Flowers for Marlborough
Julie Farstad is a Professor of Painting at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is the artist behind the public art project, Flowers for Marlborough, as well as the creator of intimate, interior-facing oil paintings on panel, all of which aim to celebrate the immense, interconnected world of native plants. Through her teaching at KCAI and her Flowers for Marlborough project, Farstad uses drawing and painting to help students awaken to a sense of wonder and curiosity about plants, their development, their ecological roles, as well as their political and cultural histories. Artists culturally operate in a myriad of ways; They are catalysts, provocateurs, questioners, complicators, storytellers, and communicators, among many other roles. In this presentation, Farstad will explore the many ways in which she and other artists have engaged with native plants in order to deepen the relationship that humans have with them, in the hopes of revealing our complex and beautiful entanglement with them.