This artist wants Phoenix residents to tell her about their favorite trees

When’s the last time you really looked at a map? Many of us have come to associate maps with apps on our phones that we use to get from point A to point B. But our next guest thinks of maps as opportunities for deep reflection.

Jen Urso is an artist here in Phoenix, and she’s just launched a new map-making project called “Treasured Trees.” It’s a collaboration with the city’s Office of Heat Response and Mitigation.

Urso wants Phoenicians to send in stories about their favorite Valley trees, which she’ll then incorporate into a hand-drawn map illustrating the role trees play in urban life.

As Urso told The Show recently, part of the inspiration for the project came from her own curiosity about a tree in her neighborhood.

If you’d like to send Urso a tree story of your own, visit her website at steadyhandmaps.com.

Full conversation

JEN URSO: I walk to meet my son to pick him up from school, and it's like we're choosing a route based on like, where can we find the best shade? And it's always like a huge challenge.

So there's this one really gorgeous old olive tree in my neighborhood. I know that the history of olive trees here in the city is they stop planting fruiting olive trees. And I don't know, I think they said it was something to do with like allergies or whatever, which I just find really funny that we would plant a tree and make it like not do what it would naturally do.

But, you know, olive trees are just so, I don't know, they feel like really like legendary and they're sort of twisted and gnarled and, you know, and dense. And it's just like I would walk by it all the time and just be like, wow, it's like the coolest looking tree, you know, even though knowing, too, it's not like a native tree, it's not right, you know.

So I feel a little guilty because I like it so much.

SAM DINGMAN: That's so interesting though. I mean, I think of, I associate to the idea of kind of ancientness. When I think of olive trees, it makes me think of Greece, you know.

URSO: Yeah.

DINGMAN: And there is sort of an interesting Phoenix commentary there that here we are in this ancient, ancient land, but so many things here are so new. And here we are transplanting this type of tree here.

URSO: Yeah, mostly new because we, you know, sort of bulldozed over and covered up a lot of the past. But it's there for sure.

SAM DINGMAN: Yeah. Yeah. So once you get to a critical mass of stories, whatever that means, what will you do next?

URSO: What I'm going to do is take a few select stories and create augmented reality experiences about them. So these will be things that people can access through, like, a QR code either on this map that I'm going to make or a website.

But it'll be sort of just like a celebration of trees in the city, which I feel like will help emerge them from where they are because, like, they exist. You just, you know, a lot of us just don't know maybe where they are because we're on the freeway.

But once you get into the neighborhoods, you know, there's always something kind of interesting to find and, you know, really interested in hearing about, you know, I don't know, like, did your grandparent plant this tree, or did you collect beans from the mesquite? Like, what, what's your story with it?

DINGMAN: You know, I could also imagine in a place like Phoenix where a tree is less of a common sighting than it is in other cities, that narrative relationship that you're describing. Your grandparent planted it, whatever the case may be, the relationship to the story of that tree for an individual person being a little bit deeper perhaps, and more significant than it would be in some hypothetical other place.

URSO: Yeah, I feel like, you know, like being from the Philadelphia area, it's just trees everywhere. And you don't really differentiate this tree from that tree as much because it's just a big forest. And also, I think trees have such a nursing kind of role here in the desert.

So you have the ironwoods and the mesquite, all of these that are legumes, so they fix nitrogen in the soil. They cause plants to grow around the base. But also, if you let, like, mesquites and palo verdes kind of grow their natural canopy, they create, like, a home. It's almost like a tent around the soil so that other kinds of living things can survive, you know, in the desert. So they just have such an interesting role as, like, an isolated thing.

DINGMAN: Can I ask what it's been like for you as mapmaker? You've done a project sort of like this previously with cacti. How did that change for you, your experience of moving around the city, seeing various species of cacti?

URSO: Whenever you're going anywhere and your focus is on something specific, like, if you're looking for, let's say, thrift stores or you're looking for a gas station, you know, like, that's all you're tuned in to see. So I think it's the same.

You can shift that. And I wanted to shift it when I worked on the cactus map to think about our city through a different kind of lens, like through a different focal point. Because those things are just as rich in what make our environment our environment. And also what makes Phoenix quite unique compared to a lot of other cities.

DINGMAN: Absolutely.

URSO: And I think maybe Phoenix is doing a little bit better now about letting the desert emerge in its way, but it could. It could do way, way better. You know, I feel like Tucson has a really good handle on this. You know, just seeing what is this natural landscape. It's not barren.

DINGMAN: There is a real overlap in terms of all these projects of yours that we've been discussing in terms of the larger goal, it seems to me, of making the invisible stakes of a place really palpable.

URSO: Well, and I think it's even more than, let's say, a place. It's what, you know, the make visible or make known other aspects. And this has been something that I've realized I pursue as an artist in general. Like what the tying thread is between all my work has been this kind of, all right, well, we're not talking about this, let's talk about it.

You know, I've done that with grief and with misogyny and with the botanical and with dirt and vacant lots and all kinds of stuff that it seems like, well, these are really integral, important components of our lives that we don't give enough credit to because we're sort of perpetually being dazzled by the spectacular.

And I've always sort of resisted the spectacular. Like, whenever a big blockbuster movie comes out, I'm like, I don't want to go see that. I resist. You tell me it's popular. I don't want to do that. And that's probably also not the best attitude.

DINGMAN: It's interesting, though.

URSO: Yeah. But I will say, with "Jurassic Park," when I finally did see it 20 years later, I was like, this is so terrible. All it is, this whole movie is just people running away from dinosaurs. That's it, you know.

DINGMAN: Well, also, if I may, Jen, your work is about, like, moving towards things. If you just take one tree as a story, there's the story that one individual person might have with that tree that's in their front yard, say.

But then there's also the story of the lineage and the legacy of that particular species of tree and all the life that it's enabling through the shade that it creates and ...

URSO: Yeah. And the relationship we have with it. And I really am just so fascinated with these little bits of people's lives, like how we keep going on and how we keep finding interest in things. And it's not the big stuff, you know, it's like little moments of pause. It's watching our children play or it's noticing a butterfly.

I mean it sounds, I guess it kind of sounds a little woo woo and trivial but I feel like that's the stuff that kind of makes life worth living and continuing. You wake up and you're like I don't know, should I do today? And it's like and then you hear the rain falling outside and you have a moment of kind of peace that there's something else happening, you know.

Yes, this is a map about trees but for me it's about connecting with these like little stories and reminding people to see how important those things are, you know and celebrate them.

Jen Urso

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