August 3, 2021 – February 20, 2022
Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art
Plants accompany every aspect of human life. We breathe in the oxygen they breathe out, we eat them (or we eat animals that eat them), we wear them, we make our dwellings and furnishings from them, we kill them when they are inconvenient to us. Eighty percent of the Earth’s biomass is composed of living plant material; living human bodies make up less than two-tenths of one percent. Ironically, the incomprehensible abundance of plants may explain our propensity to “plant blindness,” a term coined in 1998 by botanists James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler to describe modern humans’ casual inattention to plants’ foundational roles in the biosphere and their influences on human culture
Each of the 12 works featured in Plant Life was chosen because something in it provokes critical reflection on the strange entanglements of humans and plants. In these works, plants are more than props: they are – openly or cryptically – also made present to us in their own way. They show that it is possible to see our photosynthetic kin as they really exist, in this exhibition, throughout the museum, and in the world outside: as vitally, expressively, insistently with us.
Curated by Terry Harpold, Associate Professor of English, University of Florida, and the graduate students enrolled in his Spring 2021 seminar “Critical Plant Studies”: Ryan Bedsaul, Anwesha Chattopadhyay, Anna Grzybowska, Jacob Hawk, Olivia Ivings, Kevin McKenna, Elizabeth Nichols, Erick Verran, Peter Vertacnik, and Janice Whang.
“Plant Life” is made possible by The Dr. Madelyn M. Lockhart Endowment for Focus Exhibitions at the Harn Museum of Art.
Gallery Talks
Throughout the fall semester “Plant Life” co-curators will give a series of public talks.
Terry Harpold, “Plant Life: Art Marks the Unremarked”
September 4, 2021, 3 PM
Principal curator Harpold will discuss the collaborative process of choosing the works featured in the exhibition from among dozens of potential candidates in the Harn, the writing and editing of the critical and historical essays collected in the exhibition catalog, and the potential of plant-conscious art to awaken us to the vital presence of plant life in and beyond human life.
Ryan Bedsaul, Anwesha Chattopadhyay, Elizabeth Nichols
October 23, 2021, 3 PM
Co-curators Bedsaul, Chattopadhyay, and Nichols will discuss selected works in the exhibition.
- Ryan Bedsaul, “Sally Mann, Deep South, Untitled (Swamp Bones)”
- Anwesha Chattopadhyay, “Maggie Taylor, One and a Half Sisters: Plants, Photoshop, and Pentimenti”
- Elizabeth Nichols, “Frank Hamilton Taylor, Grant Inspecting a Coffee Plantation, Cordova, Mexico”
Kevin McKenna, Janice Whang
November 9, 2021, 6:30 PM
Co-curators McKenna and Whang will discuss selected works in the exhibition
- Kevin McKenna, “Photographing the Immaterial: Karen Glaser’s Fire in the Swamp #1”
- Janice Whang, “Huang Shen’s Chinese Cabbages”
This event is free and open to the public. No advance registration is required.