Performance Activity Festivities
Celebrate our 17th Birthday
Saturday, June 21, 2025, 2025
Celebrate the Driehaus Museum’s 17th birthday with 17% off admission to the Museum, 17% discounts in the Museum Store (in person only), and in certain levels of Membership (In person only)! Your admission for the day includes performances by Chicago dance company, The Seldoms, who will perform a short excerpt from Superbloom, their full-length dance work about wildflowers, wildness, and radical beauty. You can also visit the Driehaus Museum Store for a book signing with Dr. Giovanni Aloi, the curator of A Tale of Today: Materialities, and the author of Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art.
Schedule of the Day:
1-1:08 pm Superbloom excerpt (Murphy Auditorium)
2-2:08 pm Superbloom excerpt (Murphy Auditorium)
2-3 pm Dr. Giovanni Aloi book signing (Third Floor Ballroom); a limited number of books will be available for sale
Books will be available for purchase in the Driehaus Museum Store
3-3:08 pm Superbloom excerpt (Murphy Auditorium)
The dance performances will be held at 1 pm, 2 pm, and 3 pm and will last approximately 7-8 minutes. Bookending each performance, Carrie Hanson, choreographer, dance educator, and the Founding Artistic Director of The Seldoms, will join the dancers on stage to offer brief remarks about their work.
About the Performance:
Artistic Director, Carrie Hanson says that “Superbloom aims for splendor as a mirror of the sublime beauty of the natural world, and invokes the human experience of awe as a way to reconnect to our degraded environment”. In creating the dance’s movement vocabulary, Hanson and the dancers studied particular wildflowers to express, for example, the open volume of a poppy or the tighter bell-shape of a desert bluebell, providing a kinetic counterpart to our exhibition on view, Rory McEwen: A New Perspective on Nature.
Choreography by Carrie Hanson
Performance by Haley Marcin and Rachel Newton
Music by Finom (Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart)
Costume by Damon D. Green
The Seldoms will perform Superbloom in entirety at the Chicago Botanic Garden on July 25, 26, 27. A projection version of Superbloom will premiere at ART on THE MART on July 10, running through September 7.
About Dr. Giovanni Aloi’s book, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art:
This groundbreaking volume unearths the representation of plants and their vital impact on art, thereby advocating for the botanical world’s legitimate place in art history.
Desired for their aesthetic beauty, sought after for their medicinal properties, harvested for their scents and flavors, or grown as essential material resources, plants are indissolubly entwined with our existence. In art it is no different: plants have played a critical role. Yet despite their significant material and conceptual contributions, plants have been sidelined in the commentary of art historians and critics.
Botanical Revolutions presents a global history of plants in art, focusing on the crucial moments that signaled the formation of new movements and styles, as well as the creation of media that could not have occurred without the involvement of and interaction with the vegetal world. In this fascinating and beautifully illustrated book, author Giovanni Aloi delves deeply into the history and representation of plants in art, advocates for a change in our relationship with the botanical world, and presents an alternative history of art that foregrounds the truly indispensable contributions of plants.
Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, curator, and educator specializing in the histories of art and the representation of nature in art. Aloi gained his PhD in natural history and contemporary art from Goldsmiths University of London and has worked as an educator at Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries. His essays on art and nature and other subjects have appeared in The Guardian, Apollo, Esse, Flash Art, Whitehotmagazine, and many academic journals.
He has published with Columbia University Press, Phaidon, MIT, and Prestel and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota series ‘Art after Nature’. Since 2006, Aloi has been the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. Aloi is the author of several books including Art & Animals (2011) and Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019) and Lucian Freud – Herbarium (2019). Since 2021, Aloi is US Correspondent for the international publication Esse Magazine – Art + Opinion. He has contributed to BBC radio programs and curated exhibitions in the US, Canada, UK, and Europe.
Aloi currently teaches modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Sotheby’s Institute of Art in New York and London.