Chicory Lady T-Shirt

Chicories may have become one of the sexiest vegetables to ever hit the local food scene. And perhaps this piece is fulfilling some Sailor Moon “Radicchio Edition” that plays rent free in my mind. But this lil lady grew from something else.

For many years, I began my mornings harvesting chicories with a crew of women. In the winter, that usually meant a cold, quiet truck ride out to the field, bundled up in full-body rain gear, followed by a hastened waddle through the mud with a tote and a knife.

By winter, we had already spent all those long summer days together, the daily race against the sun that had stretched into years. We knew the dance. Together we harvested and hustled, shared stories and traumas, joked and sang across the rows, cried hidden within them. Rain, heat, wildfires, snow. There’s a lot that can weather a person. 

But the chicory plant is incredible. You can walk out into a frost-bitten field and think that there is nothing there but damage. But just peel a few rotten layers of leaves away, and you reveal a precious little being that only got sweeter after each frozen night. For me the chicory plant became a symbol of our power to transform. 

So one night after a long day in the field, I was curving a compass around in the Fibonacci form that defines all plant growth and I found the shapes of treviso and a woman within. The two heads on either side are the forms of pink Costarossa, the three in the center are all treviso. Original image in pencil, traced digitally for final image.