NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — On March 13 and 14, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art will host the "Contemporary Nature: Tending the Garden Symposium."

 

The public symposium features a keynote by writer and philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé that poses questions for our ecological future.

 

Artists, scholars, and students convene to share their experiences on what co-becoming means to them in their art, gardening, and land stewardship practices. 

 

It will include the upcoming "Homecoming" exhibition's Amanda Lovelee and Jessica Gersony, and Pallavi Sen and Sarah Workneh, Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, and Camila Marambio and Christy Gast.

 

Tickets to the symposium are $50 in advance; $40 students.

 

The exhibit "Homecoming" opens on June 13 as part of the museum's free day. It is an immersive, outdoor environmental art exhibition designed to remember a deeper connection between humans and nature while playfully addressing the urgency of climate change that is causing plants to migrate, stated a press release. 

 

According to a press release:

 

Gardens are choreographed sites with the most cyclically innate power to all life: to catch sunlight and transform energy into matter. Through gardening, we are able to cultivate physical and emotional energies, making us manipulators of the world. Nature is dialectic; we are one of many agents in a wide network.

Humanity continues to create gardens to ecologize, although we have blighted them through histories of apartheid, colonialism, and control, and we continue on this path. Gardening reframes choice and power, as it produces allowances and realizations to know what it means to be with others in difference, to know

unknowing, and to give humanity’s control to the ecological network that we are a part of.

 

Our intention is to dissolve boundaries of information-sharing between species and ecological processes and realize how truly interconnected we are in nature.

 

Homecoming envisions a symbolic micro field station for two trees in residence participating in assisted plant migration. Join the museum in welcoming two "trees in residence" that are part of the exhibit.