Laura Reeder walked with local youth and neighbors over two underused lawns in the City of Syracuse, NY. The walks turned undervalued public fields into living drawings, exploring how walking in public space connects ecology, safety, and community.
Her work is shortlisted for the Marŝarto Awards 2025. Below, she reflects on the experience.

My year as resident artist with the City of Syracuse did not begin in summer meadows. It began in autumn, taking hesitant walks with students in the recreation program at Schiller Park. They were reluctant. Walking felt risky! Shoes might get dirty, they might get tired or bored, and the weather was always too something: too cold, too hot, too windy, too wet.

But slowly our walking group grew. Within two weeks, very young children, awkward older youth, and impossibly cool teens were following along. Together we walked the familiar hills and paths of a park they knew well, but mostly as a landscape to cross on the way to a playground, a hangout shelter, or a soccer game. What convinced them? The stories carried back by the first brave walkers: the treasures they found, the memories of walking there with a grandparent from Nigeria, the day we raced umbrellas around dripping trees, the questions, serious and silly, posed to towering and mysterious old Goethe & Schiller statues.

Soon more young people agreed to walk with me in other parks, even when winter pressed against our cheeks. We made cultivators, walks that invited others to follow our lines in snow and leaves. The patterns stayed visible only because the young walkers stepped, shuffled, and raked them. Their footprints carried the marks farther than I ever could. I realized then that the year ahead would not be about lines I made, but the people who shaped them.

The next chapters unfolded across the city. At Kirk Park, neighbors approached from every direction… curious, cautious, playful. They asked what the lines meant, then began walking them before I could answer. Children sped along the curves, adults traced them slowly, dogs tugged their people toward new directions. The park became a shared drawing, made by feet rather than ink. We created parallel lines so that folks could walk and talk together.

In spring, we carried the practice to Thornden Park. Runners paused mid-route to ask questions, families adjusted their paths to step into the cultivator, and elders waved from benches as the pattern expanded. Each park offered a different rhythm, a different generosity. Together they formed a constellation of walking sites: Kirk, Schiller, Thornden, the smaller parks between them, and finally the summer meadows where the work opened fully.

By the time the meadows grew tall and green, our shared walking practice had taken on a deeper purpose. These were not leisurely strolls; they were acts of collective attention at a time when public life felt fractured. Each cultivator asked: Who feels safe walking here? Who feels welcome? Who hesitates? Why? The answers came in motion.

Young people described being watched in stores and followed in certain neighborhoods. Immigrant families spoke of walking without papers, unsure which routes were safe. Longtime residents noted displacement as rents rose and developments appeared without consultation. These were lived geographies, shaped by policies that narrowed rights and made movement itself a contested act.

Yet the meadows refused those constraints. When I raked the first line into the tall grass, it wasn’t a claim, it was an invitation. Children ran through it as if it had always been there. Adults paused inside the curves to speak to strangers. Some lingered at the threshold, deciding whether to enter, then stepped in anyway. A temporary commons took shape, a place where belonging was created, not assigned.

Throughout the year, I learned that walking cultivators are a form of listening. Each place asked me to acknowledge its layers: Haudenosaunee caretakers, canal workers, migrants, families seeking safety, before laying down a single line.

As I prepare my 2026 walks, I return to all of it: the first reluctant steps at Schiller, the snowy pathways at Kirk, the wide arcs of Thornden, the breathing meadows where the year came to rest. Walking has shown me that attention is a kind of activism, slow, persistent, communal.

A cultivator is simply the shape that activism takes when we walk together.

The winner and honourable mention of the Marŝarto Awards 2025 will be announced in early 2026.