Finding Flora: Exploring Nature, Art, and Meaning in California Landscapes

Exhibition curator James Nisbet, UCI professor Jon Pitt, and botanist Justin Felder come together to examine how artists engaged with California’s diverse plant life—investigating its symbolic, material, and historical dimensions. Moderated by Marianna Davison, UCI Visual Studies post-doc and former UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art Graduate Student Researcher, the panel offers an interdisciplinary dialogue between art history, ecology, and environmental studies.

This program is free and open to all; no registration is required.

About the Panelists

James Nisbet is Professor and Chair in the Department of Art History and Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and Director of the Environmental Humanities Research Center. He has published widely on the history and theory of ecocritical visual art and aesthetics from late modernism to the present. His recent book projects include Second Site (Princeton University Press, 2021), and, as editor with Lyle Massey, The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment (University of California Press, 2021).

Jon L. Pitt is an Associate Professor of Japanese Environmental Humanities in the East Asian Studies Department at UCI and is currently the director of the UCI Environmental Humanities Research Center. He is the author of Botanical Imagination: Rethinking Plants in Modern Japan (Cornell University Press) and the translator of Hiromi Ito's Tree Spirits Grass Spirits (Nightboat Books).

Justin Felder is a California Certified Field Botanist, consultant, and recent graduate from UC, Irvine’s Master’s in Conservation and Restoration Science program. He became interested in nature and science at a young age while growing up in San Diego and Orange Counties. After graduating with a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington, he contributed to the documentation of over one hundred rare plant populations in Whiskeytown National Recreation area, including a population of the federally endangered Stebbins’ Morning Glory more than 100 miles from its previously known range.

Marianna Davison, Ph.D., is an ecocritical art historian researching the role of creative and place-based practices in making environmental injustices visible. Marianna is a professor of Contemporary Art History at Chapman University and a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Irvine, where she coordinates climate justice–focused arts and education initiatives with the Wildland-Urban Interface Climate Action Network (WUICAN). Current projects and collaborations bring together artists, researchers, and educators to develop public arts projects, exhibitions, and curricula that cultivate community engagement and ecological stewardship throughout Southern California. Marianna earned her Ph.D. in Visual Studies from UCI in 2022, specializing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art, visual culture, and landscape design. She was a 2020-21 Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.