In the 11 years that curator Dana Turkovic has worked at Laumeier Sculpture Park, she has spent countless hours among the trees. They loom outside the office windows and tower over the park’s 105 acres. So as she began to plan for the park’s fall exhibition, Turkovic’s time among the trees felt like a natural inspiration.
“It’s the blessing of being able to work in a park and be surrounded by nature all of the time, this kind of constant reminder that I have to think about the environment probably more so than other people. So it goes back to just being aware of our shared space with the trees,” she says. “Every time we do an installation, we have to think about what’s here—our landscape and the trees that we share the space with.”
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Laumeier is embracing that shared space with Forest Through the Trees, on view through December 11. It’s an indoor-outdoor exhibition of new works and permanent collection pieces inspired by the power, beauty, and symbolism of trees.
Featuring more than a dozen artists, the exhibition offers varied perspectives on our natural environment, evoked through sculpture, painting, and even scent. (Katie Paterson’s 2021 work “To Burn, Forest, Fire,” which uses incense to mimic the smell of the earth’s first and last forests, was presented as part of the exhibition’s opening day.)
“The work in this exhibition is…not as tied to a statement, because all of the artists are dealing with different things in their work,” says Turkovic. “A lot of them work with trees as a sustained practice, as well as using trees as the subject in their work, or using trees as the object in their work, so the work is literally coming from trees.”
Forest Through the Trees also gives Laumeier visitors a chance to reconnect with some of the park’s permanent collection. In addition to the new works, the exhibition highlights outdoor gallery pieces that utilize trees, such as RAQS Media Collective’s 2015 work, “If the World is a Fair Place, Then…,” which features stainless-steel bands placed around trees along the park’s Art Hike Trail.
Public programming for the exhibition includes two outdoor tours in October, a fall color hike, workshops, and a campfire chat with local artist Andy Millner, whose large, nature-inspired paintings will be featured in Forest Through the Trees.
“I’m always thinking about our mission as an organization: to connect art and nature,” says Turkovic. “One thing that we’re good at is these conversations about our environment, about the park, about the landscape… We’re kind of positioned to have those conversations. The work in this exhibition is less specifically about climate change, but it is about our relationship as humans to our natural environment.”
