The Gund Gallery at Kenyon College is pleased to announce The Art of Trees, an exhibition on view at the Gund from January 22–April 11, 2021.

The Art of Trees reveals the many resonances, forms, and relationships of trees. Exploring themes of restoration and destruction, community and isolation, location and identity, and fragile temporalities, the 14 artists featured in the exhibition experiment with a range of mediums from painting to digital video, and even use trees as creative collaborators to express our essential and inseparable bond with these guardians of the earth.

The Art of Trees invites an interdisciplinary dialogue about personal, local, and global relationships to the environment, while simultaneously drawing attention to interactions between trees themselves, the communities they form, and their resilience despite human interference.

“The sense of community that trees uniquely inspire came to life through the collaborative curatorial endeavor of Gund Associates, Gallery and College staff, and Kenyon faculty,” says Dr. Jodi Kovach, curator of academic programs at the Gund Gallery and an important participant in the development of the exhibition. She continues, “By leveraging one another's experiences with nature, modes of aesthetic appreciation, and perspectives on the environmental crisis, they have realized an exhibition that shows us how art can transform our ways of living with and in the natural world.” The participating Gund Associates add, “We hope that this exhibition provokes discussion about the environment and invites a heightened collective consciousness about the intersection of community and place, near and far.”

In addition, the Gund Gallery is pleased to present Nearby Voices. This special section of The Art of Trees exhibition offers artistic reflections on the local landscape as a shared point of witness and imagines trees as archives of commonly held stories and experiences that branch across generations of a community. Nearby Voices bridges the gap between global and local environmental concerns by engaging with the art and voices of community members. It will also include the work of 2020-21 artist-in-residence Brian Harnetty, an interdisciplinary, socially and environmentally engaged artist who is working collaboratively with community members to create a “sonic map” of Gambier and surrounding Knox County.

The Art of Trees is curated by a committee of Gund Associates, Kenyon faculty, and Gund Gallery staff who worked together in a collaborative, multi-year process to bring this project to life.