Essays and Projects

The curatorial essays and creative projects below offer additional insight into the themes of the exhibition and selected works on display. Follow the links below to access each essay and project.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Birds of Japan

Sindy Chen

Flower Forms and Glass Specimens

Octavia Zhou

The Botanical Art of Bertha Evelyn Jaques

Meichen Liu

The Uncategorized, Undifferentiated, and Unexplained: Eli Lotar

Teagan Harris

The Culture of Nature and The Nature of Culture: On Mark Dion’s Roundup: An Entomological Endeavor for the Smart Museum

Datura Zhou

Der Tierlaokoon: Anthropomorphism Takes the Stage

Ellis LeBlanc

Mukul Dey’s Sacred Tree

Xuanlin Ye

Weaving Threads

Teddy Sandler

Chicago as an Incubator for Self-Taught Art: The Individualistic Life and Work of Joseph E. Yoakum

Vicky Chen

One Big Lump of Clay: On Ruth Duckworth’s Earth, Water, Sky

Jack Schneider

Taking the Time to Look Down: An Examination of Terry Evans’s Rotational Grazing

Felix Ramin

H. C. Westermann’s Precarious Landscapes

Sabrina Cunningham

Displaced Mayflies: Ephemeral Ghostly Bodies in Yun-Fei Ji’s Three Gorges Dam Migration

Wenshu Wang

Where the Forest Ends and the Tree Begins: Untidy Objects and Unsettled Ground

Isabella Diefendorf