Aluminum and polycarbonate structure, enamel, common barberry (Berberis vulgaris)

2021

140″ x 115″ x 115″

Monument to the Common Barberry serves as a memorial to the European barberry (Berberis vulgaris) and the Barberry Eradication Program. Introduced by colonial Europeans to North America as an ornamental shrub, the common barberry was the subject of an unprecedented federal and state plant disease control campaign lasting from 1918 into the late 1970s and beyond created to kill all common barberry plants for their ability to serve as an alternate host to black stem wheat rust (Puccinia gramanis) which threatened anthropogenic wheat crop production. A product of the American Phytopathological Society (headquartered in Saint Paul, MN) and USDA’s formation of the War Emergency Board of Plant Pathologists —headed by University of Minnesota’s Elvin C. Stakman—the Barberry Eradication Program resulted in the destruction of hundreds of millions common barberry bushes in the decades it was in operation. While the destruction of other lifeforms to promote an ever-shifting terrain of human interest was nothing new, the scale of the campaign and its desire for a totality of kill and militant rhetoric with which it operated makes the Barberry Eradication Program worth considering as a parallel to the context of Nationalist/ Ethno- Nationalist and National/World ideology wars, disputes, and atrocities through which the modern history of the West is often categorized and understood. The common barberry, due in no small part to the influence of Stakman, was cast as ‘an alien enemy’ shape-shifting into whatever villain common prejudice would have it: ‘kin of the Kaiser’, ‘red handed anarchist’, a remorseless ‘thief’, and frequently appearing in illustrations as host to a cloud of stem rust assuming the form of Satan about to descend upon a wheat farmer’s crop.

Monument to the Common Barberry is a greenhouse in the form of an abstract shock of wheat containing a single common barberry bush.