Back to Eden: An Interview with Jennifer Scanlan
by John Shorb
John Shorb is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, and a B.A. from Carleton College. Here, he continues his editorial work for ARTS by interviewing practicing artists and curators for our “in the gallery” column.
Curator Jennifer Scanlan stands in the main gallery of the Museum of Biblical Art at 61st and Broadway in New York City, where she is taking in the museum’s latest exhibit “Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden.” She curated the exhibit at the museum’s request, coming to them with twelve years of experience curating shows at the Museum of Art and Design, just a few blocks down Broadway. Scanlan brought together a compelling group of artists from different disciplines and backgrounds to create a show focused on the staying power of the Garden of Eden in our culture today.
John Shorb is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He holds an M.Div. from Union Theological Seminary, and a B.A. from Carleton College. Here, he continues his editorial work for ARTS by interviewing practicing artists and curators for our “in the gallery” column.
Curator Jennifer Scanlan stands in the main gallery of the Museum of Biblical Art at 61st and Broadway in New York City, where she is taking in the museum’s latest exhibit “Back to Eden: Contemporary Artists Wander the Garden.” She curated the exhibit at the museum’s request, coming to them with twelve years of experience curating shows at the Museum of Art and Design, just a few blocks down Broadway. Scanlan brought together a compelling group of artists from different disciplines and backgrounds to create a show focused on the staying power of the Garden of Eden in our culture today.
John Shorb: Let’s begin with Barnaby Furnas’ painting The Fruit Eaters.
Jennifer Scanlan: Furnas’s painting is such a vivid and dramatic image—so connected to art-historical precedents of the Garden of Eden, yet so fresh. You can see that Eve has her back to us. The entire painting is kind of blurry, making the garden seem lush and dripping with fertility. The snake is a red, violent creature. Furnas really updated the classic depiction, which was part of the point of the exhibition: to show how contemporary artists are grappling with ancient themes from the Garden of Eden story.
And I love how Furnas explicitly takes on these great themes. He approaches the Garden of Eden as an origin story. He has a desire to go back to the beginnings because he feels that we’re in a time of great change today. The world is ending, not necessarily in a catastrophic sense but in these big shifts. And the Garden of Eden story allows him to examine our origins in the midst of global change.
And I love how Furnas explicitly takes on these great themes. He approaches the Garden of Eden as an origin story. He has a desire to go back to the beginnings because he feels that we’re in a time of great change today. The world is ending, not necessarily in a catastrophic sense but in these big shifts. And the Garden of Eden story allows him to examine our origins in the midst of global change.
Yes, Furnas is taking on the full historical weight of the Garden of Eden story and turning it.
Right. He is looking at the Garden as part of our cultural heritage, and as a metaphor. I wanted a mix of views of the garden in the show, though. This piece by Lina Puerta, for example, approaches the garden in a completely different way—the garden as a more ordinary part of our lives. Puerta didn’t have the Bible in mind when she initially made her installation, but I thought her depiction of an urban guerilla “garden” offered an opportunity to reconsider how we think about “Paradise,” what it means to us. Puerta makes most of the piece out of fake plants, using weeds in particular. She also incorporates sequins and gold chains into the piece. This to me was the garden taking on the trappings of what we consider beautiful today—adorning itself with human-made objects and mixing them with the natural.
Her work is recreating a new paradise and is asking us: what would today’s paradise look like? Would a new paradise include some of the things that we have created in our contemporary world?
Her work is recreating a new paradise and is asking us: what would today’s paradise look like? Would a new paradise include some of the things that we have created in our contemporary world?
I like this question of what would today’s paradise look like.
Yes, it’s a crucial question that the artists in the exhibition answer in different ways: what does each person consider paradise? Sometimes it’s about getting far from modernity, from humankind, from all the destruction we’ve unleashed onto the world, and sometimes it’s including those things that we’ve created.
In that way, I’m interested in the inclusion of the Bibles in the show, which show medieval depictions of the Garden of Eden.
I wanted that direct connection to the Bible. And the Museum of Biblical Art has access to a fantastic collection from the American Bible Society Rare Bible Collection, which includes more than 2,000 Bibles dating from the fifteenth to the late-twentieth centuries. I chose a few with amazing illustrations to highlight the art-historical roots of the Garden of Eden. A lot of our visions of the Garden of Eden have remained so similar. In the Antwerp Bible, you have Adam and Eve in this lush paradise, which is also in Furnas’s depiction. One of my favorite connections between the historic illustrations and the contemporary artworks is the snake with a woman’s head in the Nuremburg Bible and the Rona Pondick piece with heads growing out of tree branches.
How does this connect to the Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ work, The One that Carries Fire?
Campos Pons also shows a woman-tree hybrid. She is dealing primarily with age-old archetypes, which is another theme I wanted as a focus: the way that the elements of the Garden of Eden have become archetypes in Western culture and how those elements connect to other cosmologies or other religions. Campos Pons combines two key elements of the Eden story: the Tree of Life and the Eve figure. She approaches them through the lens of Christianity as well as the Yoruba religion, which is important for her as an Afro-Cuban artist. She talks about the way that certain trees, plants and flowers are part of rites and rituals in the Yoruba religion. They can be elements of life force, strength-giving, and nurturing. Or they can be agents of destruction and deadly and dangerous. Women can be all of these things simultaneously. In the piece, she has a woman whose hair is turning into a tree—hair being a potent symbol of identity and sexuality. Then the hair grows further into a flower and then erupts into flames.
What is the significance of the fire?
I think the fire represents both the positive energy within the woman-Tree of Life figure, as well as the potential for destruction.
And in the piece, it looks like actual hair.
Yes, it is her hair. The story she tells is that when she was fifteen, her family organized a quinceañera for her, and in the preparations, her hair got cut and manipulated. She was so upset by this that now she rarely cuts her hair, and when she does have her hair cut, she saves it. And it makes its way into her work. The hair brings in this personal narrative but also references the fraught and long history of the way in which black women have been told what to do with their hair. From a religious perspective, it also points to the ways that religions have tried to control women’s hair from covering it or wearing hair in a particular way.
You commissioned work specifically for the show. Could you talk about one of the pieces or artists?
We selected six contemporary artists for commissioned works, and one of the artists was Mark Dion, who did the piece, The Serpent Before the Fall. Dion was fascinated by the figure of the snake. He especially liked one interpretation of the Eden story, which conjectured that since the snake was cursed to slither on its belly after the Fall, it must have had legs before the Fall. The biblical scholar, Robert Alter, whom we asked to write a short piece for the catalogue, calls this narrative a “just so” story, “How the Snake Lost Its Legs.” And Dion takes this idea of “Snake with Legs” and imagines it as a natural history museum diorama. He sets it up like a traditional display. He has the snake’s tail coming down around the pedestal in this playful way. It has such a great personality.
Dion doesn’t see the snake as negative. He calls it a trickster character, and I love that description—more of a character who is meant to throw everything off balance as opposed to having specific motivations and working to achieve them. So who knows what the snake’s motivations are? That was the inspiration for Dion to create this work. At a certain point, I thought I could do an entire show on the snake.
That’s a great idea—a snake show. What were your biggest curatorial challenges when approaching this show?
The biggest one was the endless number of potential themes. I had to narrow it down. So I ended up not having Adam and Eve as a focus, which could have been an entire show as well. As I went deeper into the process, I decided that I wanted to focus on the Garden of Eden as locus and as a way to look at the relationship between humans and nature. So the concepts of original sin and temptation are only lightly touched on because I’m focusing on the natural elements of Garden. Also, I could have selected works that have an exclusive and explicit focus on the Garden of Eden, but I wanted to make the point that you could look at contemporary art through this lens—the Garden as a part of our cultural background and our visual vocabulary in the U.S., and as a way to interpret artworks even if they are not directly inspired by the Bible.
Yes, that definitely comes across in the show. I love the Lynn Aldrich piece, which has a more direct reference to the Garden of Eden.
Definitely, Lynn Aldrich did have the Garden of Eden in mind. She is one of the few artists in the exhibit for whom Christianity is an important part of her life and her practice. Aldrich works with a lot with found objects. She lives in L.A., and she goes to stores like Home Depot and finds inspiration walking the aisles lined with products. In this case, she became fascinated by garden hoses, and when you look at garden hoses, they do, in fact, all look like snakes. In her piece, she uses many different patterns and different kinds of hoses. So she was really interested in the visual elements of the snake—how gorgeous and sinuous and dangerous it is. But also the idea of going into these big-box stores in places like L.A. where appearance, she feels, is very important, where we are being seduced by consumer goods and by the ability to buy so much at once. And she does just that—she goes and buys all this stuff to make her artwork. So she was playing with this idea of temptation.
Her work also brings up ecological themes. In L.A., there’s a controversy about watering your garden. It’s a semi-arid environment, so you’re taking water away from natural areas to have a green lawn. What are the consequences of having a perfectly green lawn—of recreating your own perfect garden in front of your house at the expense of the natural world? So the hose was significant for that: what do appearances make us do in terms of our relationship with nature, and what are the consequences of these actions?
Is there anything that surprised you about the show now that’s up?
I think the more I give tours and talk to people about the exhibit the more I see connections between the individual pieces. And to me, that says that the Garden of Eden story serves as a great anchor for an exhibit. It’s complex and rich, giving artists and viewers so much to draw from.
We selected six contemporary artists for commissioned works, and one of the artists was Mark Dion, who did the piece, The Serpent Before the Fall. Dion was fascinated by the figure of the snake. He especially liked one interpretation of the Eden story, which conjectured that since the snake was cursed to slither on its belly after the Fall, it must have had legs before the Fall. The biblical scholar, Robert Alter, whom we asked to write a short piece for the catalogue, calls this narrative a “just so” story, “How the Snake Lost Its Legs.” And Dion takes this idea of “Snake with Legs” and imagines it as a natural history museum diorama. He sets it up like a traditional display. He has the snake’s tail coming down around the pedestal in this playful way. It has such a great personality.
Dion doesn’t see the snake as negative. He calls it a trickster character, and I love that description—more of a character who is meant to throw everything off balance as opposed to having specific motivations and working to achieve them. So who knows what the snake’s motivations are? That was the inspiration for Dion to create this work. At a certain point, I thought I could do an entire show on the snake.
That’s a great idea—a snake show. What were your biggest curatorial challenges when approaching this show?
The biggest one was the endless number of potential themes. I had to narrow it down. So I ended up not having Adam and Eve as a focus, which could have been an entire show as well. As I went deeper into the process, I decided that I wanted to focus on the Garden of Eden as locus and as a way to look at the relationship between humans and nature. So the concepts of original sin and temptation are only lightly touched on because I’m focusing on the natural elements of Garden. Also, I could have selected works that have an exclusive and explicit focus on the Garden of Eden, but I wanted to make the point that you could look at contemporary art through this lens—the Garden as a part of our cultural background and our visual vocabulary in the U.S., and as a way to interpret artworks even if they are not directly inspired by the Bible.
Yes, that definitely comes across in the show. I love the Lynn Aldrich piece, which has a more direct reference to the Garden of Eden.
Definitely, Lynn Aldrich did have the Garden of Eden in mind. She is one of the few artists in the exhibit for whom Christianity is an important part of her life and her practice. Aldrich works with a lot with found objects. She lives in L.A., and she goes to stores like Home Depot and finds inspiration walking the aisles lined with products. In this case, she became fascinated by garden hoses, and when you look at garden hoses, they do, in fact, all look like snakes. In her piece, she uses many different patterns and different kinds of hoses. So she was really interested in the visual elements of the snake—how gorgeous and sinuous and dangerous it is. But also the idea of going into these big-box stores in places like L.A. where appearance, she feels, is very important, where we are being seduced by consumer goods and by the ability to buy so much at once. And she does just that—she goes and buys all this stuff to make her artwork. So she was playing with this idea of temptation.
Her work also brings up ecological themes. In L.A., there’s a controversy about watering your garden. It’s a semi-arid environment, so you’re taking water away from natural areas to have a green lawn. What are the consequences of having a perfectly green lawn—of recreating your own perfect garden in front of your house at the expense of the natural world? So the hose was significant for that: what do appearances make us do in terms of our relationship with nature, and what are the consequences of these actions?
Is there anything that surprised you about the show now that’s up?
I think the more I give tours and talk to people about the exhibit the more I see connections between the individual pieces. And to me, that says that the Garden of Eden story serves as a great anchor for an exhibit. It’s complex and rich, giving artists and viewers so much to draw from.
