This panel considers the interconnectedness between humans and the natural world, as explored in the work of Giuseppe Penone and on view in the exhibition "River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone’s Drawings." Art is the means by which Penone explores the relationship between humans and nature. Speakers representing perspectives in science, philosophy, and the arts will respond to Penone’s engagement with nature and offer new ideas about how humans might be similar to, and symbiotically entwined in, entities such as soil, rocks, and trees.
Dr. Lara Demori, the research associate for the exhibition, will root the discussion in Penone’s work and moderate.
Speakers
Sarah Gilbert is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work explores craft and collectivity-how the sticky relationality of material transformation can open spaces for thinking and feeling together in more-than-human worlds. Joining a wide range of materials and processes, her promiscuously interdisciplinary practice often moves between art and science, synthesizing traditional craft techniques with emerging technologies. Against narratives of material mastery or maker-movement individualism, she is interested in the ethical particularities of encounters with difference, and the radical potential of embodied attunement to reorient us towards collective care. She is assistant professor of sculpture and affiliate faculty in gender and feminist studies at Pitzer College.
Scott F. Gilbert is the Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology emeritus at Swarthmore College, where he has taught embryology and the history and critiques of biology. He is also a Finland Distinguished Professor emeritus at the University of Helsinki. Scott’s biological research concerns how changes in embryonic development can generate evolutionary novelties, focusing on how changes in gene expression create the shell of the turtle and how symbiotic microbes generate the rumen of cattle. Scott has received several awards for his work in evolutionary developmental biology, including a John Simon Guggenheim Grant, the Kowalevsky Prize in Evolutionary Developmental Biology, and honorary degrees from the University of Helsinki and the University of Tartu. He has been privileged to present lectures on embryology and philosophy to Vatican councils and to His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
Joan Naviyuk Kane is a visiting assistant professor and visiting poet at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Inupiaq with family from Ugiuvak and Qawiaraq, her eight books of poetry and prose have been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute, Brown’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, the Rasmuson Foundation, the School for Advanced Research, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. She has received the Whiting Writer’s Award, an American Book Award, the United States Artists Creative Vision Award, and the Donald Hall Prize. She raises her children in Cambridge.
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