Opening Reception: Exploratory Works + Marginalia: Open Sessions 10

Chiasmodon niger Stomach Contents, Else Bostelmann Bermuda 1931. Watercolor on paper. 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm). Else Bostelmann © Wildlife Conservation Society.
Chiasmodon niger Stomach Contents, Else Bostelmann Bermuda 1931. Watercolor on paper. 11 × 14 inches (27.9 × 35.6 cm). Else Bostelmann © Wildlife Conservation Society.

Please join us Thursday, April 13 for the opening receptions ofExploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions andMarginalia: Open Sessions 10

The event is FREE and open to the public.

In our Main Gallery and Drawing Room Exploratory Works: Drawings from the Department of Tropical Research Field Expeditions brings to light for the first time an archive of images that illustrate the formation of our modern definition of nature. William Beebe (1877–1962) was one of America's greatest popularizers of ecological thinking and biological science. Beebe literally took the lab into the jungle, rather than the jungle to the lab. The Department of Tropical Research was pioneering in that, under Beebe’s direction, women were hired as lead scientists and field artists. Artist Isabel Cooper, joining in 1919, publicly relished her opportunity to travel through the jungles of Guyana juggling a “vivid serpent or tapestried lizard in one hand, and the best grade of Japanese paintbrush in the other.” The structure of The Drawing Center’s exhibition will mirror the two salient stages of the Department of Tropical Research's investigations: jungle field station work and floating laboratories for marine biology —revealing that artists and scientists worked closely and productively in the near past and that scientists once understood art as a valuable tool for promoting ecological thinking to a broad public.Curated by Mark Dion, Katherine McLeod, and Madeleine Thompson

In our Lab gallery Marginalia: Open Sessions 10 declares our present geo-political and ideological constructs to be permeable and malleable. The artists in this exhibition view borders and barriers as material through which to build new avenues of both trespass and solidarity.Marginalia features Daniel Bejar, Ana Peñalba, Sue Jeong Ka, Carolyn Lambert, Srinivas Mangipudi, Irini Miga, and Rodrigo Valenzuela.