AaN Poster Landscape III.jpg

Series Editors: Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard

Art after Nature

At a time of unprecedented ecological crisis and cultural change, Art after Nature explores the epistemological questions that emerge from the expanding, environmental consciousness of the humanities. Authors featured in this series engage with the recent ontological turn, upending anthropocentrism, in order to grapple with the dark ecological fluidity of naturecultures. The anthropogenic lenses of inquiry emphasize an ethical focus, foregrounding the more-than-human politics of our era. Within this framework, art theory, practice, and criticism are reconfigured as intersecting platforms upon which current philosophical trajectories can be mapped. This series engages with the politics and contradictions of the Anthropocene in order to problematize recent and influential disciplines such as animal studies, posthumanism, and speculative realism, through art writing and art making. Books published in Art after Nature foster true multidisciplinarity, accessibility, and diversity. Each volume aims to provide readers with the opportunity to creatively engage with new and alternative discourses at the intersection of art, science, and philosophy.

About This Book

Dr. Giovanni Aloi, series coeditor

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He is the author of many books on art and nature including Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2018), Botanical Speculations (2018), and Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019). He is a regular public speaker at the Art Institute of Chicago, a radio contributor, and has curated exhibitions in the USA and abroad. Aloi lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York.

Caroline Picard, series coeditor

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, and curator. Curating exhibitions since 2005, she has presented shows at UIC’s Gallery 400, The Renaissance Society, Vox Popuili, La Box ENSA, and more. From 2014-2019, she Co-Directed Sector 2337, and founded the Green Lantern Press in 2005, where she served as the Executive Director until it was adopted by the Hyde Park Art Center in 2022. Publishing fiction and comics under the name Coco Picard, her novel, The Healing Circle (Red Hen Press, 2022), won the 2020 Womens Prose Award and her graphic novel, The Chronicles of Fortune (Radiator Comics, 2017) was nominated for a DiNKy Award. Art criticism and comics have otherwise appeared in Artforum, Hyperallergic, The Paris Review, and the Chicago Reader among others. She currently lives with her family in Oxford, England.

LISTEN: University of Minnesota Press podcast

Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard join Cary Wolfe, author of the inaugural volume in the Art after Nature series Art and Posthumanism, in conversation on the University of Minnesota Press podcast.

Petra Kuppers, author of Eco Soma, talks art, performance, environment, awareness, attention, capitalism, language, identity, and disability culture with Aloi and Picard.

Graham Harman, author of Architecture and Objects, talks architecture and object-oriented ontology with Aloi and Picard.

A. Laurie Palmer, author of The Lichen Museum, channels the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic characteristics of lichens with Aloi and Picard.