This year marks the bicentennial of Frederick Law Olmsted’s birth, a towering figure whose work continues to benefit communities nationwide. Join the New York Botanical Garden and landscape architect Sara Zewde on May 17 at 11 am as she discusses Olmsted’s often overlooked journey through the Southern slave states, a period that shaped his understanding of the many ways landscape, class, ecology, and power intersect. This lecture will take place online. Registered students will receive login instructions. $23 for NYBG members, $26 for nonmembers. Register HERE.

By exploring the four months she spent retracing Olmsted’s steps and her own deep archival research, Zewde examines the extent to which Southern landscapes today memorialize history and what that reveals about modern power dynamics.

She will also discuss her own design work such as Genesee Street in Houston, TX and Graffiti Pier in Philadelphia, PA which will serve to illustrate just how transformative landscapes can be.

Sara Zewde, founding principal of Studio Zewde, upends traditional assumptions of what public spaces can be with her unique blend of landscape architecture, urbanism, public art, archival research, and community engagement. A Harvard University Graduate School of Design professor, Zewde has been named a United States Artists Fellow and an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of New York.