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Giovanni Aloi

@dr.aloi

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author, curator, and editor specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art.

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Yes… I've got another new (small) book hitting the shelves this month! 'Lawn' is part of the brilliant Object Lessons series edited by Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg. I wrote it last spring, just after finishing Botanical Revolutions, and I think of it as its companion.

Like many of you, I am so fed up with lawns, what they represent, how they poison our water and land, and how they make life impossible for animals and plants. Every year, I work hard to reduce my own lawn (inherited from the previous owners...). It’s not easy. It takes labor, time, and persistence. Don’t believe the myth that doing nothing will restore native ecosystems. Lawns are ecological scars: they won’t heal on their own.

If you’ve participated in No-Mow-May, this book offers a fresh philosophical take and ideas for what to do next, how to move from small gestures to real, lasting change. And if you’re still on the fence (perhaps quite literally, staring at a neatly trimmed lawn), this book is an invitation to ditch your gas-powered mower and leaf blower (frankly, they should be illegal) and start reconnecting with the land.

At its core, 'Lawn' argues that our gardens are not ours alone: they belong to the plants, animals, fungi, and microbes that make the soil thrive. We are only one part of the equation, and we have a massive responsibility. No patch of green is too small to matter.

Let’s start now!
#lawn #nomowmay2023 #posthumanism #anthropocene #ecology #grass #rewilding #land @bloomsburybooksus @bloomsburypublishing @kate__blanchett #ecology #garden #gardening by @dr.aloi

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a year ago

Thank you Ragdalians for following me on a rollercoaster talk about Botanical Revolutions: How Plants Changed the Course of Art. What a night! #botanicalrevolutions #art #plants @gettymuseum @getty_publications_inc @ragdale_residency by @dr.aloi

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a year ago

NEW BOOK: 2025 and the myth of the “artist” is still alive and kicking, pushing talented, creative people into bad decisions about their careers and lives.

Romanticized notions of how one becomes an “artist” have long been questioned, so why do we still fetishize them in popular culture, turning a blind eye to the politics of exclusionism that characterize the art world and conforming our creative potential to well-trodden stereotypes?

So what if we gave up the title artist altogether in order to reclaim creativity? That’s exactly the proposition at the heart of my new book, 'I’m Not an Artist' (Bloomsbury).

After 25 years navigating the art worlds of Europe and the US, I’ve seen how the system really works, why it’s unsustainable, often morally bankrupt, and how creative people thrive only when they truly understand the ecology they’re actually living in.

This book was born from years of watching smart, gifted students walk away from artmaking, not because they weren’t good enough, but because art schools failed them: drowning them in debt while teaching them how to make art, but not how to live as artists.

'I’m Not an Artist' is for aspiring and emerging practitioners whose careers aren’t unfolding as they hoped. It’s for students but also for anyone who wants a clear, jargon-free look at how the art world operates behind the scenes.

Here I talk about social class, money, failure, narcissism, Institutions, part-time work, creativity and composting… yes, composting. I sketch out ecologically-inspired models that creatives can use to locate themselves in their own milieus and build sustainable, adaptive, meaningful practices.

Read the introduction and a chapter of the book at the link in bio.
#imnotanartist #art #arthistory #sustainability #ecomodels #artist #artistmyth #artworld #artmarket #collectors #arthistorians #curators #power by @dr.aloi

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a year ago

Come to Berkeley Botanical Garden on October 21st for a talk on ecology and creativity based on my recent book 'I'm not an Artist"!

"New Art Eco-models: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content"

In this lecture, Giovanni Aloi follows the making of the artist myth, from the Renaissance master to the modern rebel and creative entrepreneur, exposing institutions, wealth, and exclusions that have sustained it. Against this exhausted genealogy, his book I’m Not an Artist (2025) proposes an eco-cultural model for artistic life. Creativity precedes art. It exceeds galleries and markets, emerging as a generative force through which living beings continually reshape their worlds. Seen from an ecological vantage point, the artist can no longer be imagined as an isolated genius. The artist becomes an organism among organisms, entangled with collaborators, audiences, materials, economies, and more-than-human agencies. From this perspective, the art world itself begins to resemble a habitat: diverse, interdependent, sustained through exchanges whose value cannot always be measured.
How can ecologically minded artists lead the way to a complete reconsideration of the art world and the future of creativity?
See you there! @ucberkeleyofficial #art #nature #plants #ecology #artist #sustainability by @dr.aloi

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8 days ago

Excited to give a keynote presentation for the Lake Forest Preservation Symposium on October 16th, organized by Ragdale and the Lake Forest Preservation Foundation. My talk focuses on gardens in art and draws from my book Lawn (2025) and the forthcoming Avant-Gardeners (2027).

The most meaningful artworks of the future may take the form of gardens, rather than AI-driven technological spectacles. Art history has long privileged the stable media of painting and sculpture that can be archived and the best conform with the logics of museological displays. Why, however, should art be understood as an inanimate and inert object? A growing number of contemporary artists are challenging this inherited model by working with forms that live, change, and exceed the limits of conventional display.

In view of Ragdale's renewed commitment to its garden, this talk considers the garden as an artistic medium in its own right. Through projects by Precious Okoyomon, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Maria Thereza Alves, Olafur Eliasson, and others, it explores how growth introduces unpredictability while decay continually reconfigures form. These gardens unsettle established ideas of artistic authorship and permanence, recasting artistic practice as an evolving relationship with living systems.

Tickets at link in bio! It's going to be an amazing 3 days of talks and events! Come along!

#art #nature #gardens #avant-gardeners #talk #symposium @ragdale_residency @lakeforestpreservationfdn #lakeforest #plants by @dr.aloi

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How have I missed this very odd painting by Hugo Simberg’s The Garden of Death (1896) until now??? This musr be one of the strangest works of Finnish Symbolism.

Simberg (1873–1917) created a deeply personal world inhabited by angels, devils, spirits and personifications of Death. Here, three skeletons tend a garden of raised beds and potted plants.

Simberg described the garden as a kind of purgatory, a place where the souls of the dead wait before reaching heaven, and the plants have often been read as symbols of those souls. Perfect for this time of the year as mortality permeates every corner of the garden...

I'm still trying to wrap my head around this... I might use it in a talk I will give at a symposium in Paris at the end of the month... #art #painting #garden #death #plants #Finnishart by @dr.aloi

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12 days ago

Honored and excited to be a part of this wonderful volume expertly edited by Frances Cannon. Queer Flora, Fauna and Funga' is a transdisciplinary cornucopia, highlighting the sexual and gender diversity in nature where queer theory and natural history intersect through visual art and creative writing. My contribution explores the lack of queer representation of animal life in natural history dioramas, following the detrimental branching of normative images that proclaim themselves as natural truth while having been fully crafted and masterminded by us.
It features more than 40 contributions by the most creative, mold-breaking, and thought-provoking voices on the scene.

Let's queer it!

Get your copy now! This is a timely gem.

#LGBTQAI+ #newbook #nature #queerness #art #literature #normativity #posthumanism #anthropocene @frankyfrancescannon by @dr.aloi

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18 days ago

Very interesting encounter while researching...
A.L. Jackson
Flower Sellers in the Market at Washington
Illustration
1870

During the late 19th century, the intersection of Seventh Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, right at the heart of Washington, DC, was the home of one of the biggest marketplaces in the USA. The location was designated as a marketplace by George Washington in 1797, and it opened for business in 1801. Counting roughly 700 sellers by 1870, the market’s success led to a rapid expansion with many additional buildings joining Center Market in the decades that followed.
Crowded and chaotic, the market regularly carried a dazzling range of fruit, vegetables, flowers, and meat. African American slaves were also sold at the market until 1850, when slavery was abolished in Washington. Thereafter, the market began to provide African Americans with some of the only available opportunities to own stalls and start businesses. This image, published in Harper’s Weekly, shows a group of female merchants selling flowers and potted plants. The unassigned curbside areas of the market could be occupied for free as long as unregistered sellers showed up to claim their spot very early in the morning, sometimes in the middle of the night, depending on the season. #art #nature #plants #flowers #market #Blackhistory #resistance #survival by @dr.aloi

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19 days ago

Esse 118 | Giovanni Aloi (@dr.aloi) reviews the exhibition 𝗔𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗸𝗮 𝗬𝗶, 𝙈𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙖𝙜𝙚 𝙛𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙈𝙪𝙙, presented at @stormkingartcenter, Mountainville, New York from May 17 to November 9.

“Steeped in the history of Land Art, Storm King Art Center has an unparalleled reputation among the world’s most inspiring sculpture parks. For nearly seventy years, its hills have given modernism a pastoral afterlife, allowing steel and concrete to reconcile with the organic world they once stubbornly rejected. Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud adds complexity to this legacy, resisting the solemnity of works by Serra, Nevelson, and Noguchi and inviting audiences into an experience shaped by her ethos. Throughout her career, Yi has moved between microbial proliferation, fungi, sweat, ants, and tempura-coated fried flowers, challenging genre boundaries and expanding what art can do when it engages the world as a field of exchange.”

⤷ Create a free account to read this review and more on esse.ca

📸 : @anickayi_studio, 𝘔𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘢𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘶𝘥, installation view, Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, 2026. Photo: Jeffrey Jenkins by @dr.aloi

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19 days ago

How much of a lawn’s upkeep is really about what the neighbors think?

I included John Falter’s 'Sunday Gardening' (1961) in my recent talk at Tufts University about my book Lawn. Painted in oil on panel for The Saturday Evening Post, it places two versions of suburban life side by side: the carefully maintained garden and the unruly yard, where a reclining neighbor appears untroubled by the work left undone.

Falter’s humor opens onto a question central to my book: how did a patch of grass become a measure of moral character? Across this boundary, gardening becomes a public performance that signals rationality, virtue and mastery framed by a reliable and unthreatening sense of normality. But of course, a lot more lurks beneath the surface.

Thank you, @silviabottinelliart, for the wonderful experience. Your students are so dedicated and engaged.

#lawn #book #grass #normativity #gardens @tuftsarthistory by @dr.aloi

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20 days ago

On plant blindness. by @dr.aloi

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23 days ago

Very much looking forward to this conversation at Tufts University with Emily Gephart. Emily's contribution is going to focus on birds, while mine will center on animal objectification in the gallery space, from living animals to taxidermy and processed animal materials. Thanks to Silvia Bottinelli for organizing. @humanitiesattufts #art #nature #animals #objectification #materials by @dr.aloi

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