Thursday, May 10, 6:30 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
On May 10, in conjunction with the University of Iowa Museum of Art (UIMA) exhibition Resistance, Resilience, & Restoration, the Figge Art Museum will host an evening with exhibit curator Vero Rose Smith, the assistant director of the Legacies for Iowa Collections-Sharing Project who will share her thoughts on the selection of pieces for this celebration of the beauty and fragility of nature.
As is stated on the UIMA Web site: “Gardening, agriculture, and other forms of land modification have long defined human interaction with the broader natural world. However, these interactions have radically changed over the past two centuries. The impact of large-scale industrialized agriculture, ever-stricter municipal and neighborhood association ordinances regarding yard maintenance, and the increasing urgency of climate change have fundamentally re-shaped how people view their relationship to landscape. Furthermore, already marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by the deleterious effects of pesticide run-off, dwindling water reserves, and climate change-induced environmental disintegration.
“First established by ecologist Phillip S. Lake, the concept of resistance, resilience, and restoration refers to the health of dynamic ecological communities. Lake writes: 'The capacity to weather a disturbance without loss is defined as resistance, whereas resilience is the capacity to recover from a disturbance after incurring losses, which may be considerable...In restoration, interventions are designed and implemented with the aim of strengthening the resilience, that is, the capacity to recover, of degraded systems.'
“Can Lake's definition of degraded systems include systems of human interaction, both historical and contemporaneous? After all, inequality rises from systems – social, governmental, and ecological – degraded over time. What does cultural resistance look like? How does resilience form and become visible? Finally, where do the paths to ecological and social restoration cross? Is restoration even possible, or is renewal a better phrase? This exhibition explores both contemporary historical contexts of landscape visualizations.”
Vero Rose Smith's curator talk on May 10 will be preceded by a 4 p.m. happy hour and 5:30 p.m. performance by the WIU President's International String Quartet. Resistance, Resilience, & Restoration will be on display in the museum's UIMA galleries through August 12, and more information on ese events is available by calling (563)326-7804 or visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
