Opening Reception

Trees feature prominently in the origin stories of many world religions. Ancient history recounts how their shade and branches have been sites of contemplation, suffering, and renewal. Ancient history recounts how their shade and branches have been sites of contemplation, suffering, and renewal. The Bodhi Tree is said to be the site of Siddhārtha Gautama’s awakening as the Buddha. The Tree of Life is found in both the beginning of the Jewish Tanakh and in the last book of the Christian Scriptures. Ancient Chinook prayers address God as the “Maker of Trees.” Trees are rightly called the “architecture of imagination,” writes the novelist Richard Powers.

Today, trees still speak: deep root systems form tangled webs of communication, blunt stumps nod to deforestation, and charred limbs attest to fires started by our own hands. To Bough and to Bend explores these ecological issues through the work of 29 artists who look to religious and historic art practices to guide us back into fellowship with these old friends and the living world we share.

The first iteration of To Bough and To Bend opened at Bridge Project’s Hollywood gallery in March 2020, on the eve of the COVID pandemic lockdown. Given the circumstances, the exhibition was seen by very few visitors. “A tree can be only as strong as the forest that surrounds it,” writes Peter Wohlleben in The Hidden Life of Trees. In the solitude of our isolated quarantines, this bore itself out as a human reality as well. The Bridge Projects curatorial team, consisting of Cara Lewis, Meaghan Ritchey, Vicki Smith, Michael Wright, Alejandro Figueredo Diaz, and Linnea Spransy, adds, “We are deeply grateful to the Weisman Museum for giving the exhibition a second life. It is our sincere hope that, like a forest canopy on a hot day, To Bough and to Bend will be a shared space of reflection and rest.”

The exhibition opens on August 30, with a curator’s walkthrough and reception on September 10.