What does it mean to feature living material in museums? How does live plant art alter traditional aesthetic sensibilities and notions of authorship? How do plant installations muddle the boundaries between art and science as well as those between botanic garden and museum? From works on paper to bioart, plants play an integral and often overlooked role in contemporary museum practice. In honor of the installation Stitch Field, this colloquium examines the relationship between art and plant life, posing questions about nonhuman aesthetics and sentience, visual ecology, and the role of liveliness in museum spaces. This half-day symposium will feature a gallery talk, a panel with local experts, a collection study and salon and a keynote talk by scholar and curator Giovanni Aloi, who has authored and edited multiple books and journals on plants, animals, and art.
Please . FMI: benton@pomona.edu.
2–2:30 pm Gallery Talk with Caroline Eastburn
2:30–4 pm Plants and the Arts Panel with Cheryl Birker, Christian Cummings, and Sean Lahmeyer
4–5 pm Collection Study with Salim Moore
5:30–6:30 pm Keynote featuring Giovanni Aloi
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and co-editor of the ‘Art after Nature’ book series published by University of Minnesota Press. He is the author and editor of many books on art and nature including Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2018), Botanical Speculations (2018), Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder) and Estado Vegetal (2023). Aloi has contributed to BBC radio programs, served as an academic adviser for many institutions and has curated exhibitions in the USA and abroad. He lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.
Cheryl Birker is the California Botanic Garden Seed Conservation Program Manager. Cheryl has a degree in Biology with a concentration in Biodiversity, Ecology and Conservation Biology from California State University Fullerton. She started in May of 2014 as a seed collector for the BLM Seeds of Success Program, then worked in the Restoration Nursery growing native plants for restoration and mitigation projects. Cheryl has been managing the Seed Conservation Program since August 2016.
Christian Cummings is Executive Director of the newly minted nonprofit Nonhuman Teachers and is partner in the botanically-minded creative studio Cactus Store Studio, both of which operate in Los Angeles and in NYC, respectively. For ten years, C.S. Studio has worked in the cracks between disciplines on projects that help broker better relationships between people and plants with a "by any means necessary" approach that includes landscape design, greenhouse architecture, publishing, lectures and events, making clothes for gardening in, outdoor furniture design, and even crafted a perfume that makes you smell like a tomato.The work of CS Studio has been featured in the New Yorker, Architectural Digest, The LA Times, New York Magazine, Purple Magazine, OC23 Magazine, SSENCE, Brutus Mag, and a whole bunch of others. The success of which was proof-of-concept that an alternative, unexpected, and aesthetic approach is helpful toward exciting new audiences about the plight of the natural world. Thus was born Nonhuman Teachers.Nonhuman Teachers is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that takes a new approach to ecological storytelling, blending science, art, and imagination to help deepen the relationship between humans and the natural world. Through its multidisciplinary public programming, immersive botanical spaces, and new nature media, Nonhuman Teachers aims to ignite a sense of wonder about our rapidly changing Earth, not only to make us better citizens of this place but to help us imagine it differently. Before CS Studio and Nonhuman Teachers, Christian worked for seven years at Cal Arts and for two at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City.
Caroline Eastburn (CMC ’20) is the communications manager at the Benton Museum of Art and curator of Stitch Field: Alice-Marie Archer’s Agritextiles.
Sean Lahmeyer serves as the associate director of the botanical collections, conservation and research, providing programmatic, curatorial, and administrative leadership, as well as coordinating all ex-situ conservation activities, including the tissue culture lab, seed bank, and herbarium. Sean has also been an adjunct instructor of biology—specializing in botany—at Pasadena City College since 2007.
Sean has been featured in online articles published by the Botanical Research Institute of Texas and Armory Center for the Arts, has written articles for VERSO, The Huntington’s blog, and has been published in botanical journals.
