“World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project”
Born into slavery in Missouri just one year shy of abolition, George Washington Carver (ca. 1864–1943) was only an infant when Confederate raiders kidnapped him and his mother, Mary, from the Carver family farm where they were enslaved. The Carvers recovered George for the price of a prized steed, but his mother’s fate remains unknown—one of the many unimaginable tragedies wrought by America’s cardinal sin. The Carvers facilitated George’s early education; he showed a keen interest in art, horticulture, and botany, and eventually attended Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University), where he became the institution’s first Black faculty member. His accomplishments were manifold: He was a noted artist, chemist, and expert mycologist, discovering many new species. He led the agriculture department at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for forty-seven years, publishing more than forty-three scientific bulletins on crop diversification and landscape restoration, and he invented novel uses for peanuts and other plants that helped restore an agricultural economy decimated by monocrop cotton farming (a reminder that, in addition to its human toll, the transatlantic slave trade also devastated regional ecologies).
“World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project,” a PST ART exhibition curated by Cameron Shaw and Yael Lipschutz, situated Carver’s creative and scientific legacies in the context of environmental sustainability—of which Carver was a radically early proponent. While the exhibition eschewed chronology in favor of “a constellation of ideas,” according to a wall text, it seemed to unfold in a linear manner that conflicted with the configuration of the galleries. Nevertheless, this multifaceted and extensively researched exhibition offered illuminating artifacts and ephemera alongside a diverse group of thematically resonant contemporary works, the strongest of which engaged with Carver’s legacy and philosophical worldview directly.
A collaborative installation by Karon Davis and Henry Taylor served as both a monument to and a surrogate for the exhibition’s eponymous subject. In George Washington Carver, 2024, a nearly life-size figure crafted from bone-white plaster—Davis’s signature material—grasps a painter’s palette along with several brushes and gazes toward the viewer. Davis’s sculptural simulacrum of Carver stood next to a large easel adorned with Taylor’s painting “Call Her Green,” Plant, 2024, which depicts leafy collard greens against an earthen ground. Taken together, these works re-created a historical photograph of Carver standing next to an easel with a painting of lush stalky blooms, which—along with most of his other paintings—was destroyed by a fire in 1947. This collaborative rendition pointed to the acute tragedy of this loss, which haunted the exhibition like a specter. An adjacent gallery displayed several of Carver’s surviving drawings and works on paper: a sailboat on a roiling sea, carefully rendered succulents, impressionistic landscapes, a row of soft peaches. All of these poetic vignettes revealed his subtle affinity for Romanticism. The material sensitivity and gestural dexterity of these works, displayed here alongside sketchbooks, weavings, and seed specimens from his lab and studio, rendered the loss of his paintings even more explicit.
Carver approached his research, whether artistic or scientific, with an experimental sensibility that underscored his dedication to the natural world. His many alchemical investigations led to the creation of early bioplastics and of numerous pigments made from vernacular plants and soils, several of which he patented (his formula for Prussian blue, re-created by Amanda Williams, coated one of the gallery’s walls). This material inquisitiveness also informed his work in mycology, here connected via an illuminating pairing to the mycological studies of John Cage, who similarly found creative and philosophical meaning in the improvisational practice of mushroom foraging. The inclusion of Candice Lin’s Xternesta (Memory), 2022, a work rooted in the study of the kudzu plant, was equally compelling. A glass table topped with beakers, ceramic vessels, photographs, tinctures, kudzu roots, and dried plant matter arranged by Lin suggested the eccentric laboratory of a tinkering scientist. Kudzu, a perennial vine native to Asia, was introduced to the American South in the nineteenth century as a method for remediating soil depleted by the overfarming of cotton—to devastating effect. Now considered invasive, kudzu further wounded strained ecosystems. Lin’s work probes this socio-environmental history while also investigating the plant’s potential as a source of bioplastic, much like Carver’s work before her.
In the final gallery, Abigail DeVille’s Jesup Blessup, 2024, served as a sculptural ode to one of Carver’s most iconic and progressive projects, the Jesup Wagon—a nomadic education station that disseminated tools, seeds, and agricultural techniques to farmers in the South, empowering their relationship to the land. Here, a 1903 Studebaker covered wagon rests atop a glittering matrix of broken mirrors and celestial images, positioning Carver as a cosmological messenger tasked to heal and educate a broken planet.
