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NATURE, ART, AND THE ENVIRONMENT

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NEW BOOK: This groundbreaking volume unearths the representation of plants and their vital impact on art, thereby advocating for the botanical world’s legitimate place in art history.

Desired for their aesthetic beauty, sought after for their medicinal properties, harvested for their scents and flavors, or grown as essential material resources, plants are indissolubly entwined with our existence. In art it is no different: plants have played a critical role. Yet despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics.

Botanical Revolutions presents a global history of plants in art, focusing on the crucial moments that signaled the formation of new movements and styles, as well as the creation of media that could not have occurred without the involvement of and interaction with the vegetal world. In this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, author Giovanni Aloi delves deeply into the history and representation of plants in art, advocates for a change in our relationship with the botanical world, and presents an alternative history of art that foregrounds the truly indispensable contributions of plants.

Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in environmental subjects and the representation of nature in art. His previous publications include Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), Botanical Speculations (2018), and Why Look at Plants? (2018).

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author, educator, curator,
and maker specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art

What we do
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Giovanni Aloi’s research focuses on the Anthropocene and new conceptions of nature in art. He currently teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture (www.antennae.org.uk). Aloi is the author of Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), Vegetal Entwinements in Philosophy and Art (edited with Michael Marder, 2023), Estado Vegetal: Performance and Plant-Thinking (2023), Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (2025), Lawn (2025), and I'm Not an Artist: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content (2025). He has contributed to PBS TV and BBC radio programs, worked at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and currently is USA correspondent for Esse Magazine. Aloi has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series 'Art after Nature'.

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MORE INFO AND RESOURCES

ANTENNAE:

THE JOURNAL OF NATURE

IN VISUAL CULTURE

Founded in 2006 by Giovanni Aloi, Antennae is the leading journal on nature, the environment, and art. A peer-reviewed, hybrid, journal free to the public. Download all issues free and stay up to date with current news.

Visit Giovanni Aloi's faculty page at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Giovanni Aloi's academia.edu site features downloadable essays, book chapters, and video recordings of talks and other events.

© 2024 Giovanni Aloi

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