Jen: Well my key object is the Jensen Graphic, and it's a very little known project.
It's a graphic design that Frank Lloyd Wright created for his friend the landscape architect
Jens Jensen.
And it's specifically designed for a conservation group that Jensen founds in 1913 called Friends
of our Native Landscape.
Essentially what we're looking at is an abstracted prairie landscape that Frank Lloyd Wright
designs.
The horizontal line that sort of is the datum of the graphic design represents the prairie,
the flatness of the prairie.
We also have an abstracted moon with rings around it, as well as abstracted weeds and
sea pods.
So, right away this tells us quite a bit about how Frank Lloyd Wright was approaching the
ecology of the prairie and also how he's approaching nature in general.
He is looking at nature for underlying geometries and underlying abstractions, not trying to
create a representational, you know, illustration of nature.
The preliminary sketch that Frank Lloyd Wright did in preparation for the Jensen Graphic
is just as interesting, if not more so than the more final drawing.
Because on it, Wright actually annotates it quite a bit and explains in a lot of detail
what the symbolic meanings of the abstracted prairie that we see in the final version,
what those meanings actually are for him and for Jensen.
So it's a very unexpected moment to sort of peek into his mind and get a sense of what
his motivations were and thought processes and actually to see how Wright himself interpreted
this object.
And then, of course, reading that we can also decide how we, what interpretations we also
bring to the table.
Therese: And then we have this object, which is my key object, which is perfectly, clearly
delineated.
And it is undated.
We don't know who made it.
But it is highly abstracted, yet filled with information about plants, including how to
plant them.
And this list has some of the indigenous plants.
You know, the asters or the hawthorn or those kind of prairie plants that I was expecting
to see.
But I was also finding oriental poppies and Japanese lilies and all kinds of imported
Asian plants.
That, of course, made me question why were these exotic plants being used here?
Jennifer: It's one of the most sort of well-known received narratives about Frank Lloyd Wright
that he is overwhelmingly sensitive to the native ecologies of the Midwest.
And in doing the research around this graphic I came to learn, partly through working with
Therese O'Malley, that in fact the discourse of the native plants is really just that.
It's a construct or a discourse.
And very frequently Wright and Jensen and other landscape architects and their milieu
would use all different kinds of plants, non-native species, native species.
It wasn't necessarily about creating some sort of indigenous landscape.
And moreover, the discourse around the plants actually gets wrapped up into a much larger
social and political discourse about race and about immigration and about what's native
to a certain area that's very much part of the time period that they're living and working
in.
So it's not just about ecologies in the sense of nature or the environment, but it's also
about social ecologies and political ecologies and what these networks mean as well.
Therese: That has been a lot of fun is to take one plant like the hollyhock as we did,
or the sumac as we did, and try to understand why are these plants so often being depicted
in stained glass and perspective renderings like this.
They're everywhere.
And they have great histories.
Histories of introduction to the country, history of when they're being used in--in
gardens.
So this particular drawing is very beautiful too.
So it's very attractive.
It's kind of this Japanese mode that was being done by his staff.
But looking at the hollyhock, that's a great plant because it was actually naturalized
in this country.
So, all these things are coming out of discussion with this one beautiful plant we found in
the front of the drawing.
And there was always the question of what is an American garden?
What is an American design?
What is American architecture?
This is a question being asked all the time.
So we have to consider that when understanding what they're trying to do here.
Jennifer: Right, one of our challenges in working on this project is just the terminology
alone.
Do you say ecologies?
Do you say environment?
Do you say natural?
I mean, even to use the word nature just raises all kinds of questions because we assume,
without, if we don't think more critically, that nature is just a priori that exists before
we do.
But all of these natures are very constructed for different reasons at different times.
And so even just agreeing on what word to use was quite complicated.
And we finally settled on ecologies because it speaks to the interconnectedness between
all of this.
It speaks to the fact they be constructed ecologies and don’t always just exist on
their own.
And we can also talk about social ecologies from there.
These aren't just about plants.
The plants are also standing in for a larger set of questions and discourses about the
structure of society and these kinds of things.