Book Celebration | Cura's Garden | Conversation

Cura’s Garden is a long-term immersive exhibition by Ben Thorp Brown, developed with Belgian landscape designer Jan Minne in the medieval garden of Kunsthal Gent, a former Carmelite monastery. Inspired by the Roman myth of Cura, the installation combines trees, flora, fog, sculpture, and sound into a dense, indeterminate sensorial environment that reimagines Arcadia while testing the limits of paradise.

This richly illustrated volume, organized around the seasons, features vivid documentation across two years of the garden’s young life alongside linocut botanical prints by the artist’s mother, Cary Thorp Brown. New essays by Laura McLean-Ferris, Laurie Cluitmans, Robert Wiesenberger explore the conceptual, formal, art historical, and affective valences of Cura’s Garden, and a roundtable conversation between Brown and Laura Herman, Jan Minne, and Valentijn Goethals considers the history and development of the project, from the artist’s 2019 film Cura, a precursor to the garden, through present concerns around the maintenance and unfolding nature of this site-specific work
"Cura’s Garden" by Ben Thorp Brown | 8.75 × 11.75 inches | 152 pages| Hardcover | Design by Valentijn Goethals | Co-Published by Inventory Press | Kunsthal Gent, and Roma Publications
Ben Thorp Brown (b. 1983) is an artist based in New York. He atten­ded the Whit­ney Muse­um Inde­pen­dent Stu­dy Pro­gram, and is a gra­du­a­te of Wil­li­ams Col­le­ge and the School of the Art Insti­tu­te of Chicago. He has presented recent solo museum exhibitions of his work at CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Kunsthal Gent, Jeu de Paume, and the St. Louis Art Museum. His work has been featured in significant group exhibitions including Empathy Revisited: Designs for More Than One at the Istanbul Biennial, The Supermarket of Images at the Jeu de Paume, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1904-2016 at The Whitney Museum, and Greater New York 2015 at MoMA PS1. He is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received awards from Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Valentijn Goethals is a designer and musician. Educated as a graphic designer, Valentijn’s activities range from collaborating with artists and designers on various graphic design projects to curation and playing the guitar in the band The Black Heart Rebellion. He is a member of the artist collective Smoke & Dust founded in 2008. In 2013 the collective took over an abandoned welding factory in Dok-Noord Gent and turned it into a transdisciplinary art platform called 019. In 2018 they started another venue in a former monastery located in the center of Gent, now called Kunsthal Gent, where Valentijn is curator among other roles.

Annie Godfrey Larmon is a writer and editor based in Garrison, New York. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in apricota, Artforum, BBC Culture, Bookforum, CURA., Even, Frieze, MAY, the Miami Rail, Spike, Texte zur Kunst, Topical Cream, Vdrome, WdW Review and the White Review. The recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing, she was the publications editor for the inaugural Okayama Art Summit and is a former international reviews editor of Artforum. As an editor, she has also worked on books for MoMA, MoMA PS1, Blank Forms, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Larmon has been a writer-in-residence at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France; Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy; Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency; and Eighth House in Rochester, Vermont.

Robert Wiesenberger is the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. He was formerly Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute and Lecturer in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. His interests span modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture, with a special emphasis on ecology and the more-than-human world.

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