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November 14th, 2024

“Picturing Botanical Imperialism in the Americas”

Picturing Botanical Imperialism in the Americas

Maggie Cao
Associate Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina

Lecture and Q&A sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History

Summary: The circulation of plants has long been tied to considerations of climate. Today climate change endangers many native species while exacerbating the negative impact of invasives. This talk explores artists’ engagements with plants in the context of imperialism past and present. The most famous landscape painter of the nineteenth-century US, Frederic Edwin Church, was a master of painting the flora of the American tropics. This talk will explore his paintings of Jamaica and the ways they engaged with botanical understandings of colonialism and emancipation. The legacy of Church’s nineteenth-century botanical imagery will be examined through contemporary artist Maria Thereza Alves’s ongoing Seeds of Changeproject, in which unearthed seeds from historic ballast sites are used to grow gardens. These gardens generated from waste—the dumped rocks, earth, and sand that once balanced merchant vessels—invert the history of colonialism told by the hothouse displays and herbarium collections of the past.

Location

F.W. Olin Building, Room 110

Date & Time

November 14 - 4:30pm - 5:45pm

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