MASS MoCA is currently accepting applications for its call for student papers, with submission due on November 1, 2025. Click here to learn more and apply.

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 immanence between nature and humanity? Artists, scholars, and students convene to share their experience 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 immanent 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 give humanity’s control to the ecological network that we are a part of.

MASS MoCA poses a question for our 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 immanence between nature and humanity?

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

MASS MoCA seeks out new ways of being and knowing as contemporary nature through polyphony, indeterminacy, and ecosystem cultivation. We seek to expose artist ecologies that drive new ideas into existence, and give life to, critique, and share culture.

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.

Image: Pallavi Sen