A Happening in a Hothouse: Mimi Pinheiro’s “Salad Days”

Something new and strange has sprouted at New Bedford’s Allen C. Haskell Public Gardens. On view through October 12, the exhibition “Salad Days” has filled three defunct greenhouses with works by twenty-one artists—Lara Harrington’s ceramic flock of tiny flamingos, Greer Pester’s glass hangings casting colored light, a sculpture Stéphanie Williams crafted from driftwood, plaster, and the bodies of bees she raised. The show marks the first project for Site Specific Happenings, a new venture dedicated to creating exhibitions and elaborate events in historic spaces that have been overlooked or forgotten.

Cofounder Mimi Pinheiro has prior experience throwing arty parties in unlikely places. Before her recent return to New Bedford, where she grew up, Pinheiro spent five years in Mexico City, where she collaborated with fellow artists to stage an exhibition in an abandoned bodega, a performance in a former convent, an absurdist ballet in a Surrealist’s hacienda, and a mythic soiree in a quinceañera hall. I spoke to Pinheiro about curating “Salad Days,” the winged guests who crashed the opening party, and her hopes for future happenings.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Jacqueline Houton: Where did the idea for Site Specific Happenings come from?

Mimi Pinheiro: Tracing it way back, I actually studied dance in college, and I did a course called site-specific dance. I think that’s where my fascination with sites came from. So when I went to Mexico City, I was just absolutely amazed by the architecture and these abandoned sites. I have always thought that abandoned places would be very interesting locations to put art because you can usually get away with things. I’m like, “Okay, that’s an empty thing. Maybe they’ll let me do something.” And usually I got a yes. So that’s where a lot of those projects came from. They mostly started out as performance pieces, and then they became other things—games or art exhibitions or something like that. One thing that they shared was they were pretty collaborative, and I was always involving different artists. Each site sort of dictated the direction. In a quinceañera hall, we threw a Bauhaus party, or a party inspired by those ideas. We made a whole myth together as a group after recording people’s stories from the neighborhood, and we made the party follow this myth. It was kind of elaborate, but it actually turned out to be really amazing with all the different artists and all their talents. We had one person who was a pre-Hispanic chef, and he took the myth in his own way and made food based on that, so that was his art piece.

JH: And how did the concept for “Salad Days” start taking shape?

MP: For this one, I really wanted to attract people to New Bedford, in my own selfish way, because I moved back here about a year ago. And I recognized the city as a super interesting, really strange, kind of surreal place. So I thought, What a great opportunity to show people that through a curation and bring artists into these greenhouses and these gorgeous gardens, which I feel like are very hidden. The property is about fifteen minutes away from where I grew up, so not far, but I never had known about it growing up. About three years ago, when I was back here visiting family, an artist friend of mine who’s from here took me on a long bike ride one day and didn’t tell me where we were going. And we ended up there, and I was totally flabbergasted, because I was like, how did I not know this magical place was here?

The Haskell Gardens were tended to by Allen C. Haskell, who was a topiary artist and a horticulturist and very storied. He was very eccentric, sort of an artist, always having some gossip about him and always having a good time. He worked with Martha Stewart and did some landscaping for a queen. It was private until about ten years ago, but people would go to buy their plants there. He had plant sales; he had a little antique shop. A couple years after I first visited, I was just like, “I want to do something similar to what I was doing in Mexico City here.” And I was like, “Okay, it makes total sense for it to be in the greenhouses.” I talked to the steward who now works for the Trustees, and she was so down to do it. She was just like, “Yeah, do it. Screw into that, drill into that.”

JH: The show features twenty-one artists working in a range of mediums. A handful of them are from the South Coast; others are based in Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, San Francisco, even as far as Glasgow. What was the curation process like?

MP: It was my first time doing an open call. I put the call out on the newsletter Words of Mouth, and that really helped to spread it wide and let people know about it who would otherwise have no idea. In the call, I tried to be really clear that it may rain on your piece, that it will be over 100 degrees—all these different factors that limited who applied. So a lot of people who applied were ceramicists, because that work can withstand the conditions. And some other people applied anyway and were willing to take the chance. From there, it was a super intuitive process. I’m not a trained curator; I’m an artist. But I’ve done a lot of curation and love to put pieces together. So I chose pieces based on knowing the theme that I was going for, which is the slow, the handmade, seeing the messiness, the human trace, and also things that I knew would look good in these greenhouses. It’s all viewed from the exterior because the greenhouses are defunct, and for legal reasons, they didn’t really want the public going through. So it’s sort of like a window gallery, like window shopping. Something I’ve always been interested in is window design for big stores, which I’ve never gotten a chance to do. This was a really fun opportunity to pretend I was window dressing an Hermès shop—though obviously not at all because it was very DIY and chaotic, but in a beautiful way.

JH: The opening reception sounds like it was really fun. You encouraged attendees to dress in their vegetal best, and there was drawing in the gardens, music by Myles Goulart, and an equinox performance and elixir by the artist Willa Van Nostrand. How did the night go? Were there any highlights that jump out for you?

MP: Everyone was enchanted to be there, even a lot of locals who lived, like, three blocks away and had never heard of the place. A lot of people also came that I feel like weren’t that familiar with art, which I love. That’s another huge thing: I don’t just want to create spaces that have the same group of artists come to them all the time.

One huge highlight from that night was during Willa’s performance. She was leading everyone in a procession through the field. She started out in the greenhouses, ringing a bell and singing and doing a movement piece out to this really gorgeous hop house—we call it the hop house because there’s a lot of hops growing on it. It’s sort of made of branches, a little house that is covered in gorgeous plants, and you can go inside. And so while she was walking up to the field, it was getting quite dark—and bats were swooping everywhere! And then when she was in that little hop house, she created this elixir that was made with all the herbs and plants from the land and served it to us ceremoniously. So that was really magical.

JH: I know you have some grant applications in the works and some ideas for future happenings that might be too in the early stages to talk about. But when you think about your hopes for Site Specific Happenings, what’s one dream venue that springs to mind?

MP: One that inspired a lot of this, and weirdly kind of inspired me to move back here, was the Orpheum Theater on Route 18. I’m driving past this thing every day of my life growing up, and it’s been closed my entire life. It’s this massive building with graffiti on the bottom, and you can’t even see any doors; they are all bricked off. But at the top there are all these crazy faces, like gargoyles, that are massive. The opening night was the night the Titanic sank. The inside to this day is very decrepit but very intact. It hasn’t been changed at all, except that the bottom was a grocery store at one point. So that’s a site that I’ve always dreamed of. New Bedford has a lot of places that I’m very attracted to. There’s a lot of old places that are kind of in ruins that could have a little more attention paid to them, which is a big part of why I like to do this. I’m not a preservationist, but I really love preservation, getting the architecture to stay beautiful and not go totally prefab and modern. The character of things makes us unique. If everyone’s taste becomes the same, then that washes away our ability to create and our ability to imagine a future.