Photo: Emily Paine
Professor Chris Martine (in cap) co-teaches the class.
Cross-pollination
What Class?
Cross-pollination: Art and Sex Through the Lens of Botany
Who Teaches It?
Professors Anna Kell, art & art history, and Chris Martine, biology, the David Burpee Professor of Plant Genetics & Research
What is the purpose of a flower? It is, undoubtedly, all about sex.
Cross-pollination integrates the professional perspectives of a visual artist and a botanist, introducing foundational concepts in these fields and encouraging students to integrate different systems of knowledge and explore their intersections. The course highlights floral anatomy and the diversity of floral reproductive strategies that can be observed. What makes this course different is that these concepts are taught through a series of studio-based projects and critiques that compare the creative sexual strategies of flowers to the often stifling and restrictive vocabulary our culture perpetuates around human sexuality.
The course deals with the biology of flowers — their reproductive strategies and tricks, their morphology and evolution — but it also examines the ways people use flowers to communicate ideas and cultural values, many of which are related to deeply embedded cultural codes surrounding concepts of beauty, innocence, romance, gender and the circle of life. What are we saying when we buy red roses on Valentine’s Day? What do we make of the pastel petals emblazoning grocery store ads preceding Mother’s Day? Why lilies at Easter? We clearly “say it with flowers,” relying on them to help us express many of the complex emotions we have for one another. Flowers, as traditional gifts and cultural motifs, are so ubiquitous that many of us fail to remember that they are actually sexual/reproductive structures.
“What are we saying when we buy red roses on Valentine’s Day? What do we make of the pastel petals emblazoning grocery store ads preceding Mother’s Day? Why lilies at Easter?”
We hope that the students, through their lab and studio experiences, come away not only with an appreciation for floral biology and the power of creative expression but also with a healthy new sense of suspicion for the limitations we impose on the human experience. We hope students realize — with the help of the natural world and critical theory — that the binary systems endorsed by most of our previous educations are reductive and that perhaps new expressions, new activism and new symbols can help us all forge a more inclusive way forward.
— Anna Kell and Chris Martine
