Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World
by: Stephen H. Goddard

Softcover. Lawrence KS, Spencer Museum of Art, 1st, 2018, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 300 pages, color illustrations. This extensive exhibition catalog explores humankind's deep connections and fascination with the plant kingdom through artworks from the Spencer Museum's permanent collection, a number of significant loans, and site-specific commissions by four artists-in-residence: Ackroyd & Harvey, Sandy Winters, and Mathias Kessler. The exhibition is organized through several themes: artists' studies of plant forms; historic and contemporary plant lore; ecological sustainability and biomechanical plant hybrids; plants in a post-human world; and works dealing with scientific research on how plants sense the world and communicate. One aim of the exhibition is to cultivate viewers' empathy for plants by addressing the tendency of humans to dismiss plants as a static backdrop to their fast-paced lives. Themes in Big Botany are explored further through an exhibition catalogue published by the Museum that includes short contributions from a variety of artists, curators, poets, philosophers, ecologists, and more. Clean, bright copy.