Mon Oct 19 · 12pm
Public Research Talk: The Reformist Language of Plants: Marianne Dwight’s Botanical Watercolors with Alice de Galzain
At the Brook Farm utopian community in 1844, Marianne Dwight joined the “Fancy Group,” women hand-painting goods for sale in Boston in pursuit of independence and equality. Sorbonne researcher Alice de Galzain reads Dwight's botanical watercolors, bound into flower “books,” as a language for Fourierist reform that joins the Transcendentalist search for harmony with nature to early feminist and labor politics.