Conversation: In Search of Thoreau's Flowers

Robin Vuchnich and Dr. Emily Meineke are sitting down at the Frist Art Museum on Friday, October 16, to talk through the partnership behind In Search of Thoreau's Flowers - The Memory of a Season. The conversation is part of the museum's new-media program, Shimmer: Dreaming the Posthuman, and it sits right at the intersection of art, ecology, and scientific research. Mark Scala, the Frist's chief curator, will moderate.

The talk opens up the creative process behind the exhibition, which Vuchnich built from the herbarium of the nineteenth-century philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, now held at Harvard University. She used those pressed plants to explore biodiversity loss through immersive, interactive installations. One piece projects a grid of Thoreau's plants, color-coded to reveal scientific research on species decline around Walden Pond; another is an immersive projection that shifts as you move through it. Vuchnich made two trips to Walden Pond to capture video and a soundscape of insects, birds, and water, and when she's not working on her art, she runs a micro-flower farm in Clarksville.

Meineke brings the scientific side to the table. She's an assistant professor of landscape entomology and a Hellmann Fellow at the University of California, Davis, and her collaboration with Vuchnich is what connects the art to the actual data on species decline. Hearing them talk together should give you a better sense of how the exhibition came together—from the archival plants at Harvard to the field recordings at Walden Pond and the research on the insects and plants that have disappeared from the area.

The conversation runs from 12 PM to 1 PM in the auditorium at the Frist Art Museum, 919 Broadway. It's free for members and $10 for not-yet members, and registration is required. The exhibition itself is on view from September 25, 2026, through January 3, 2027, so you can see the work before or after the talk.