Image: Ruby City, San Antonio
With ‘Weed is a Word,’ multidisciplinary artist Julia Barbosa Landois transforms a fenced lot at Ruby City into a garden, gathering place, and space for reflection.
At the center of the project, Landois cuts a large circle into the existing turf and reintroduces beneficial native plants that have increasingly disappeared from contemporary lawns, including goldenrod, purslane, frogfruit, and shy plant. From this starting point, ‘Weed is a Word’ considers how language shapes ideas of value and exclusion.
By returning plants often removed or overlooked to the landscape, Landois invites viewers to reconsider their assumptions about beauty, value, and place, prompting them to ask who gets to decide what belongs. As the garden responds to weather, growth, and care, the artwork will change over time, making its experience inseparable from the place where it takes root.
The free, all-ages community picnic invites visitors to spend time in the garden, share food, listen to music, and explore the ideas at the heart of the project. Through food, art, conversation, and hands-on activities, the gathering extends the artwork beyond looking and into the experience of being together.
She imagined Ruby City as a place where art could be shared freely and where people could come together around new ideas and perspectives.
