Giovanni Aloi

Original version in English

My recent book, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (Getty) is centered around a simple provocation bearing the possibility of vast consequences: the history of Western art has been written as though plants merely ornamented human imagination, when in fact they have materially enabled, conceptually shaped, and aesthetically transformed it across time. Paper, canvases, pigments, books, textiles, architectural materials, and photographic processes all emerge, in my alternative account of art history, as deeply important, vegetal-human collaborations. In truth, plants have never been passive subjects waiting to be elevated by human genius. They enliven art as substance and signification, inscribing within it the vegetal traces of longing and earthly relation. The book therefore asks art historians and art appreciators alike to shift their attention from the heroic conception of the artist as sole creator, toward the more subtle field of co-creations in which vegetal life has always participated.[1]
At the center of this argument lies an important critique of anthropocentrism that, inherited from Aristotle and then bolstered by Christianity through the humanist philosophies of the Renaissance, has crystallized an artistic hierarchy that relegated plants at the lowest threshold of conceptual and representational worth.[2] Vegetal stillness and silence, were all misread as shortcomings. Over two thousand years, this philosophical demotion has shaped the Western visual archive as plants have been flattened into the background of human protagonism, or made to carry arbitrary symbolic meanings, while their own forms of intelligence and complexity remained unacknowledged. Botanical Revolutions argues that this blindness has impoverished art history as much as it has impoverished our ecological imagination.[3] To rediscover our relationship with plants today, thus, means to recognize that art has always been more-than-human in its materials and its ideas and that moving forward we should continue to reconfigure artist endeavors around this important aspect of our creative existence.
Since the 17^th century, in early modern Europe, the genres of history, mythology, and religion, all not incidentally associated with the nude, stood at the summit of artistic value. Women were largely excluded from academies and barred from the training that gave access to these prestigious categories.[4] Botanical illustration and flower painting became available to them precisely because, along with plants, women had also been devalued as human beings. Within this constrained space, despite the relentless sidelining they endured at the hands of male peers and male-dominated institutions, exceptionally talented artists developed extraordinary forms of attention, as the work of Rachel Ruysch, Marianne North, and Maria Sibylla Merian clearly show.[5] Framed in this context, across the book, vegetal observation, thus, becomes a discipline of intellectual audacity that can overturn the anthropocentric hierarchies of humanist thinking in order to generate new modes of being in the world.
These women’s work exposes a history of art organized around mastery and human self-assertion that could only and intentionally misread botanical art as secondary. The plant was deemed too passive, and the women who studied it were expected to mirror its character, as though the careful observation of vegetal life could only belong to those already confined to the margins of cultural authority.[6] Yet in that shared marginality, a different model of relational and attuned art-making centered around empathy and collaboration that is today gaining more and more momentum in contemporary art, began to emerge.
It is however unfortunate that the same bias continues to structure institutional culture today. In recent years, major museums have rapidly embraced ecology and climate change as urgent themes. MoMA’s Emerging Ecologies, Mori Art Museum’s Our Ecology, Musée d’Orsay’s 100 Works that Tell the Climate Story, and MOCA Los Angeles’s Josh Kline: Climate Change demonstrate that environmental crisis has entered the vocabulary of large institutions.[7] Such exhibitions signal that the museum now recognizes climate as a cultural emergency worthy of major curatorial investment. Yet plant-focused exhibitions remain far more often the domain of university museums, botanical gardens, regional galleries, and smaller civic institutions. The House of Ideas: Plants in Art at the Gregg Museum, Seeds: Containers of a World to Come at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Botanical Art Worldwide initiatives have carried the specificity of vegetal life with seriousness, while their ranking in an artworld still too obsessed with hierarchies reveals the persistence of a conservative and non-ecological, old order.[8]
This discrepancy matters because “ecology” can become an abstract, safe word that allows museums to speak about crisis and repair while keeping plants themselves at a safe, conceptual distance. Plants remain available as metaphors for resilience and growth yet still struggle to be granted the status of full subjects they deserve. Thus, the museum can mourn the Earth without attending to the root, thereby continuing to reproduce anthropocentric models of exclusion; the climate crisis is staged primarily as a threat to human futures, rather than as a violation of the planet’s right to persist beyond the measure of our needs.[9]
Botanical Revolutions challenges precisely this contradiction. If institutions cannot grant plants a legitimate place in art history, their ecological commitments will amount to little more than lip service. In my book, I invite a deeper transformation, rooted in the acknowledgement that human creativity can no longer remain a continuous act of self-reflection of the human condition, imagined as an isolated and superior state of being. Between 3500 and 2500 BCE, art-making began to drift away from its original ritual and cosmological purposes and, progressively, in the hands of institutional power, whether wealthy commissioners, religious leaders, or the state, was reduced to a propagandistic forms employed for the legitimization of subjugation.[10] At the turn of the last century, with the rise of the avant-gardes and the emancipatory processes that accompanied new and increasingly experimental forms of thinking and making, art shed its skin to emerge into a critical tool for world-making.[11] It is within the context of this new conception, heralded by modern art, that we must now embrace a sustainable reconsideration of how plants (and animals) can no longer figure as decorative motifs, or symbolic accessories, but must be recognized as constitutive agents in the making of art and life itself.
The botanical revolution called for by my book is historiographical as much as it is ethical as it requires curators, scholars, and audiences to abandon the residual arrogance that still separates high art from natural history, painting from botany, intellectual labor from careful looking. Plants changed the course of art because they taught humans to make knowledge visible and portable, to draw intelligence from processes and to imagine ourselves as parts of a rich and complex world where diversity is normal.
This is why Botanical Revolutions ultimately foregrounds the contemporary botanical revolution already being advanced by artists who are changing the terms of ecological discourse from within art itself. In the work of Precious Okoyomon, Rashid Johnson, Maria Thereza Alves, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others, plants are casts as agents of historical repair, guardians of ancestral memory, harbingers of political resistance, and speculative world-making collaborators. More than representing nature at a time of crisis, the practices of these artists cultivate new aesthetic and ethical frameworks through which vegetal life can be encountered and understood anew. As long as art history continues to sideline plants, ecological thinking will remain trapped confined by the limitations of the human mirror, unable to see beyond the image of supremacy we have been polishing for millennia.

1. Giovanni Aloi, Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art (Getty Publications, 2025).
2. Aristotle, De Anima, translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Penguin, 1986); Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Harvard UP, 1936);
3. James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, ‘Preventing Plant Blindness,’ The American Biology Teacher, vol. 61, no. 2, 1999, pp. 82-86.
4. Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ARTnews, Jan. 1971; and Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (Pantheon Books, 1981).
5. Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Beacon Press, 1993); Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760-1860 (Johns Hopkins UP, 1996)
6. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (HarperOne, 1980)
7. ‘Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism,’ The Museum of Modern Art, 17 Sept. 2023-20 Jan. 2024, www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5609. Accessed 20 June 2026; ‘Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living,’ Mori Art Museum, 18 Oct. 2023-31 Mar. 2024, www.mori.art.museum/en/exhibitions/eco/. Accessed 20 June 2026; ‘100 Works that Tell the Climate Story,’ Musée d’Orsay, 11 Mar.-15 July 2025, www.musee-orsay.fr/en/program/whats-on/exhibitions/100-works-tell-climate-story-itinerary. Accessed 20 June 2026; and ‘Josh Kline: Climate Change,’ Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 23 June 2024-5 Jan. 2025, www.moca.org/exhibition/josh-kline-climate-change. Accessed 20 June 2026.
8. ‘The House of Ideas: Plants in Art,’ Gregg Museum of Art & Design, 5 Aug. 2025-1 Aug. 2026, gregg.arts.ncsu.edu/exhibitions/the-house-of-ideas-plants-in-art/. Accessed 19 June 2026; ‘Seeds: Containers of a World to Come,’ Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 21 Feb.-28 July 2025, www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/on-view/on-view/seeds-containers-of-a-world-to-come-2025. Accessed 22 June 2026; and ‘Botanical Art Worldwide,’ Botanical Art Worldwide, www.botanicalartworldwide.info/. Accessed 23 June 2026.
9. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke UP, 2016); and T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016).
10. Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study (Cambridge UP, 2003).
11. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (Continuum, 2004).