Join Milk Street On the Road to Oaxaca on March 19 – 26, 2024. Only twelve spots are available, and registration is now open. You will travel with Maria Itaka, Iliana de la Vega, and Milk Street’s April Dodd. Take hands-on cooking classes with Iliana de la Vega, Mexican cooking authority and Milk Street friend. Tour the city’s best eats with Maria Itaka, Chris Kimball’s guide on his trips to Oaxaca. Travel to Tlacolula to cook with Catalina Lucas in her home in the rural countryside. Visit expert ceramicist Isabel Sanchez and learn about her passion for saving heirloom corn seeds. Eat at restaurants experimenting with new approaches to traditional ingredients. Per person cost $400 (single room supplement $500), including hotel and tour events. Airfare not included. Email milkstreettrips@culinarybackstreets.com
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents a special exhibition through September 17 in all special exhibition galleries.
Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art features work by contemporary artists who practice with living plant material. These artworks invoke themes associated with the fragility of life, the impossibility of permanence, and the construction of personal meaning through memory. Rather than using nature as a subject for depiction—as occurs in traditional landscape painting—these artists incorporate and manipulate plant species to help us reflect on the meanings and associations that influence our relationship with the natural world.
For these internationally-recognized artists, plants provide a medium for expressing individual identities, shared narratives, and collective memories. From an image born of growing grass to a cinematic reflection on eco-queer themes, to a suspended vertical garden on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, these thought-provoking and beautiful works mirror the transitory existence of the artists who cultivate them and the audiences that experience them.
Isabella Stewart Gardner constructed her art museum to center horticulture as a ‘living art,’ placing the blooming Courtyard at the heart of her galleries and cultivating numerous species of plants to establish a living collection that still exists today. This exhibition exemplifies the Gardner’s long tradition of interdisciplinary experience by uniting contemporary artistry with its horticultural and garden arts. This summer, join us to explore the emotional resonance and material expression of plants as art.
The exhibition highlights established works and site-specific installations from British team Ackroyd & Harvey; Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans; Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Piero Golia; Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson; and Brooklyn-based multi-media artist Rashid Johnson in the Hostetter Gallery. Johnson’s work – Antoine’s Organ (2016) – will be animated on weekdays and Thursday evenings with contemporary jazz piano improvisations. A film by Hong Kong-based video artist Zheng Bo is featured in the Fenway Gallery, and a new artistic commission by Natalie Jeremijenko on the theme of plants is presented on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. Please note: The soil and other living materials on view in Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art will be composted at the end of the exhibition. As this phase of life ends, they will transform to support new growth.
