Natural World
September 30, 2022–January 15, 2023
Vance Waddell and Mayerson Galleries (Galleries 124 and 125), with additional installations elsewhere in the museum.
Free Admission
Friends of Photography

Natural World is a commissioned collaboration between artists John Edmonds and David Hartt, poet Jason Allen-Paisant, and organizing curator Nathaniel M. Stein. The four collaborators explore meanings of nature and naturalness in overlapping dialogues with history, forms of knowledge, and museum collections and spaces. The exhibition features Hartt and Edmonds’s lens-based installations in two dedicated galleries, as well as the artists’ interventions elsewhere in the museum. In pivotal new bodies of work engaged with the museum’s objects and environments, they illuminate the social frames through which nature and naturalness are commonly understood, and offer glimpses of other ways to know it. Their work invites us to see what and how we have taught ourselves about nature, and to learn nature again—with an enlarged ability to perceive. At stake is a natural world with less erasure, in which it is possible to recognize the existence and agency of culturally marginalized actors.

An artist-designed companion book pairing Hartt and Edmonds’s images with new writing by Stein and Allen-Paisant is available in limited quantity through the museum shop beginning September 29, 2022.