For me, it started with the bees. Within the first few months of moving to Brooklyn from Portland, Oregon, I bought a pair of vintage Gucci flats with a botanical pattern: bees, beetles, flowers. After reading as many books on beekeeping as I could get my hands on, I decided to buy a hive of my very own. Consisting of 10,000 bees and one queen, I picked it up outside of Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan and brought it to live in my Brooklyn backyard. My morning ritual before the bees all flew away (the technical beekeeping term for this is that they absconded) was to have a cup of tea in my bee-decorated shoes, then watch and listen as my bees flew in and out of their hive, before playing with the flowers that I grew in drawers from old filing cabinets.
If you’re wearing a cotton T-shirt, eating a slice of bread, or enjoying a glass of wine, somewhere on planet Earth, a farmer grew that fiber, grain, or fruit. In New York—a city that often seems to revolve around fashion, culture, and restaurants—it’s easy to feel distant from the source. To watch a bee pollinating a flower in a city park, to hear a neighbor’s excitement that they’ll be growing corn in the community garden this year, to enjoy a locally-sourced dinner are all small ways that we reconnect with nature in metropolitan places.
With this in mind, over the course of this spring, I followed along with Aerthship, a creative collective working to bridge the gap between culture and ecology. The range of their work extends from building out an immersive evening for Air Company’s new carbon-neutral fragrance, to working alongside indigenous fisherman Stevie Dennis for Gucci’s Off the Grid capsule. For the Pierce Spring Tour, they created a dinner series overseen by model and chef Pierce Abernathy in New York, all with the aim of showcasing the work of the city’s many urban farms.
Aerthship was founded by Tin Mai, who previously worked as a creative director on a promotional campaign for Rihanna’s Anti album and with record label 88rising, along with his college friend group, who all moved to New York together from the University of Oregon in around 2015. The charm of Aerthship lies in the deep friendships that forged it. Along with Mai and Abernathy, the core team includes Mimi Zhu, author of Be Not Afraid of Love; producer Alex Lianopoulos whose work spans from HBO to Nike; Rex Nwerem, senior strategist at Weiden + Kennedy, who has worked on projects for the NFL and NBA; and Benson Wink, a creative strategist who also builds and designs furniture for the team. (I saw a photo of a particularly compelling outdoor table that was built with a hole in the middle for a tree.)
Hanging out with the group took me back to my own circle of friends in Oregon before I moved to New York—cooking huge dinners together, making bonfires in our backyard, taking photographs of each other, getting excited about thrift store finds. “I feel that we’re on a mission to generate some eco-cultural hope,” Mai tells me. “What people are moved by—whether it’s the hottest fashion drop or everyday food habits or even merchandise you might purchase from a favorite musician—is typically removed from anything associated with the earth and our place on it.”
Recognizing that the onus is often on small brands and individuals to make sustainable choices—yet the path towards a healthier planet is paved by larger companies getting on board—the team set about building relationships across disciplines, with collaborators of all shapes and sizes. One of the first brands to work with Aerthship was Gucci, which came about thanks to Abernathy. The model and recipe developer leveraged a film degree and stints in media at Vice and Buzzfeed into creating food-content Instagram reels out of his parents’ kitchen in Kentucky during Covid. His lucky break came when an agent reached out to him via Instagram DMs, and the next thing he knew, he was in Los Angeles auditioning for a Gucci campaign. (Suffice to say, he booked it.)
Next, Gucci reached out to Abernathy for their Off the Grid capsule, a sustainably-minded collection the brand first launched in 2020, which Abernathy immediately brought back to the Aerthship team. They then pitched an ecological angle for a dinner party—in this case, working with Stevie Dennis, a fisherman, and Ahousaht member of the Keltsmaht First Nations. “The ecological side was collaborating with an Indigenous fisherman and paying him properly in teaching us how to forage locally for food,” Mai explains. “You can’t remove the story of the earth from that project.”
Now, Aerthship has brought that dinner party concept back to New York City under the moniker “Pierce Spring Tour”—exploring the landscape of urban farming in the city today by hosting dinners at various farms, sourcing ingredients grown within city limits, and expanding the definition of the practice to include everything from farmers markets to CSAs.
I began my journey on the tour at Smallhold Mushrooms’ farm in Brooklyn. Co-founder Adam DeMartino walked me around, pointing out the separate rooms for yellow oyster mushrooms, lion’s mane (a variety that recently went viral on TikTok), and blue oyster. As we were chatting, somebody came by to pick up an order of six pounds of mushrooms for a dinner party for the tahini brand Seed and Mill; as he prepared to pass it over, DeMartino hand-wrote a note to the host. Then, a farmer in an Online Ceramics Eat Mushrooms shirt put on loud club music (to me, unidentifiable EDM.) “Is this Skrillex?” DeMartino asked. It was the end of the work day. “This is our wind-down music,” he answered.
One of the reasons for visiting a farm is to have a more robust understanding of where your food really comes from. Smallhold, in particular, is fascinating because they’ve transformed the mushroom section of the grocery store from button mushrooms in styrofoam packaging to something coveted and exciting. But visiting farms humanizes the food system, too. Your farmer might have contentious taste in music and wear ironic T-shirts. Knowing those small details—and experiencing first-hand the farm where it came from—creates a different kind of connection with the people who grow our food.
The first dinner I attended of the Pierce Spring Tour was Upstairs at Public Records, a bar and lounge known for having one of the best sound systems in the city. There, I ran into baker Aimee France (more commonly known by her Instagram handle YungKombucha420) who had previously made desserts for another iteration of the tour’s pop-ups, while my husband and I sat next to an editor at Eater. The vibe was casual and familiar: Squash flowers, crudité, and dips were served on trays along with Armenian string cheese—a nod to Abernathy’s Armenian heritage—which in turn brought me back to family dinners at my Armenian ex-boyfriend’s house in my early twenties. (I haven’t eaten Armenian string cheese since.)
A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Bushwick, walking towards a destination blasting techno that could be heard a block away. This was the dinner at Farm To People, a kitchen known for its farm boxes that are delivered around the city. Similar in concept to Local Roots, another Brooklyn favorite, the CSA style involves a delivery of in-season vegetables to your door or to a pickup point in your neighborhood. The music soon shifted from techno to something more melodic and low-key, as I sat with my sister, Mai, Abernathy, and the creative strategist Rex Nwerem. The sommelier, Matt Ross, poured local New York wine from vineyards Wild Arc Farm and Barry Farm Cellars, while for herbs and garnishes, Abernathy pulled from a vertical farm in Prospect Heights, Farm.One.
My sister quickly realized that she had already been to a stop on the Spring Tour, at Rhodora, an understated wine bar in Clinton Hill. Abernathy described Rhodora as one of his favorite stops in the series: “The whole experience was casual and a little chaotic,” he said. The tour stops seemed to take the spirit of its location—whether it be the dance culture for which Bushwick is known or the quiet sophistication of Clinton Hill—and expand upon it.
In mid-June, I attended the final dinner of the Pierce Spring Tour. Taking place at Oko Farms—an outdoor aquaponic farm and education center on the Williamsburg waterfront that raises fish (primarily carp) alongside plants—we ate dinner in a greenhouse made cozier with the sounds of raindrops, under a canopy of drying cotton which was grown on the farm the year before. Upon walking in, the first thing I noticed was the flowers: a wispy, sculptural display of Japanese alliums, U.S.-grown poppies, and local garlic-scapes by set designer Liz Mydlowski.
Dinner included radishes with a heap of farm-grown herb butter, locally grown sorghum salad, and carp (referred to jokingly as “ex-employees”) that were raised on the farm. Just before it started pouring rain, Abernathy cooked the carp on a bonfire which was fed by sorghum stalks along with logs.
With the help of her carp, her team, and a handful of NYU masters students, Oko Farms founder Yemi Amu is growing jute, from her native Nigeria, which can be used both for fiber and food; medicinal herbs like marshmallow; Japanese indigo for natural dye; and local seasonal vegetables. There are several beehives in the space and the farm attracts dozens of varieties of native bees and other pollinators. Yemi’s non-profit, Oko Farms, works with organizations like One Love Community Fridge to strengthen their goals of mitigating climate change and increasing food security for New Yorkers.
At the dinner, I also met Alex Lianopoulos, Aerthship’s head of production, whose house upstate serves as the home base for any building projects associated with the tour, and Benson Wink, a creative strategist who works alongside Rex, who explained that everyone on the team wears many hats. I experienced this first-hand in how they all held umbrellas over the food when it started raining, in how they served each other wine, and took turns doing dishes at the end of the evening.
The Aerthship team, dressed in colorful combinations of Collina Strada, vintage jackets, and shirts found on travels to Costa Rica, clearly just enjoyed being together and celebrating the end of a successful tour. The dinner was Abernathy’s last before heading off to men’s fashion week in Milan, while other Aerthship members expressed excitement about applying their expertise to expanding their cultural reach. “A huge goal is to begin transitioning from food to music,” said Mai. “What does a regenerative album release look like?”
While I initially thought the name Aerthship was in reference to the sustainable architecture style, Earthship, in which homes are built out of recycled materials like tires, Aerthship’s name is actually inspired by a quote from a speech given by Adlai Ewing Stevenson II to the UN in 1965. “We travel together, passengers on a little spaceship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil, all committed, for our safety, to its security and peace. Preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work, and the love we give our fragile craft.” Aerthship may be exploring the joys of bringing together community, fashion, and food, but at its essence, it offers a reminder of something more essential: that tending to the earth can be a genuinely creative endeavor.
