordinary work. The community gathered at JAM catalyzed artists to develop new and better art, as observed by artist and choreographer Ishmael Houston-Jones. Currently, Goode Bryant leads Project EATS, a New York City–based urban farming nonprofit with six farms growing plant-based food for communities without access to locally grown foods. At Project EATS, communities gain access to produce and learn how to farm themselves. Forty years after JAM first opened, Just Above Midtown: Changing Spaces opened at the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition charts the sixteen years JAM was open, bringing together a suite of groundbreaking works exhibited at JAM and working to bring its radical spirit into the institution. “I could really, really, really look up and see the elders sitting in the rafters and say, ‘Y’all did it. We’re here. We’re in the infrastructure of this mofo now.’ And I like that.” says Goode Bryant. “Because we should be. We should’ve been. And we are.”