Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas

Lunch registration for April 11, 2026.

The April 10 portion of this event will be held in Room S223 in Sterling Divinity Quadrangle (409 Prospect St., New Haven) and the April 11 portion will be held in Miller Hall (406 Prospect St., New Haven).

Plant Lives: Sacred Interdependencies in the Arts of the Americas is a two-day conference that explores the capacities of plants to transmit divine insights across time. Working from the understanding that botanical knowledges are often shared through oral, ancestral, and visual traditions, its twelve talks and performances will consider how plants have been central to the construction of ideas of the sacred throughout the Americas. The event affirms history (including art history and botanical history) not as something centralized in official archives but as a repertoire of tacit knowledges – as a source for “theory in the flesh,” Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherrie Moraga have written. Plant Lives is organized in collaboration with New Haven’s Community Parks Enhancement Network (CPEN) to place academic and artistic practitioners in conversation with community stakeholders.

The conference and the celebration will also look to plants as a means of reviving sacred interdependencies in contemporary art and musical practices. Coconut shells and seed beads frequently appear in contemporary Santeria divinations; the banjo is a cousin of gourd-based stringed instruments originating in Africa and Brazil; African American eco-feminist musicians have revived shekere and coconut percussion instruments since the 1980s. Images of plants are also powerful reminders of the tastes, smells, and other sensory experiences lost to migration. The event will activate questions such as: How have plants sustained spiritual relationships across geographic contexts? How can we see plants as living archives that impact what we remember in the here and now?

Presentations by artists, art historians, musicologists, and community partners address a wide range of topics, such as the role of plants in precolonial or Indigenous cosmologies, the production of plant-based musical instruments, intimacies with organic matter or vegetation, plants and planting in sacred music repertoires, and planting and agricultural work as teaching tools.

This event is convened by ISM fellow Katie Anania. Speakers and Performers include Doreen Abubakar, Aidan Anne Frierson, Talia Wright, Lydia Daniller, Adrienne Renée Weiss, Endiya Griffin, Mitchell Herrmann, Krisztina Ilko, Rong Lin, Lois Martin, Eric Millikin, Ever Reyes, and Marivi Véliz.

Free and open to the public.

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Host or Publisher Yale Institute of Sacred Music