exhibition / Trees & Other Ramifications

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Trees & other Ramifications: Branches in Nature & Culture

Spencer Museum of Art, Natural History Museum, and The Commons at Spooner Hall

March 5–June 7, 2009

Trees have proven to be a timeless and near universal source of inspiration in many areas of human thought and activity. Their great age, strength, and beauty have been evoked in the arts of most cultures, and the branching structures of their limbs and their roots, literally their “ramifications,” seem to resonate throughout the natural world and have provided countless models for visualizing different kinds of knowledge. Humans have contrived family trees, trees of science, language trees, mathematical trees, dialing trees, trees of knowledge, and evolutionary trees of life. This exhibition cannot deal with all of these, but it offers a starting point to reflect on the importance of trees to the natural world and to the world of human thought.

Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species, the epoch-making study in evolutionary biology published in 1859, elegantly expressed some of the basic concerns that we revisited in this exhibition. In describing his branching diagram of the evolutionary tree of life he wrote:

“The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth. […] As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

Collaborations with colleagues in the Biodiversity Research Institute’s Natural History Museum were essential for the identification of tree varieties in the exhibited works, the creation of maps that chart the projected change in the distribution of several tree varieties as a result of climate change, and the creation of two videos.

— Steve Goddard, SMA Senior Curator

The following items include the exhibition catalog, produced in-house and on-demand, as well as the interior banner that served as the exhibition's title panel.