FRSEMR 63W: Vegetal Humanities: Paying Attention to Plants in Contemporary Art and Culture

Class meetings Tuesdays, 12:45 PM - 2:45 PM
Sackler Building, Room 423

Instructor Carrie Lambert-Beatty

Email lambert2@fas.harvard.edu

Sign up here for office hours

They make up 80% of the earth's biomass.  Your every breath depends on them.  But how often do you really pay attention to plants?

How might it change you, if you did? 

 

This seminar invites you to develop a new kind of plant-consciousness. 

 

Our guides will be the contemporary artists and writers who are creating a new culture of plants, with  gardens in galleries, plant protagonists, and botany-based experiments in philosophy, architecture, music and more. We'll learn from the new science of plant communication and learning, as well as plant-based revisions of human history, anthropology's vegetal turn, and indigenous cultural knowledge about humans' role in the more-than-human world.

Plants themselves will be primary sources for our work, via exercises in which you'll interview a plant,  become the group's resident expert on one plant species; and develop your own contribution to the vegetal humanities.

Our plant-consciousness will also involve critical questions about our own endeavor. In a time of climate crisis, social inequity, poisonous politics, and mass dislocations, why this attraction to plants? Is the vegetal turn a diversion from tough human problems? Or is there reason to think a cultural change like this could, even now, change the fate of nature?

 

Course Schedule [preview only]

Here's a Gallery of art you'll learn about

Check out recommended reading/viewing for the curious, and some more Vegetal Humanities art and ideas (see Pages for more course content)

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Herb leaves and stems lying on top of a photograph of a bomb siteimage.png

 

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This class is open only to first-year Harvard students. Though there's some opportunity for non-written creative work, it is a seminar in visual and cultural studies (not an art-making class) . It can serve as an entry point to further coursework in either History of Art and Architecture or Art, Film, and Visual Studies, but you don't need any prior experience in the arts. No botanical knowledge is expected or required either. 

 

What you'll do in "Vegetal Humanities"

"Interview a Plant" Project. At the start of the semester you’ll get a kit with container, soil, grow light, and seeds. You will post daily  observations of your growing plant  (#vegetalhumanities) and complete exercises in deepening botanical attention based on the course developed by nature educator Craig Holdredge. 

The Plant Expertise Project. Each student will be resident expert on one type of plant. You'll follow a series of exercises to learn about your plant, and design your own Vegetal Humanities project: an essay, short story, photograph series, podcast, film, or other project of your choosing.

Reading/Watching. Weekly readings will be limited to about the length of a textbook chapter. Sometimes it will be a literary text, sometimes a scholarly essay, sometimes I'll assign a video to watch. These must be read/watched before class each week.

Talking/Listening. Each week in seminar I'll introduce works of art that illuminate a different question about plant/people relationships, and we'll discuss the art in relation to the assigned text. Some meetings will take place at the Harvard Art Museum, Museum of Natural History, Herbarium, or other destination.

 

Is this class for you?

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First group: works by Joiri Minaya, Laurence Aëgerter, Zheng Bo. Second group: Abdullah MI Syed, Rashid Johnson, Andrea Büttner, Eija-Liisa Ahtila. Please see the course gallery. for detailed information about these art works and many more.