Opening Reception, May 11th, 6-8 pm 

The gallery is open Fridays and Saturdays—12-6  May 11th, 12th, 18th, 19th, 25th and 26th.

Participating Artists: 

Manal Abu-Shaheen, Colin Brant, Rick Briggs, Mary Carlson, Jane Fine, Cate Giordano, Judy Glantzman, Carly Glovinski, Susan Hamburger, Kurt Hoffman, Mala Iqbal, Gary Leib, Jessica Liebman, Anissa Mack, Emily Mullin, Irene Papaefthemiou, Jon Rappleye, Amy Sillman, Mary Temple, Melanie Vote, Mie Yim

Orwell’s Garden, III

organized by Mary Temple

In Rebecca Solnit’s 2021 book, Orwell’s Roses, the author builds a case that it is George Orwell’s love of nature and his obsession with gardening in particular, that provided him the strength and psychological resources to write such deeply dystopian and prescient novels as, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. “To make a garden is to feel," in Solnit’s words, more “agrarian, settled, to bet on a future in which the roses and trees would bloom for years and the latter would bear fruit in decades to come”. 

In an interview* Solnit explains, “One of the things I know very well from growing up more or less around the left is the sense that everybody should be 24/7 about the big, important things and that everything else you do can be treated as trivial, irrelevant, self-indulgent, superfluous, etc. Orwell felt like the perfect case study because nobody calls Orwell a lightweight or a dilettante or self-indulgent. While he was dying, he wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century. He was a great anti-fascist who went and fought in the trenches against fascism. He stood up for his beliefs with incredible courage, and he loved flowers and birds and roses and rural and domestic life...and I think Orwell never forgot what he was for. And you can see it in Nineteen Eighty-Four, in his essays and how he lived his life.”      

The relationship between living conscientiously while renewing one’s hope and energy through simple joys, pleasures and beauty are at the heart of Solnit’s book and of this exhibition. In Orwell’s Garden the artists gathered find sustenance in observing and recording the natural world, demonstrating new ways to think about life and decay, beauty, transformation and energy.

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“Does anyone know the name of the weed with the pink flower that grows so profusely on blitzed sites?”

(George Orwell to his readers in 1944, about London’s many districts bombed by the Nazis)

 

*Interview with the Author, by Anne Strainchamps, Wisconsin Public Radio, 2022

 

ORWELL’S GARDEN IS AT 535 METROPOLITAN AVENUE, WILLIAMSBURG, BROOKLYN, 11211