[ENVS] From Lawn to Garden: Artistic Forms of Vegetal Resistance
At the intersection of the research developed in two of his books, Lawn, published last year by Bloomsbury, and Avant-gardeners, forthcoming with Prestel, the lawn and the garden emerge as cultural forms through which to rethink the relationship between art and nature. As a monoculture, the lawn suppresses biodiversity, demands water, fertilizers, pesticides, and repeated mowing, while offering no hospitality to animals and other forms of life. A rooted manifestation of outdated colonial and patriarchal ideals of order and normativity, the lawn conceals histories of exclusion and extraction, making the garden’s unrulier, more relational forms of cultivation all the more politically significant. The recent interest in gardening as an artistic practice constitutes a form of dissent against the extractive logics that have impoverished soils and reduced the living world to resource or passive backdrop. Many contemporary artists are now working with the vegetal world, unsettling the categories of artwork and proce…
Campus: Medford/Somerville campus. Location Details: Curtis Hall Multipurpose Room,
474 Boston Avenue. Open to Public: Yes. Speaker Name: Dr. Giovanni Aloi, Adjunct Professor at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. RSVP Information: https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_78EXisrHTMOXfRG9dolDpQ.
Thursday, September 24, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
For more info visit as.tufts.edu. Arnold J. Kemp: Artist Lecture-Performance
Join Tufts University Art Galleries and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts MFA Program for an artist lecture with Fall 2026 exhibiting artist Arnold J. Kemp. Arnold J. Kemp will reprise a 2023 performance lecture he developed after his first encounter with N. H. Pritchard’s poems in the Johnson Publishing Library, Chicago. Kemp will bring together recent scholarship and dynamic performance in honor of Pritchard’s innovative approach to poetry, sound, and visual art.
Norman Henry Pritchard (b. 1939, Manhattan, New York; d. 1996, Pennsylvania) was one of the most formally innovative poets of the 1960s and early 1970s. Affiliated with downtown literary and art circles, he was a member of Umbra, a collective of Black writers and musicians on the Lower East Side, and a regular at Greenwich Village’s Cedar Tavern. Pritchard published two collections of poetry in his lifetime (The Matrix, Poems: 1960–1970 (Doubleday, 1970), and Eecchhooeess (New York University Press, 1971), which were both…
Campus: Boston SMFA campus. Location Details: Anderson Auditorium. Wheelchair Accessible: Yes. Open to Public: Yes. RSVP Information: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1988566252191?aff=oddtdtcreator.
Friday, September 25, 2026, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM.
For more info visit artgalleries.tufts.edu. Solomont Speaker Series: Dr. Vivek Murthy
Register (In-Person Attendance) , Register (Virtual Attendance)
Join a conversation with the 19th and 21st Surgeon General of the United States and New York Times best-selling author, Dr. Vivek Murthy, about his book: Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World. In Together, Dr. Murthy makes a case for loneliness as a public health concern: a root cause and contributor to many of the epidemics sweeping the world today from alcohol and drug addiction to depression and anxiety. Loneliness also has implications far beyond our health: it affects how children experience school, how we navigate and perform at work, and the sense of division and polarization felt across the country.
Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World was chosen as this year's selection for the Common Book Program, a partnership between the Tufts University School of Medicine and Tisch College, for all incoming medical students.
Following Dr. Murthy’s tenure as Surgeon…
Online Location Details: https://tufts.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Kau2psObRv6d-Xc28eM3Ug. Campus: Boston Health Sciences campus. Location Details: DeBlois Auditorium (108)
MedEd Building
145 Harrison Avenue
Boston, MA 02111. Wheelchair Accessible: Yes. Open to Public: Yes. Event Type: Lecture/Presentation/Seminar. Event Subject: Health/Wellness. Medicine. Public Service/Government. Admission/Cost: Free.
Friday, September 25, 2026, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM.