LF PRESERVATION SYMPOSIUM - Avant-Gardeners: When the Garden Becomes Art

This event will be led by the Giovanni Aloi Garden Program. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, he is widely recognized for his scholarship on art, ecology, animals and plants.

The most meaningful artworks of the future may take the form of gardens, rather than AI-driven technological spectacles. Art history has long privileged the stable media of painting and sculpture that can be archived and the best conform with the logics of museological displays. Why, however, should art be understood as an inanimate and inert object? A growing number of contemporary artists are challenging this inherited model by working with forms that live, change, and exceed the limits of conventional display.

Drawing on Giovanni's forthcoming book, Avant-Gardeners, and in view of Ragdale's renewed commitment to its garden, this talk considers the garden as an artistic medium in its own right. Through projects by Precious Okoyomon, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Maria Thereza Alves, Olafur Eliasson, and others, it explores how growth introduces unpredictability while decay continually reconfigures form. These gardens unsettle established ideas of artistic authorship and permanence, recasting artistic practice as an evolving relationship with living systems.

Within them, histories of migration and cultivation become materially embedded in the soil, while questions of belonging are continually reshaped by inherited histories and present forces.

This event will be held from 2-3 p.m. in the Ragdale Dance Studio.

Tickets are priced at $40 for members and $50 for non-members.