Big Botany: conversations with the plant world
27 March - 15 July 2018
Spencer Museum of Art
University of Kansas
1301 MISSISSIPPI ST
LAWRENCE, KS 66045
USA
Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World explores humankind’s deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom through artworks from the Spencer Museum’s permanent collection, a number of significant loans, and site-specific commissions by four artists-in-residence: Ackroyd & Harvey, Sandy Winters, and Mathias Kessler. Peter Randall-Page exhibits Fibonacci Flip II, an ochre thumb printing which is now part of the museum collection.
The exhibition is organized through several themes: artists’ studies of plant forms; historic and contemporary plant lore; ecological sustainability and biomechanical plant hybrids; plants in a post-human world; and works dealing with scientific research on how plants sense the world and communicate. One aim of the exhibition is to cultivate viewers’ empathy for plants by addressing the tendency of humans to dismiss plants as a static backdrop to their fast-paced lives.