Natural World

Cincinnati Art Museum

September 30, 2022–January 15, 2023

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.

Group Show Contemporary Historical Photography Family Friendly Installation Film/Video

Related Events

October 1, 2022
9:00am – 4:30pm

The 2022 Biennial Symposium starts Friday, September 30, with a Film Screening and Conversation featuring Dara Freidman’s Dancer, and continues through Sunday, October 2, with talks, discussions, and keynote addresses at Memorial Hall and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

9am	Breakfast
9:45am	Opening Remarks by Mary Ellen Goeke, FotoFocus Executive Director
10am	Introduction by Kevin Moore: Photographs are the Monuments of Our Online Visual Culture Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator
10:30am	Discussion of Images on which to build, 1970s–1990s Moderated by: Ariel Goldberg, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Independent Writer and Curator, New York, NY, with panelists: JEB (Joan E. Biren), Photographer, Filmmaker, and Activist, Washington, D.C.; Lola Flash, Photographer, New York, NY; Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Co-coordinator, Lesbian Herstory Archives and Associate Dean, NYU Libraries, New York, NY; and Diana Solís, Photographer and Educator, Chicago, IL
11:30am	Artist Talk by Ian Strange Ian Strange, Transdisciplinary Artist, Perth, Australia
Noon	Lunch Break
1pm	Artist Talk by Jason Allen-Paisant Jason Allen-Paisant, Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
1:30pm	Discussion of On the Line: Documents of Risk and Faith Co-moderated by Makeda Best, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA, and Kevin Moore, FotoFocus Artistic Director and Curator, with artists: Mitch Epstein, Photographer, Holyoke, MA, and Xaviera Simmons, Artist, New York, NY
2:30pm	Conversation with Baseera Khan and Amara Antilla Amara Antilla, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Senior Curator at Large at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH; with Baseera Khan, Artist, New York, NY. Previously scheduled with Ylinka Barotto, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Independent Curator, Houston, TX
3:30pm	Keynote Lecture by Makeda Best: Devour the Land Makeda Best, FotoFocus Guest Curator and Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Access to the entire FotoFocus Biennial Program Week is a benefit of being a 2022 FotoFocus Biennial Passport holder. GET THE PASSPORT for free entry and exclusive events!

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
John Edmonds, Refuge, 2022. Pigment inkjet print, 40 x 60 inches (101.6 x 152.4 cm). © John Edmonds. Courtesy of the artist, commissioned by the Cincinnati Art Museum
Charles Nègre, Plants in Sunlight, c. 1865. Albumen silver print, 8⅜ x 6¹¹⁄₁₆ inches (21.3 x 17 cm) on sheet 8⅜ x 7⁷⁄₁₆ inches (21.3 x 18.9 cm). Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum purchase: Gift of John Sanborn Conner, by exchange, 1981.157
Unidentified Igbo Artist, Ikenga (Seated Male Figure), mid 20th century. Wood and pigment, 23½ x 5³⁄₁₆ x 4 inches (59.7 x 13.2 x 18.9 cm). Cincinnati Art Museum; Museum Purchase: Gift of John Sanborn Conner, by exchange, 1981.124