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October 28, 2024 to March 16, 2025 (Galleries)
November 17, 2024 to November 2025 (Grounds)
A Garden of Promise and Dissent inaugurates The Aldrich’s newly renovated campus and Sculpture Garden. This intergenerational group exhibition of twenty-one artists explores the animation of the “garden” as a site of private expression (poetics) and public action (praxis). Gardens offer solace, community, nutrition, and well-being; they provide safe spaces for rebellion and empowerment; they alleviate climate change, revitalize, and widen access to land use–providing localized food resources and alternative medicine. Gardens symbolize growth, death, and regeneration as well as represent care, resilience, and hope. Gardens can be highly ordered and aestheticized or anarchic indicators of aspiration and failure. The artists in this exhibition radicalize the garden as a theme to tackle moral, social, economic, and ecological afflictions that trouble our planet. Spanning the galleries and grounds, works will be sited within the natural world and against the built environment, unsettling the gulf that exists between the two.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue.
Artists participating in the exhibition include Terry Adkins, Kelly Akashi, Teresa Baker, Alina Bliumis, Carolina Caycedo, Carl Cheng, Rachelle Dang, Anders Hamilton, Maren Hassinger, Hugh Hayden, Max Hooper Schneider, Athena LaTocha, Gracelee Lawrence, Cathy Lu, Jill Magid, Suchitra Mattai, Mary Mattingly, Brandon Ndife, Meg Webster, Faith Wilding, and Rachel Youn.
A Garden of Promise and Dissent is curated by Amy Smith-Stewart, Chief Curator.
Major support for A Garden of Promise and Dissent is provided by The Aldrich Council. Generous support is provided by Diana Bowes and Jim Torrey and the Further Forward Foundation. Significant support is provided by Kristina and Philip Larson and The Cowles Charitable Trust. The catalogue is supported by the Eric Diefenbach and James-Keith Brown Publications Fund. Preferred Art Logistics Provider: Crozier Fine Arts.
Top image: Kelly Akashi, Heirloom, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Paul Salveson