Contemporary Nature: Tending the Garden is a public symposium that poses questions for our ecological future: How do we tend the garden into co-becoming with the earth and all that it embodies? How can artists help us understand the interdependence between nature and humanity? Artists, scholars, and students convene to share their experiences on what co-becoming means to them in their art, gardening, and land stewardship practices. Presenters include Pallavi Sen and Sarah Workneh, Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman, Amanda Lovelee and Jessica Gersony, and Camila Marambio and Christy Gast.

Gardens are choreographed sites with the most cyclically innate power to all life: to catch sunlight and transform energy into matter. Through gardening, we are able to cultivate physical and emotional energies, making us manipulators of the world. Nature is dialectic; we are one of many agents in a wide network. Humanity continues to create gardens to ecologize, although we have blighted them through histories of apartheid, colonialism, and control, and we continue on this path. Gardening reframes choice and power, as it produces allowances and realizations to know what it means to be with others in difference, to know unknowing, and to give humanity’s control to the ecological network that we are a part of.

Our intention is to dissolve boundaries of information-sharing between species and ecological processes and realize how truly interconnected we are in nature.

On Friday, March 13, 2026, undergraduate and graduate students will present new papers on various topics around Tending the Garden. Saturday, March 14, 2026, is a full day of programmed talks and performances.

SCHEDULE

Friday March 13, 2026
Club B10

2pm: Doors Open

2:30pm: Welcome and Introduction by Gabriel Sacco, Senior Manager of Public Programs and Creative Producer

3–4:45pm: Student Presentations

5–6pm: Reception and Mixer in the Research & Development Store

Saturday March 14, 2026
MASS MoCA’s Research & Development Store

9:30–10:30am: Coffee and pastries in MASS MoCA’s Research & Development Store with presentation of MASS MoCA’s Campus Initiatives by Andy Schlatter, Director of Facilities and Campus Planning

Club B10

10:30am: Doors Open

11am: The Topics of Contemporary Nature, Gabriel Sacco, Senior Manager of Public Programs and Creative Producer

11:30am: Making the World You Want to Exist In: A Conversation with Sarah Workneh and Pallavi Sen, Moderated by Roz Crews
Imaginative in all that they do, Sarah Workneh and Pallavi Sen will discuss the world-building practices of farming and gardening. Viewing the act of growing food as inherently political, they will explore the larger implications of making a garden — how it extends beyond pleasure or pastime to become an act of self-determination, care, and resistance.

12:15pm: A Homecoming with Amanda Lovelee and Jessica Gersony
Amanda Lovelee and Jessica Gersony weave together joy, the bipartisan tool of cheer, and the science behind assisted plant migration in their outdoor exhibition at MASS MoCA, Homecoming. During their conversation they explore how cross-sector collaborations are a primary influence for their work with a focus on climate and environmental justice.

12:45pm: Homecoming Pep Rally for the Trees
Join us for the Homecoming opening program! 

1:30pm: Lunch Break

2:30pm: Afternoon Sessions Introduction

2:45pm: Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman
The conventional farming model, defined by its extractive practices and inability to plan for the long term, is heading toward collapse. This trajectory is reinforced by institutions that deny the viability of alternative methods. Artists Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman challenge this false narrative. Through their research into sustainable agriculture, they envision a way out of the extractive model and provide insight into how we can collectively progress.

3:30pm: Camila Marambio and Christy Gast
Marambio and Gast introduce The Venice Agreement (2022), and how the visual and performative arts are sites to leverage human ecologies and decentralized policy-making, specifically for the awareness and protection of wetlands, peatlands, and bogs.

4:15pm: Break

4:30pm: Keynote with Báyò Akómoláfé
Writer and philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé discusses post-humanist philosophy, entanglement, and agential realism, or the co-becoming of agents through material-discursive practices, in the face of a changing climate worldwide.

About the Speakers:
Amanda Lovelee is a civic and environmentally focused artist whose work sits at the intersection of science, connection, and system change. Her public practice uses empathy and play as tools to shift conversations about shared futures. She works with governments and in cross-sector collaborations, creating bright, joyful, engaging, and complex large-scale public art projects. For past projects, she has partnered with arborists, planners, biologists, water resource managers, and scientists. Lovelee is currently a US Cultural Policy Fellow at Stanford University, working in residence at the Environmental Protection Agency on projects that foreground art, culture and climate change. She is the co-founder of CAIR Lab, a firm that builds and supports the field of artists in residence in government, and is the co-founder of PLUS/AND, a civic design studio that builds stronger cities through relationships and art. 

Jessica Gersony is a plant physiologist, artist, and educator. She is passionate about exploring human-planet interactions through both scientific and artistic inquiry, and strives to do this work through an intersectional, social justice lens. The ultimate goals of her work are to increase and deepen our awareness of (and relationship to) the natural world; to further diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM spaces; and to improve our understanding of how plants are responding to climate change. Scientifically, she investigates the physiological processes underpinning how plants interact with the changing climate around them.  To integrate across these interests and explore how they can all inform one another, she has formed the PLACE (PLant physiology, Art, and Community Engagement) Lab at Smith College. The lab investigates questions related to plants and climate change, such as: What might northeastern U.S. forests look like in the coming decades? Members of the PLACE Lab are also encouraged to pursue and present sci-art projects and identify ways to include community engagement in all aspects of research and art-making (specifically communities historically excluded from STEM spaces). 

Born in 1989, Pallavi Sen is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, Instagram, and intuitive movement. Current interests include planting meadows, inner lives of birds and animals, the grief of the Anthropocene, South Asian costumes, domestic architecture, altars, deities, atheism and magical thinking, style, pattern history, masculinity, friendship + love, her future lover, farming and the artist as farmer, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, seeds, and cooking.

Prior to joining the team at Sky High Farm, Sarah Workneh spent 23 years running alternative art educational spaces—first at Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency and more recently at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. Workneh’s central interests in the history of social movements mixed with models of liberatory education and praxis informed her approach to her work and informed significant structural, experiential, and financial shifts at Skowhegan, which raised $22M in a comprehensive capital campaign and underwent a five-phase Master Facilities plan. She has published numerous essays & speeches; has lectured widely at schools & programs around the US; and has served as an advisor to academic, residency, and other non-profit programs, particularly around issues of community building, equity, and strategic planning. Workneh is currently on the advisory boards of Recess, the Black Lunch Table, Salmon Creek Farm, and is on the Boards of Colby College Museum of Art, RAIR in Philadelphia, the Buxton School in Williamstown, MA, and ProjectEATS. Workneh has a BA in Linguistics & Russian and pursued graduate work with a focus on Social Movement Theory, Political Economy, & Liberation Theology.

Roz Crews is an artist, curator, and educator focused on creating platforms for public dialogue and collaboration. As Associate Curator of Programs at the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), Roz oversees programming and helps shape interpretive strategies. Recent projects at WCMA include co-organizing Pallavi Sen: Colour Theory and managing the accompanying publication, developing and implementing public programs for Emancipation: The Unfinished Project of Liberation and Teddy Sandoval and the Butch Gardens School of Art, and curating Tsedaye Makonnen: Refuge used to live among the Hoosic River and the White Oak Trees. With an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a BA in Public Archaeology from New College of Florida, Roz has held various roles in museums, non-collecting art institutions, public schools, and universities.

Bergman and Salinas are artists, book publishers, educators, and facilitators of dialogue, having held full-time faculty positions at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, the University of Washington, and the University of Missouri. Our work is inherently multi-layered and interdisciplinary, manifesting as site-based sound recordings, text publications, public artworks, paintings with handmade inks, site-specific installations, reading rooms, seed libraries, and community events. For over two decades, we have steadily produced this research-based work for a global context, exhibiting at the 4th Athens Biennale; the 1st Bergen Assembly Triennial; Serralves Museum, Porto; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Nikolai Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Palais de Tokyo; Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Luminary, St. Louis; Artspace New Haven; and Artspace San Antonio; among others.

Camila Marambio is a transmedia curator, artist, somatic worker, and scholar, exploring the frontier between the possible and the not-yet-imagined. Her research meets at the intersection of contemporary art, environmental humanities, and performance studies. She draws inspiration from significant events, people, and places that have nurtured her experimental approach to eco-cultural work. Most recently, her immersive curatorial work gave rise to the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol was praised as one of the top ten pavilions of 2022 Biennale by The Brooklyn Rail, Frieze Magazine, and Art Review. 

Christy Gast (b. 1976, Ohio) is a New York-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, video, and textiles. Her work is rooted in field research and collaborative practices, as well as complex textile constructions. Gast was a founding member of the research collective Ensayos, through which she spent 15 years working on issues of ecological storytelling in Tierra del Fuego and other archipelagos. 

Báyò Akómoláfé (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea Aanya and Kyah Jayden Abayomi, the grateful life-partner to EJ, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, self-styled ‘trans-public’ intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak (along with Professors Molefi Kete Asante and Augustine Nwoye), Bayo Akomolafe is the visionary founder of The Emergence Network, a planet-wide networking project and inquiry at the edges of the Anthropocene that seeks to convene new kinds of responsivities, sensuous solidarities, and experimental practices for a posthumanist parapolitics. He is host of the postactivist course/festival/event, ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’ and curator of Dancing with Mountains, the educational consultation.

Image: Pallavi Sen