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Tag: isabella stewart gardner museum

  • Through June 20 – Shen Wei, Painting in Motion

    Dancer, choreographer, painter, and filmmaker Shen Wei moves fluidly between disciplines and cultures to create art that expresses a common spirit animating the world around us. His theory of dance seeks to align the energies inside and outside the body, approaching the body and its environment as fundamentally interconnected. As a painter, Shen Wei uses the monumental scale of the canvas to create immersive visual environments that evoke ancient Chinese landscape paintings while enlisting the drips and gestures of twentieth-century abstraction. The size of the paintings invites the viewer on a journey along the canvas, integrating movement into the experience of static works. His films synthesize choreography, time, place, and light to craft ethereal worlds. Shen Wei’s practice transcends the boundaries between visual and performing arts, seeking spiritual meaning that unites his work across disciplines.

    Painting in Motion, a single exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in three parts, is the first exhibition in the U.S. to present the range of Shen Wei’s artistry. Shen Wei’s recent paintings, including two works he created as an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum, are on display in the Hostetter Gallery along with notebooks, sketches, and documentation of his choreography that provide insight into his evolution as an artist. Calderwood Hall and the Fenway Gallery of the Palace screen his films, featuring a new commission for the Gardner Museum, Passion Spirit. Shen Wei reimagines an image from Passion Spirit for his piece on the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, showing the continuity between time-based and still media in his work.

    For more information on times, and for a gallery guide, visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/shen-wei

  • Friday, April 9, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm – Behind the Scenes of the Hanging Nasturtiums, Online

    Friday, April 9, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm – Behind the Scenes of the Hanging Nasturtiums, Online

    Enjoy a virtual behind-the-scenes look at the Hanging Nasturtiums display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with Erika Rumbley, The Stanley P. Kozak Director of Horticulture, and horticulturist Lindsay Grimes. During this April 9 noontime talk, Erika and Lindsay will explore the life cycle of our Nasturtiums, explain how this iconic display comes together over the course of nine months, and take us into the greenhouse (virtually!) to see where the Nasturtiums are grown. After the program, participate in a Q&A about the installation. Free for members of the Gardner Museum. To join and participate, visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/event/behind-scenes-hanging-nasturtiums

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  • Tuesday, February 25, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Plants in the Design Imagination

    Please join The Harvard Graduate School of Design on February 25 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium in Gund Hall in Cambridge for the Sylvester Baxter Lecture featuring a discussion by landscape architects Ron Henderson, Julian Raxworthy, and Douglas Reed, and moderated by Danielle Choi. Free and open to the public

    Participants:

    Ron Henderson is Professor and Director of the Landscape Architecture + Urbanism Program at Illinois Institute of Technology and has held prior appointments at Harvard, Penn State, Tsinghua, and RISD. As founding principal of L+A Landscape Architecture, he has designed the Lynch Courtyard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), City Walk (Providence), Grounds of the Elizabethan Theater at Chateau d’Hardelot (France), Landfill Garden (Providence), and Jiuzhou Qingyan garden at the China Pavilion of the 2010 Shanghai Expo (Shanghai), among many projects. He writes and lectures frequently on Asian gardens and cities, including The Gardens of Suzhou published in 2013 by University of Pennsylvania Press.  An exhibition of fifteen of his Japanese cherry tree sketchbooks is currently exhibited at the US National Arboretum where he is also collaborating with master gardener, Fujimoto Kurato, on the restoration of the arboretum’s venerable Japanese cherry trees.

    Julian Raxworthy PhD is a landscape architect based in Dubai. He is an Honorary Associate Professor with the ATCH Research Centre (Architecture, Theory, Criticism and History) at the University of Queensland, where he completed his doctorate entitled “Novelty in the Entropic Landscape: landscape architecture, gardening and change”. He has been a Registered Landscape Architect in Australia, where he was Design Manager for Aspect Studios, and Principal Landscape Architect for Donovan Hill Architects (now part of Bligh Voller Nield) and was also a Registered Landscape Architect in South Africa, where he was Convenor of the Master of Landscape Architecture & Master of Urban Design programs at the University of Cape Town, and Principal Landscape Architect for Wolff Architects. A graduate of RMIT University, Melbourne, he was a founder of Kerb: journal of landscape architecture, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Virginia, and at the École Nationale Supérieure de Paysage (ENSP) Versailles. His most recent book is Overgrown: practices between landscape architecture and gardening, published in Fall 2018 by The MIT Press, which was supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

    Douglas Reed , MLA ’81, is recognized nationally for design leadership and for his tireless advocacy of culturally significant landscapes. Through his diverse projects and non-profit work, he passionately promotes the wise and creative treatment of our cultural patrimony. Known for his cultivated eye and relentless focus on contemporary design expression, Reed garnered broad critical acclaim two decades ago for the innovative Therapeutic Garden at the Institute for Child and Adolescent Development. That project received the President’s Award of Excellence from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

    Reed is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. In 2011 he was recognized as a Resident of the American Academy in Rome. He was selected in 2005, with Gary Hilderbrand, for the Emerging Voices program of the Architectural League of New York City, and for the Thaler Memorial Lectureship at the University of Virginia in 2013. He lectures widely and participates as a critic on reviews for design schools nationwide. He co-authored the firm’s 2012 monograph, Visible | Invisible, which received the ASLA’s Award of Excellence in Communication.

    Danielle Choi, MLA ’08, is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She teaches in the MLA-I core studio sequence and leads design research seminars.

    Choi’s research concerns infrastructure, technology, and the synthetic role of landscape architecture in American urbanization. Current research projects concern the environmental history of 20th century interior landscapes, and also water infrastructure and the invention of public nature. Archival work is used as a critical component of design research methodology as the cultural legacy of these projects is maintained through present-day projects of preservation, conservation, and restoration.

    Choi’s research has been published in Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture. Prior to joining the GSD, Choi taught studio in urban design at Columbia University. She is a licensed landscape architect, and has practiced with Topotek in Berlin and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in New York; as a senior associate at MVVA, she led strategy and design of complex urban landscapes and managed large, multi-disciplinary teams. She holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Masters in Landscape Architecture from the GSD, receiving the Jacob Weidenmann award for excellence in design.

    Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or events@gsd.harvard.edu.

  • Thursday, September 12, 7:00 pm – Landscape Lecture: Picturing Social Reform

    Thursday, September 12, 7:00 pm – Landscape Lecture: Picturing Social Reform

    Big Plans examines the role of visual images in support of progressive social reform in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum exhibition features large-format urban plan drawings and small-format documentary street photographs. Big Plans considers the urban planning proposals developed in the service of social reform by Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Eliot in relation to the political picture-making of Lewis Hine, and the cultural place-making of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The exhibition presents the invention of landscape architecture as a progressive response to the social and environmental conditions for working-class immigrants in the industrial metropolis and raises contemporary questions as to who advocates for the social, cultural, and environmental health of the city today.

    Join us at the Museum on September 12 at 7 pm for a discussion of urban plans as cultural works and the role of cultural imaginaries in progressive urban reform, featuring presentations by and conversations with:

    Anita Berrizbeitia, Harvard University
    Toni Griffin, The Just City Lab
    Nikil Saval, Reclaim Philadelphia
    Sara Zewde, Dumbarton Oaks

    Introduced and moderated by Charles Waldheim, Ruettgers Curator of Landscape. Tickets are required and include Museum admission. $15 adults, seniors $12, students $10, free for members. Register buy calling box office at 617-278-5156, or online at https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/event/lecture-big-plans-20190912

  • Thursday, March 14, 7:00 pm – Piet Oudolf with Thomas Piper

    The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum will present a Landscape Lecture on Thursday, March 14 at 7 pm in Calderwood Hall. The lecture is currently sold out but to put your name on a wait list call 617-278-5156, Wednesday through Monday, 11 – 4:30.

    The evening begins with a screening of Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf, followed by Piet Oudolf and Thomas Piper in conversation with Charles Waldheim.

    Piet Oudolf is an internationally recognized Dutch garden designer, plantsman, and author. Oudolf is a leading figure of the “New Perennial” movement. He practices a naturalistic approach to gardening using bold drifts of perennials and grasses chosen at least as much for their structure as for their color.

    Thomas Piper is an award-winning non-fiction filmmaker, focusing on design and contemporary art. Five Seasons won the Polly Krakora Award for Artistry in Film at the 2018 DC Environmental Film Festival. In 2008, his film Ellsworth Kelly: Fragments won best Film for Television at the International Festival of Films on Art in Montreal.

    Patrons are invited to a private reception with Piet Oudolf following the screening.

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  • Thursday, October 25, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture: Michael Van Valkenburgh

    Michael Van Valkenburgh is the founder of the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, with offices in Brooklyn, New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The firm works at all scales, from large urban green spaces like Brooklyn Bridge Park to intimate gardens like the Monk’s Garden at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Other recent projects include Dorothea Dix Park in Raleigh, The Obama Presidential Center in Chicago (rendering below), A Gathering Place for Tulsa, and master planning and design for a new neighborhood at the mouth of Toronto’s Lower Don River.

    Michael earned a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and a Master of Fine Arts in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

    Currently the Charles Eliot Professor Emeritus in Practice of Landscape Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Michael is a registered landscape architect in more than 25 states. On Thursday, October 25 at 6:30 pm in the Piper Auditorium at Gund Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Michael will deliver the Frederick Law Olmsted Lecture, free and open to the public. For more information visit http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/michael-van-valkenburgh/

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  • Through July 31 – Summer Blues Courtyard Display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

    Late-flowering hydrangeas make the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Courtyard a delightfully cool retreat in the summer, beginning with large, spectacular mopheads and ending with the tall Paniculata ‘Grandifolia’, known in America as PeeGees. In July, the statuesque Agapanthus appears in the Courtyard with its large umbels of inky blue flowers. Hydrangeas are native to Japan, where they have been grown as ornamental plants for centuries; Western travelers brought them to their gardens in the late 18th century.

    Visit the Museum website for hours and entrance fee information. Photo by Siena Scarff, 2012. Please note that the Courtyard displays are part of a living collection and as such the actual flowers may be different than what is described on our website, http://www.gardnermuseum.org/

    Summer Blues courtyard display at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  • Thursday, September 14, 7:00 pm – Kate Orff

    Join The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for its annual series of engaging and inspirational presentations from leading voices in the field of landscape architecture. Internationally renowned designers present their recent work articulating landscape as a medium of design for the social, cultural, and ecological life of the city.

    On Thursday, September 14, the 2017/2018 season kicks off with a lecture by Kate Orff. Kate Orff is the founder and design director of SCAPE, a firm focusing on landscape architecture, broadly construed. She has designed projects across the United States and internationally. She lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on the topic of urban landscape and new paradigms of thinking, collaborating and designing for the anthropocene era. A recent TED talk on Reviving New York’s Rivers with Oysters has been viewed over 300,000 times. Kate sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean — thus driving even more innovation in “oyster-tecture.” Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.

    Landscape Lectures begin at 7 pm in Calderwood Hall. Lectures include Museum admission and require a ticket; tickets can be reserved online, in person at the door, or by phone: 617 278 5156. Museum admission: adults $15, seniors $12, students $5, free for members. Landscape and Horticulture public programs are supported by the Barbara E. Millen and Markley H. Boyer Endowment Fund. These programs also are supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which receives support from the State of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Photo courtesy of www.architecturaldigest.com.

  • Thursday, November 10, 7:00 pm – Gardner Museum Landscape Lecture: Julie Bargmann

    Julie Bargmann is a leader in designing and building regenerative and environmentally appropriate landscapes. She founded D.I.R.T. studio in 1992. Highly regarded for her versatility and hands-on approach (she likes to get her hands dirty), Bargmann’s work hews to themes of sustainability, economy, community engagement, respect for site histories, and above all a love of the landscape. For Vintondale Reclamation Park in rural Pennsylvania, she collaborated to create a large-scale natural filtration system for a waterway polluted by acid-mine drainage. The project earned D.I.R.T. the 2001 National Design Award from the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Landscape Lectures begin at 7 pm in Calderwood Hall at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Lectures include Museum admission and require a ticket; tickets can be reserved online, in person at the door, or by phone: 617 278 5156. Museum admission: adults $15, seniors $12, students $5, free for members. This Thursday, November 10 event is sponsored by an anonymous donor. Landscape and Horticulture public programs are supported by the Barbara E. Millen and Markley H. Boyer Endowment Fund. This program is supported in part by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which receives support from the State of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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  • Thursday, October 15, 6:30 pm – Massachusetts Horticultural Society Honorary Medals Dinner

    Each year, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society presents the Honorary Medals Dinner where the leading lights of horticulture are honored. The event gives us the opportunity to recognize the outstanding contributions of horticulturalists, plant innovators, and those who have made significant contributions to the enjoyment and appreciation of plants and the environment. This year’s dinner will take place Thursday, October 15 beginning at 6:30 pm in the Hunnewell Building at Elm Bank.

    THE GEORGE ROBERT WHITE MEDAL OF HONOR: Kris Jarantoski, Executive Vice President and Director, Chicago Botanic Garden- Keynote Speaker

    Kris Jarantoski (pictured below)  develops and directs the horticulture, plant collections, and facilities and planning of the Chicago Botanic Garden. Since joining the Garden in 1977, Jarantoski has played a major part in the creation of each of the 26 distinct gardens and four natural areas on the Garden‘s 385-acre campus.

    During his time at the Garden, Jarantoski has received a number of notable awards. In 2007, the American Horticultural Society presented Jarantoski with its Professional Award for his significant contributions to the field of horticulture. In 2011, the Garden Club of America presented Jarantoski with its Distinguished Service Medal for outstanding service in the field of horticulture.

    In July 2014, Jarantoski received the American Public Gardens Association (APGA) Honorary Life Member Award—its most prestigious—recognizing “an enduring commitment and contribution to the organization and leadership in the field of public gardens.” Announcing the award, Casey Sclar, executive director of the APGA, wrote, “Kris’s service to the Association for almost four decades is a beacon of leadership for others to emulate. He not only has taken the Chicago Botanic Garden from fledgling garden to one of the great gardens of the world, but has lifted the entire profession along the way with his charismatic, positive grace.”

    Most recently, in November 2014 Jarantoski was awarded the 2015 Arthur Hoyt Scott Medal and Award. The Scott Medal and Award, established in 1929 by Swarthmore College, recognizes an individual who has made an outstanding national contribution to the science and art of gardening; it has long been regarded as one of the most prestigious honors in horticulture.

    In addition, the Thomas Roland Medal will be presented to Joann Vieira, Director of Horticulture at Tower Hill Botanic Garden, The Jackson Dawson Memorial Medal will go to The American Chestnut Foundation, and Gold Medals will be awarded to Roger Cook, for his expertise on This Old House and his promotion of the public’s understanding and appreciation of horticulture and gardening, Mrs. Dorrance H. Hamilton for her support of excellence in horticulture through the Preservation Society of Newport County Flower Show, and Mrs. Maureen Ruettgers for her support of excellence in horticulture at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

    For information on attending, visit www.masshort.org.

    Kris-J-with-books

     

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