The Natural World

Natural World is a collaboration between visual artists John Edmonds and David Hartt, poet and scholar Jason Allen-Paisant, and curator Nathaniel M. Stein, each of whom brings particular tools and perspectives to the task of including silenced positions in a shared conversation about the nature of the world. The Natural World project encompasses both an exhibition of Hartt’s and Edmonds’s commissioned artwork, mounted by the Cincinnati Art Museum in 2022, and a companion book.   This book presents Hartt’s and Edmonds’s photographs in dialogue with artworks and documents the artists selected from the collections and records of the museum. Essays by Allen-Paisant and Stein explore interrelated encounters with collections, institutions, and notions of naturalness, reflecting on the practice of history against the social and institutional impetus to tell history straight. Stein situates the Natural World collaboration in a consideration of his professional practice, as a trans man. Allen-P