Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery, Byerly Hall, 8 Garden St., Cambridge
Join the artist and educator Evelyn Rydz for an afternoon of conversation and collective artmaking within the exhibition Water Stories: River Goddesses, Ancestral Rites, and Climate Crisis, on view September 18–December 16, 2023.
The exhibition presents artworks that tell alternative stories of water experience in the context of climate change, while encouraging viewers to appreciate the multivalent meaning of water and their own relationship to it. Rydz has repeatedly observed the increasing impacts on natural and cultural ecosystems throughout her various field...
Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St. Cambridge)
Join the Harvard Graduate School of Design for a Sylvester Baxter Lecture featuring Kongjian Yu.
Kongjian Yu, DDes '95, is Professor and founding dean of Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape, and founder and design principal of Turenscape. Yu’s guiding design principles are the appreciation of the ordinary and a deep embrace of nature—even of its potentially destructive aspects, such as flooding. His projects have won numerous international design awards, including 14 ASLA Excellence...
Online or at Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
Join editor Susan Barba for a mobile landscape reading of her new literary anthology, filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers. What is a mobile landscape reading, you ask? Instead of sitting in a lecture hall, you will meander through the wildflowers of the Arboretum, stopping to hear beautiful poems and prose while surrounded by the wildflowers that inspired them.
Online or at Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre St., Boston
Join poets Jennifer Barber, Deborah Leipziger, and Charles Coe for an afternoon of tree-themed poetry readings and discussion. Each poet will read segments of their works, including the poetry anthology Tree Lines, interspersed with interactive dialogue with the audience. At the end of the event, audience members will be given prompts and encouraged to try their own hands at writing tree-inspired poetry.
Online or at Knafel Center, 10 Garden St., Cambridge
The 2023 Kim and Judy Davis Dean's Lecture in the Arts will feature the Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy Award-winning composer John Luther Adams. Motivated by a deep concern for the state of the earth and the future of humanity, he brings the sense of wonder we experience outdoors into the concert hall with the hope, and belief, that music can do more than politics to change the world.
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
In this talk, Ana María Durán Calisto will discuss the design principles of ancient Amazonian agroecological urban constellations; the ways in which colonialism disrupted (and continues to disrupt) Amazonian patterns of inhabitation and habitat construction; and the visions Amazonian urban history offers to inform our ability to reimagine future urban ecologies.
Join a participatory, in-person read-aloud of excerpts from Richard Powers’ tree-inspired novel The Overstory hosted by the Arnold Arboretum.
The read-aloud will take place on Saturday, January 28, between 1pm and 4pm, within the exhibition of artist Diane Samuels' 160-foot scroll, The Overstory by Richard Powers, which was inspired by and celebrates the Pulitzer-prize winning novel. This is the last chance to see the scroll first-hand before the exhibition closes. View the scroll, listen to the excerpts, maybe read a portion yourself. Samuels herself will be joining...
Harvard Museum of Natural History, 26 Oxford St., Cambridge
Did you know that many of the birds in the Northeastern United States spend the winter in Latin America socializing and eating among tropical trees and flowers? Explore the lives and behaviors of these birds in our Birds of the World gallery and learn about flowers from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico in the Blaschka Glass Flowers gallery. Try some hands-on activities led by Hear Me Out/Escúchame teens, see their newest mini exhibit, decorate a bird or flower mask, and brighten the dark season!
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium (48 Quincy St., Cambridge)
In this talk, Ana María Durán Calisto will discuss the design principles of ancient Amazonian agroecological urban constellations; the ways in which colonialism disrupted (and continues to disrupt) Amazonian patterns of inhabitation and habitat construction; and the visions Amazonian urban history offers to inform our ability to reimagine future urban ecologies.
Hemlock Hill and Conifer Collection, Arnold Arboretum, 125 Arborway, Boston
Led by Bengali culture worker Pampi, this audience participatory workshop allows attendees to weave love letters into hand-crafted ceremonial vessels for their loved ones. Vessels will be fashioned out of natural materials sourced from the Arboretum grounds and displayed in the MassQ Ball on July 9.
The Arnold Arboretum's sesquicentennial Director's Series traces the Arnold’s significance in the landscape architecture movement, value for the people of Boston, and leadership in creating global connections between plants and people.
Panelists include:
Dr. Michelle Kondo, Research Social Scientist, UDSA-Forest Service
Rev. Mariama White-Hammond, Chief of Environment, Energy, and Open Space, City of Boston
Laurence Cotton, Consulting Producer, “Frederick Law Olmsted: Designing...
Arnold Arboretum (Hunnewell Building), 125 Arborway, Boston
Dr. Liseli A. Fitzpatrick, a Trinidadian-scholar in the field of African Diasporic cosmologies and sacred ontologies, will lead an engaging lecture and discussion exploring African mythologies and folkloric cultures.
Plants are essential to humans and the environment: they provide food, absorb carbon dioxide, produce oxygen, serve multiple ecosystem functions, and beautify landscapes. In Lessons from Plants (Harvard University Press, 2021) Beronda Montgomery invites us to appreciate our interdependence with plants and the many lessons that can be gained from a better understanding of the ways in which plants grow, adapt, and thrive.
In this conversation with Brenda Tindal, she will address what plants can teach us about relating to one another, building diverse communities and...
Initiation – In Love Solidarity is a choreographic narrative exploring the embodiment of the Middle Passage, and the resilience and evolving identities of women in the African diaspora. A film component of the work was created at historic sites in New England related to the transatlantic slave trade and emancipation. The imagery of the cowrie shell is present throughout, chosen as an emblem of the transformative identity of the Black female body.
This is the third lecture in the Arnold Arboretum's 2021 Director's Lecture Series. Tiya Miles takes up the pecan tree as inspiration for exploring the meaning of trees in the lives of enslaved African Americans. Using a family heirloom, slave narratives, oral histories, and missionary records, her talk underscores the importance of trees in the Black experience of captivity and resistance, ultimately revealing the centrality of the natural world to Black, and indeed human, survival.
At the time of its founding in 1872, the land on which the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University is sighted was a patchwork of farmland and forest. As the Arboretum was planted, pathways were developed to lead people through the picturesque landscape. As the landscape developed, economies shifted, wars took place, and directors changed. Each of these factors subtly influenced shifts in the park’s path system. Join the Arnold Arboretum on Zoom with Jared Rubinstein as he reveals the layers of change in this beloved landscape.
This lecture explores whether it is possible to achieve both social justice and environmental sustainability in efforts to mitigate urban flood risk. The expanding scale of urban flooding under climate change has renewed interest in large-scale restoration projects that make room for water in metro centers. However, ecologically functioning green infrastructure – unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands – is inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local governments seeking to maximize local land values and minimize affordable housing. Moreover, even...
Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street, Cambridge, MA
Miaki Ishii, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Recent volcanic eruptions in Hawaii and Guatemala remind us of how devastating these geological eruptions can be. Popular culture depictions of volcanic disasters found in movies like Dante’s Peak and Volcano can strongly distort the public’s understanding of volcanic activity and its immediate effects. As with many science-fiction films, Hollywood depictions of natural phenomena don’t always align with the scientific facts. Seismologist Miaki...