Adventive America

Adventive America places the 250th anniversary of the United States into a broader international context by examining plants and their agency in nation-building. This nontraditional lens explores collectors, collections, and global botanical exchanges between the United States, Indigenous nations, Britain, Spain, Japan, and China, from the early American republic to the present day. Whether shipped in William Bartram’s boxes in the eighteenth century, showcased at the 1876 Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, emergent in the weedy ballast grounds along the Delaware River, or exchanged as part of the traditional seed-saving practices of Indigenous peoples or immigrant communities, plants from around the globe serve as proxies for our own international migrations and as carriers of cultural meaning in our landscapes. Plants feature significantly in America’s national and imperial project, revealing fraught layers of ethnobotanical and gendered relations while upending false binaries of what it means to be native or alien, exotic or adventive, in the ongoing and imperfect construction of nationhood.

In conjunction with a January 2026 conference, a multimedia exhibition brings together archival images, news coverage, and documentary video, exploring the exuberant ambitions of the 1876 Centennial International Exposition at Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, the patriotic spectacle of President Gerald Ford’s 1976 Bicentennial, and the radical counter-celebration of the People’s Bicentennial that exposed the nation’s ongoing battleground over labor, race, and inequality through protest and parody. Reckoning with the mainstream narrative about America’s Semiquincentennial, Adventive America opens a window onto more inclusive and inventive futures.

Organized by architect, landscape architect and faculty member Catherine Seavitt, the exhibition remains on view at Meyerson Hall through May 16, 2026. Presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture and the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the Weitzman School of Design.

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