Experts from Fordham University speak at the NYBG/Humanities Institute Colloquium. From left to right: J. Alan Clark, Sheila Foster, and Roger Panetta.
On Friday, February 26, 2016, the Humanities Institute hosted the colloquium Ethical Spaces: Landscapes and Environmental Law. Promoting innovative thinking about the rapidly urbanizing world we live in, the discussion centered on land, law, and ecology, focusing on the four classic elements—air, earth, fire, and water. Featuring three experts from Fordham University, the discourse ranged from bird migration (air) to legal ramifications of land ownership and social vulnerability (earth, fire) and the many challenges facing New York City’s waterfronts (water).
Paulina Saliga, Executive Director of SAH (center), and Study Day participants gather in the Mertz Library’s Shelby White and Leon Levy Reading Room.
On September 25, 2015, the Humanities Institute hosted a special Study Day for members of the Society of Architectural Historians. Celebrating its 75th anniversary, SAH has for many decades provided important leadership in furthering the understanding of architecture, landscapes, and urban planning, encouraging new design solutions and conserving the world’s cultural heritage. The Society aims to inspire critical thinking about the central role that architecture and landscape design play in the quality of everyday life.
The Lake at Chapultepec Park, Mexico City. Photo ca. 1920.
On June 26, 2015, The Humanities Institute conducted its fourth seasonal interdisciplinary colloquium, in the Readers Room-Auditorium of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library. With these more informal round table conversations the Humanities Institute has been able to start the process of reconnecting the various disciplines within the arts and sciences that form part of the environmental humanities: the complex relationship between nature, culture, cities, and society.
This Summer Colloquium’s topic, From the Garden of Eden to the Megalopolis: Mexico City Before and After Kahlo, was inspired by the Garden-wide Frida Kahlo exhibits and focused on the architectural and ecological historical development of Mexico City. The capacity crowd included a diverse mix of university faculty members and graduate fellows, art and architectural historians, as well as architects and urban planners, botanical and horticultural experts.
Claire Sabel is a Junior Fellow at the Humanities Institute of The New York Botanical Garden.
Marc Hachadourian showing a horse-tail plant (Equisetum) to Humanities Fellows
The Humanities Institute at The New York Botanical Garden was launched in the spring of 2014 to support interdisciplinary research between the arts and sciences. The Institute brings scholars to the Mertz Library to research relationships between humanity and nature, landscapes, and the built environment. This summer, several Fellows joined the Institute to pursue research projects that focus on the Library’s collections, which are some of the best in the world for the history and practice of horticulture, botany, and landscape design. In this series, they explore how visiting living plant collections in the Nolen Greenhouse has informed their work.
As Humanities Fellows, we work primarily with inert objects: a printed page, handwritten letters, sketches from field notebooks, an occasional herbarium sheet. Between our various research projects, which you can read more about here, we cover centuries and continents, and almost everything we need to do so is contained within the rich collections of the LuEsther T. Mertz Library (with the occasional help of the Internet).
Part of what makes the Humanities Institute so special, however, is its position within a much larger and varied research institution and living museum. Although humanists typically make use of archives and museum repositories, the Botanical Garden has a unique set of special collections housed in the Nolen Greenhouses.
Left to right: Jensen Wheeler Wolfe, Bob Grese, Carey Lundin, and Darrel Morrison shared their insights on the legacy of Jens Jensen and his revolutionary urban landscape designs.
“We all need the living green or we’ll shrivel up inside. To make the modern city livable is the task of our times.”
– Jens Jensen
On Earth Day, Wednesday, April 22, The Humanities Institute hosted New York City’s only screening of the award-winning documentary, Jens Jensen The Living Green. Followed by a panel featuring the film’s director and scholars in ecological landscape design, the event attracted more than 200 people in an exploration of the work of Jens Jensen (1860–1951) and its relevance to today’s urban environmental issues. Jensen was a passionate environmental activist and now, 50 years after his death, he is hailed as a pioneer of sustainable design, an early champion of native species, and a visionary landscape designer.
Speakers and hosts: Susan Fraser (Director Mertz Library), Arlene Shaner, Lisa O’Sullivan, Lucy Barnhouse, Ina Vandebroek, Jodi Moise, and Vanessa Sellers (Coordinator, Humanities Institute)
The Humanities Institute’s Winter Colloquium, The Healing Properties of Plants: Art, Culture, Science, was held at the Mertz Library on Friday, February 20, 2015. The colloquium was organized in conjunction with the NYBG exhibit on the curative properties of exotic plants, Wild Medicine in the Tropics, at the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory.
“An unsung American hero,” is how film director Carey Lundin describes landscape architect and pioneering conservationist, Jens Jensen (1860–1951), who rose from street sweeper to prolific city park designer amid Chicago’s steel industry boom. On Earth Day, April 22, the Garden’s Humanities Institute hosts the New York premiere of Lundin’s award-winning documentary, followed by a panel discussion exploring ways we can honor Jensen’s legacy. We sat down with Carey to hear more about the important man behind the film.
What inspired you to choose Jens Jensen as your subject matter?
I was born in Chicago and I love a great underdog man against the machine story, and I mean that two ways, both the political power machine and the rise of the machine age. Jensen fought for humanity against both.
On November 7, 2014, the Symposium The Changing Nature of Nature in Cities was held to a sold-out crowd in Ross Hall. It was the 2nd Symposium hosted by The New York Botanical Garden’s new Humanities Institute. Organized in collaboration with Todd Forrest, Arthur Ross Vice President for Horticulture and Living Collections, and Jessica Arcate Schuler, Director of the Thain Family Forest, it brought together a diverse group of scientists, botanists, landscape and garden design professionals, urban planners, architects, and general public to discuss the development of novel ecosystems in our rapidly growing metropolitan areas—a timely and often contentious subject in current conversations on the topic.
By exploring innovative approaches to studies in the environmental humanities, the Humanities Institute aims to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences. To further the connection between the disciplines, the Institute offers short- and long-term fellowship programs for students and scholars from a wide range of backgrounds and holds a number of events, including symposia, seminars, and colloquia.
Various seminars and colloquia, or dynamic “round table brainstorming sessions,” were held in July and September in which graduate students from New York universities and institutes of art and science—including the Bard Graduate Center, the Cooper Hewitt-Smithsonian Design Museum, and Fordham University—participated. The events featured a historic book and manuscript viewing in the Mertz Library’s Rare Book Room, followed by lively debate. During the discussions, students tried to define what form a humanities research center should take on to be most relevant in today’s rapidly changing world.
