Face Nature

Berkshire artist Madeline Schwartzman brings humans in close proximity to plants with her experimental art practice. "Face Nature," featuring installations on the human body that form uncanny hybrids and present a vehicle for mutual subjectivity, exhibited in the Leonhardt Galleries from Jan. 15 to Feb. 25, 2022.

View the gallery album of the exhibition.

Read a feature article on Face Nature published in The Berkshire Eagle.

Schwartzman's anthropocentric practice aims to create a crack in human awareness and serve as an antidote to passivity and inaction surrounding the future of nature. Schwartzman exhibits work and gives Face Nature workshops around the world, including at Space P11 in Chicago; the Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam; San Francisco College of Art; Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan; Baltan Laboratories, Eindhoven; The American School Madrid; and the IAAC, Barcelona. She is a long-term faculty member at Barnard College and at Parsons: The New School for Design. This exhibition includes human-scaled photographic portraits and moving images that convey how skin and nature collide and integrate.  

Schwartzman is an artist, writer, and architect whose work explores human narratives and the human sensorium through social art, book writing, curating and experimental video making. Her book See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception (Black Dog 2011) is a collection of futuristic proposals for the body and the senses. See Yourself X: Human Futures Expanded (Black Dog, 2018) focuses on the human head—presenting an array of conceptual and constructed ideas for how we might physically extend the head, mind, and brain into space.