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...
