Friday Focus - Urban Agriculture: Growing Care
Join Blair Cunningham in this online talk, to explore how Glasgow’s community gardens are growing care and reshaping the city’s future.
Friday Focus: The Hunterian's Online Talks
Date: Friday 23 January 2026
Time: 13:00 - 13:30
Venue: Online
Category: Hunterian
Speaker: Blair Cunningham
For over a decade Glasgow has witnessed a blossoming of Community Gardens. Small in size but with great potential, these places and the groups that maintain them are playing a significant role in re-shaping both the city’s landscape and its relationship with food.
Although not without challenges, through these grassroots forms of re-generation, citizens are beginning to define their urban lives, not as private individuals, but as social beings. In doing so, we begin to see our environment as a great ensemble of people, animals, plants and things – all contributing to this place we call Glasgow.
The artwork 'Urban Agriculture: Growing Care' represents a glimpse of another Glasgow – a Glasgow that generates new forms of value in places and people all too often neglected or exploited by purveyors of the ‘profit first’ logic.
This artwork is part of a larger body of research carried out by researchers at the University of Glasgow that considers community gardening as an example of what a more caring city looks like.
'Urban Agriculture: Growing Care' is on display as part of Views of Glasgow a new exhibition at the Hunterian Art Gallery which invites visitors to consider: What does community mean to you today — and in the future?
About the Speaker
Blair Cunningham is a Glasgow based artist and academic who has worked at the university of Glasgow for over 20 years. Their artistic practice looks at the systems or dialogues we create to understand and contextualise our environment using the form of maps, text, photography, and intuitive mark-making. His work is in several collections in Scotland and England and have exhibited internationally.
About Friday Focus
Friday Focus is an online talks series hosted by The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. Each session features a different speaker, sharing a deeper insight into our exhibitions and collections, research and work going on behind the scenes at The Hunterian.
The talks take place at 1pm over Zoom, and are 25 minutes long with time for questions afterwards. Recordings of the sessions will be made available on our YouTube channel.