Join Flower Craft artist Emily Thompson and Nancy Hass, writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, for a discussion of evoking nature “in magnificent style.” The sculptor-turned-botanical artist, who draws inspiration from the eighteenth-century ideals of the picturesque and her intense engagement with the natural world, will also give a live demonstration of how she animates living materials into sublime floral installations.

ASL interpretation will be provided for this program and visitors with disabilities are eligible for free admission. Please email education@madmuseum.org to reserve your ticket.

About the panelists

Nancy Hass is writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine covering design, architecture, and culture.

Emily Thompson was raised in the Northeast Kingdom, Vermont, a place of uncompromising beauty. She brought her sense of this place, its ruins and its wilds, to her work as an artist, traveling from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Pennsylvania to UCLA, where she earned her MFA in sculpture, finally landing in New York City. Here, she fell in with a rough crowd of thorny brambles and made it her mission to bring them to light. Emily likes to cite William Gilpin, eighteenth century theorist of the picturesque, who directed builders of follies and artificial ruins to do so as if these ruins were not designed but naturally chosen. What’s more, writes Gilpin, they must be in magnificent style. Emily’s work, like her ideal faux ruin, evokes nature in magnificent style.