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Natural World

Presented by FotoFocus and Cincinnati Art Museum at Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati OH

Ongoing
Natural World

Gioacchino Altobelli, Castello e Ponte Sant’Angelo, Rome (detail), c. 1868. Albumen silver print, 9⅝ x 13⅞ inches (24.4 x 35.2 cm) on album page 18⅞ x 23⅝ inches (47.9 x 60 cm). Cincinnati Art Museum; The Albert P. Strietmann Collection, 1979.41

Part of the 2022 FotoFocus Biennial.

Curated by Nathaniel M. Stein, Curator of Photography, Cincinnati Art Museum

Natural World is an expansive collaboration between visual artists David Hartt (Canadian, lives/works Philadelphia, b. 1967) and John Edmonds (American, lives/works New York, b. 1989), poet Jason Allen-Paisant, and curator Nathaniel M. Stein. In new photographs, textiles, sculptures, site-specific installations, and an artist-designed publication, the collaborators reflect on relationships between identity, institutions and their collections, ways of knowing and telling stories, and ideas about nature and naturalness. Their overlapping dialogues with the museum’s collections suggest that we learn—and can unlearn—what we perceive to be natural about the ideas and worlds we make and inhabit.

Edmonds’s project, Father’s Jewels, is a profound meditation on family, reflecting on themes of identity, community, and belonging. Conceived in dialogue with works from the museum’s collection of African art and with the European artistic tradition, Edmonds’s pictures explore wounding, conflict, reverence, and love within and between generations of Black men.

Hartt’s project, The Garden, examines ways of seeing and picturing that are rooted in European artistic, political, and intellectual traditions. Synthesizing concerns he has explored throughout his career, Hartt focuses on plant life as it negotiates the environment outside human-assigned physical parameters and social meanings. Both artists offer pivotal statements about what it might look like to include silenced positions in a shared conversation about the nature of the world.

The poet and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant (Jamaican, lives/works Leeds, UK, b. 1980) explores embodied experience in the context of Afro-diasporic politics and world building. For Natural World, Allen-Paisant develops new writing reflecting on the complex meanings of nature in Black life.

As a writer for the exhibition catalogue, Nathaniel M. Stein (American, b. 1976) reflects on the necessity of unlearning naturalness, and professional practice against the impetus to tell history straight.

Commissioned by the Cincinnati Art Museum with support from FotoFocus and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

ADMISSION INFO

LOCATION

Cincinnati Art Museum

953 Eden Park Drive, Cincinnati, OH 45202

Full map and directions

PARKING INFO

Parking: FREE. Bike Racks are available outside the Main Entrance of the Art Museum. Hook up to one of our Marcel Duchamp-inspired racks during your visit! Accessible Parking is available in our north parking lot, just past the main visitor parking lot and entrance. Wheelchair + Stroller Entry is available via our DeWitt Entrance, on the east side of the museum, near the accessible parking. Access to the Mary R. Schiff Library + Archives is available via our Castellini Foundation Entrance, just to the right of the main entrance on the west side of the building.

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