Adventive America

Adventive America places the 250th anniversary of the United States into an international context by examining plants and their agency in nation building. This exhibition 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 transatlantic 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. By “following the plants,” visitors can explore fraught layers of transnational and ethnobotanical relations, upending false binaries of what it means to be native or alien, exotic or adventive, in the ongoing construction of nationhood. Organized by the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the Weitzman School of Design.

If you require any accessibility accommodation, such as live captioning, audio description, or a sign language interpreter, please email news@design.upenn.edu. Please note, we require at least five (5) business days’ notice.