Opened on March 11 - july 25, 2020
The Bodhi Tree is said to be the site of
Siddhārtha Gautama's awakening as the Buddha. The Tree of Life is found in both
the beginning of the Jewish Tanakh and in the last book of the
Christian Scriptures. Ancient Chinook prayers address God as the "Maker of
Trees." As the novelist Richard Powers said, trees are rightly
called "architecture of imagination." Their shade and branches
have been sites of contemplation, suffering, and imagining our renewal.
Today, trees still speak: blunt stumps communicate deforestation and charred limbs speak of Los Angeles fires started by our own hands—or our negligence. New discoveries of communicating root systems speak to a tangled web of connections just below the surface of the visible world, just as LA's iconic—and imported—palms evoke a colonial past. In To Bough and To Bend, artists explore these ecological issues and look to both religious and historic art practices that help us listen to these old friends, so that we might find our way back into the living world we share.
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