A Garden of Promise and Dissent

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.

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.