A Flemish tapestry from the late 16th to early 17th century towers overhead, its intricate threads forming a carefully ordered garden that stretches more than 17 feet across. As the viewer stands before it, the gallery fills with the sounds of running water, soft piano, and birdsong. This is the first encounter upon entering the Museum of Fine Arts’ new exhibition, “Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination.”
The exhibit, which opened March 15, celebrates human connection to gardens and nature across time and geographic location. Organized thematically across seven rooms, with the opening “Tapestry with park scene” and interlude video, the exhibit unites global human activity with its impact — good and bad — on the environment.
In the audio story for the piece, part of the eight-story audio tour on Bloomberg Connects, curator Betsy Williams refers to the opening tapestry as a “table of contents” for the rest of the exhibit. This is made clear by the mix of fantastical and realistic elements alongside structure, human labor, and community.
The “Gardens as Art” gallery in the first themed room is built around a large series of scrolls by artist Yuan Yao. Read from right to left, the viewer is led through an idealized version of a garden. Centering the idea of gardens as a place of artmaking, the scrolls depict a wandering and organic pathway from the entrance with people gathering and laboring.
This section includes a Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock print, a style from the Edo period that often focused on landscapes and was derived from the Buddhist term, ukiyo, about the fleetingness of life. Utagawa Hiroshige, one of most prominent ukiyo-e artists, is presented next to Yoshida Hiroshi, an artist of the shin-hanga style that revitalized traditional ukiyo-e. Hiroshi’s “Iris Garden in Horikiri” and Hiroshige’s “Horikiri Iris Garden” allow the viewer to compare and contrast the same subject and medium across movements.
The next room, titled “Gardens Through Time,” centers a fresco panel from 14-62 C.E. Pompeii alongside a Roman fountain basin and marble statue. The fresco is perhaps the most challenging piece to conceptualize as a garden in the collection, with geometric shapes of red and dark yellow acting as architecture around the greenery.
The audio story for the fresco, narrated by curator Anastasia Christophilopoulou, explains that “the pastoral garden in a Roman villa was a central courtyard,” adding that Romans of the time believed that they could possess nature.
Outside of this Roman collection, the section explores the idea of paradise and includes multiple pieces about the Garden of Eden. Joyce J. Scott’s beaded breastplate, “Adam and Eve Being Cast from the Garden of Eden,” is particularly striking, depicting both Adam and Eve as sexually and racially ambiguous.
Scott’s piece is presented alongside a pillow sham attributed to Asnaku Melese, which “shows Adam and Eve as a dark-skinned couple, a nod to this artist’s roots in the Ethiopian Jewish community,” according to the wall text. These contemporary pieces place the legacy of Eden firmly within racialized society.
In “Gardens and Gardeners,” the work behind gardens is commemorated, a category often unseen and underappreciated. Instead of typical museum benches, this room invites guests to sit on Tom Loeser’s “Dig 23,” a maple bench with shovel handles for the back.
Depictions of human labor and tools range from obvious symbols to small details. “Resting,” by Jay Lynn Gomez, honors the often low-paid labor force behind landscaping with her painting of faceless workers at rest near a trash barrel. Ruth Bernhard’s photograph, “Garden Hose,” gives whimsy to an everyday object — the backyard garden hose — through the hose’s glistening curls. In a woodblock print from iconic ukiyo-e artist Katsushika Hokusai, “The Cushion Pine at Aoyama,” a gardener is hidden in the corner.
The succeeding room is an interlude containing a two-wall video projection of Tenshin-en, the MFA’s Japanese garden, through each season. It includes the quiet sounds of passing cars, people walking, leaves falling, and birdsongs, combining an invitation to contemplation with contemporary reality. Soft, bush-like chairs made of cotton chenille and shredded foam, called “Topia Chair[s]” designed by Barbara Gallucci, immerse the viewer.
The fifth section, “Artists and Gardens,” aims to highlight gardens as an expression of an artist’s craft. Most notably in the room is “Water Lilies,” by Claude Monet, which is paired with Gustave Caillebotte’s “Les dahlias, jardin du Petit Gennevilliers” to showcase impressionist painters that regularly corresponded with each other about their garden cultivation.
“Artists and Gardens” is perhaps the weakest gallery in the exhibit, including art that has been pulled from the MFA’s permanent impressionist gallery. However, “Untitled (Our Family’s Garden),” a photograph by Claudio Eshun of his home garden in Worcester, Mass. stands out. The photograph places family at the center while speaking to the journey of finding home.
In the audio story for this piece, Eshun talks about how he included specific components to hold onto his family’s roots in Ghana.
“Looking at art history and paintings, I don’t really see too many Black or African families being showcased in a way that you can see they’re being resilient, but yet staying true to their cultures while blending new cultures,” Eshun said in the audio recording.
“Taking the Garden with You” is a smaller gallery that shows the range of gardens’ influences. It includes dresses by designers Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, a perfume scent station, a painted pedal harp, and nature-inspired jewelry.
The most captivating piece in this gallery, and perhaps even the exhibit as a whole, is a wallpaper designed by Édouard Muller and manufactured by Jules Desfossé that was made for the 1855 Paris Exposition. Handprinted with more than 3,000 wooden blocks, it is a vibrant depiction of romantic florals, architecture overflowing with greenery, and a marble statue. This exhibit is the first time the wallpaper has been presented in full in the US. Its grandeur and unique viewing opportunity alone is enough reason to pay the exhibit a visit.
“Gardens as Power” shows the ways humans dominate over nature and reflects on concerns like colonial exploitation. In an untitled photograph by Gohar Dashti, the destruction from the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s is seen through the window of a room filled with flowers growing.
“Helen Nez, Diné Elder,” a 2022 photograph by Dakota Mace, references the forced displacement and relocation of almost 10,000 Diné, with a strikingly red image of native plants from a carmine-red dye wash on the left and the aged hands of Helen Nez in grayscale.
In the final section, “Gardens Futures,” the audience is left to reckon with gardens as a symbol of change and an indication of the future before exiting the exhibit. Daniela Edburg’s laser print, “Knit Series: Killing Time,” places the serenity of gardens and soothing activities like knitting with the unsettling anxieties of violence and war, as shown by a grey bomb being shaped by her knitting.
Photographs by Graciela Iturbide capturing an ethnobotanical garden in Oaxaca, Mexico show plants needing extreme human intervention like splints and IVs, confronting the viewer with the challenges nature and its caretakers face in the modern world. An untitled photograph by Gregory Crewdson of plants and butterflies set around litter, which is placed next to the exit doors, gives a message of nature’s perseverance against human pollution.
Throughout the exhibit, viewers are taken through Mother Nature’s beauty and art inspired by that beauty, recognizing the many ways humans interact with and view nature through gardens.
“Framing Nature: Gardens and Imagination” is on display at the MFA Boston through June 28. Emerson College undergraduate and graduate students are eligible for free admission.
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