Natural World

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.