Alexa Kleinbard was inspired by exploration of folklore and medicinal recipes from Indigenous peoples. | Michelle Corum, Jacksonville Today
Published on November 14, 2024 at 3:20 pm
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Thirty contemporary artists explore humanity’s connection to nature in a new exhibit at Jacksonville’s Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens.
Spirit in the Land features works by artists from North America and the Caribbean. The theme is natural environments under stress. Three of the artists are from Tallahassee.
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Acting as environmental stewards, the artists revitalize our understanding of nature as a repository of cultural memory, a place of sanctuary, and of spiritual healing.
Tallahassee artist Alexa Kleinbard’s series called Remedies depicts medicinal plants native to North Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas.
Kleinbard says it’s a reminder of the environments at imminent risk of destruction by humankind. And as she explains the meaning of her three images of oil on birchwood, she points to how each plant is a remedy for an ailment.
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“The connection to the spiritual self — the land, the pollinators, the plants,” she said. “We are connected to everything.”
Fifth generation Floridian Jim Roche of Tallahassee has his gelatin silver prints and graphite on paper in the exhibit. It’s called Return to Florida, All in my Background. Earlier in his life, Roche left Florida for a few years, then returned in the early ’70s and began to document Florida’s changing ecology.
“I came back and just saw that since I’d been gone so many things were being cut down, paved over, eliminated in the natural world,” Roche said.
Roche has displayed eight images with writings. He combines his photographs with poetic, diary-like text that record the date and time of each encounter.
In one of the larger displays, exhibit curator Trevor Schoonmaker describes the story behind Andrea Chung’s House of the Historians with sugarcane bark and leaves, sweetgrass, excelsior and floral twine. The art addresses the migration of millions of Asians to the Americas after the abolition of slavery. It’s inspired by Mauritian birds that weave nests in former sugarcane fields.
Spirit in the Land kicks off the Cummer’s new season, focused on the theme “Centering the Land and Voice.” The public can join a conversation with the curators of the exhibit, including Schoonmaker and Holly Keris, at 7 p.m. Dec. 10.
Spirit in the Land is on view at the Cummer, on Riverside Avenue, until Feb. 9.
