-George Washington Carver was a scientist, an artist, an educator, an activist.

He was born a slave.

Many people know him as the Peanut Man.

It's true.

He had an incredible interest in the possibility of the peanut and believed that there were over 300 uses, but he also was so much more.

-Most people do not know that Carver started as an artist and really his art is central to his scientific practice and vice versa.

His science is central to his artistic practice.

-He was an artist first, so I feel like the way he approached science was from this less rigid, more open perspective.

-He was sold as the scientist, the inventor, and it makes me so proud to know that he had this artistic side.

-That's one of the very powerful things about this story, is how really interrelated the art and the science are.

-This exhibition is about re-centering George Washington Carver and expanding on his ideas.

[music] -When my co-curator, Yael, brought the idea for this exhibition, it was the perfect fit for PST in the way that it encapsulated art and science.

These two aspects of him are inextricable.

He is an artist, he is a scientist, and he brings those things together, and together they reflect his worldview.

-This was a really unique process because it was both a process of learning as much as we could about Carver's work and his practice.

-The exhibition really begins with Yael.

She spent time in the archives.

-This came from Tuskegee, -the Carver Museum.

-Oh, okay.

In Tuskegee, Alabama, where George Washington Carver spent much of his career, one in Diamond, Missouri, which is the place that he was born, and then one in Dearborn, Michigan, which is the Henry Ford Museum.

-He had to actually take them.

Reading through every letter, every article that we came across, I was really blown away by the expansive career and a story that was incredibly rooted in art.

Early on, he was recognized for his painting at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1893.

He was one of three African Americans that were represented there.

Shortly before Carver passed away in 1938, there was a museum created in his name at Tuskegee and it housed hundreds of paintings.

That museum was the victim of a fire in 1947, which destroyed almost all of his artwork.

[music] -Because so much of Carver's work was destroyed, this exhibition is a sort of attempt to look at Carver, but bring it to life through contemporary art.

-It's not a chronological exhibition.

It's created as a constellation of ideas with the archival materials interwoven with the contemporary art.

-It pulls on his artworks, lab equipment, scientific writings, archival photography, documenting his life, and then puts that into conversation with what is happening now.

-The exhibition includes 30 artists and artist collectives and four archives.

It's a very significant exhibition in size with a great deal of coordination.

[music] -It's so exciting to see just how a curator looks at each work.

To me, it's just this beautiful harmony of how can they talk to each other.

-Alicia takes on this idea of ecological devastation, but also the possibility of regeneration- -This piece is diversity of voices, rehydrating, resisting contamination.

-which was such a perfect complement to the thinking throughout the exhibition.

-So much of the work is connected to a kind of higher investigation of the natural world and our role in it.

-It draws on found materials.

-I was gifted a lot of this Full Bleed magazine, which is a LA arts magazine that became the material for this creation.

I want the viewer to step into something that's abstract, but maybe have a little bit of a foundation to go from so the titling is really purposeful.

This work, in particular, is this mushrooming form, taking the fabric of the society of artists in LA to think about something new.

How do we grow something over destruction?

-It also looks like a mushroom or like a creature that it is in the process of decaying and growing at once.

-For me, it's this science side, this artistic side that pulls me together with Carver.

-George Washington Carver was a mycologist.

He was deeply interested in mushrooms and fungal matter.

-He became one of the most sought-after mycologists at Iowa State.

He also, while there, ran their art club.

Even while he was really excelling in botany and horticulture and mycology, he never left the world of painting.

Because of his very robust background in chemistry, most of his pigments were made in his laboratory using oxidized clays and natural pigments.

One of the walls that we have in this exhibition is an artwork called Innovation Blue by Amanda Williams, a Chicago-based artist and architect who took his Prussian blue formula and worked to recreate it.

Inside that wall, there's a replication of a number of patents honoring the African American inventors who paved a path forward.

One of those patents is Carver's patents of pigments and stains.

He wanted to keep his inventions free and accessible to the public, but there are few instances where he did create patents.

-He was really on the cutting edge of so many ideas.

-He was really one of the very important public thinkers in terms of talking about organic sustainable agriculture.

-He was responding to the deep devastation of the landscape around him due to mono-crop farming and the ravages of the plantation economy and slavery in this country and on the land of the South.

-He was always interested in how can I help uplift the economy around me, which was struggling.

-Dr.

Carver has made important discoveries which are being used to the benefit not only of his own race but the industry and agriculture of all the South.

-Carver taught at Tuskegee University.

In 1906, Carver created the Jesup Wagon and it became basically the first extension school that the United States government ever put into action.

-It carried farming equipment, seed samples, and he used it to connect with Black farmers.

-It's his public outreach.

It's his democratizing the classroom and making sure that people who might not have access to the most up-to-date information on best practices or conservation practices have access to information.

[music] -We acquired a 1903 wagon from rural California, brought it down to the museum, and Abigail worked her magic on it.

Her work is called Jesup Blessup.

-As soon as I got here, I knew I wanted to paint it red and an iron kind of red.

I think it could be in reference to a blood-soaked earth or thinking about seeds that had been sown previously to him arriving at Tuskegee, right?

He's from Missouri and he grew up in the Midwest, but he was born into slavery.

I tried to think a lot about the fact that Tuskegee is situated within the Black Belt and the Black Belt being geologically rich because of this fossil formation that is underneath.

It is the reason why the soil was so rich for growing cotton there -It draws on so much beautiful, evocative symbolism.

The chalk, a reference to the soils, the land, the Black Belt.

The cosmos, you see this incredible NASA-like imagery of the cosmos, and then the mirror- --thinking about the reflections of maybe heaven and earth, thinking about infinite reflections.

-Throughout the exhibition, you will see mirror fragments, which are our reference to this world without end concept, that there is this constant moment of reflecting and reflection.

World without end comes from the works of Judson Powell, who is an artist featured in this exhibition.

The exhibition really began with Judson.

-Judson basically devoted many decades of his artistic career to exploring Carver and would speak consistently and passionately about Carver to me -The title comes from the prayer Glory Be.

For Judson, it was this idea of no beginning, no end.

There is very much this as above, so below, forming the basis of how we structured this exhibition, the macro and the micro.

That's really how we brought everything together, thinking about this true world without end.

-You see these kinds of stories that all connect to one another, shaping Carver's practice, the contemporary practices on view here, and really our ecological moment of the now.

-This is not only an exhibition about a great historical thinker and major contributor to art and science but also about what we might learn from the dynamism and the sense of possibility that he carried about the world.

-When I touch that flower, I'm not merely touching that flower, I'm touching infinity.

That little flower existed long before there were human beings on this earth and will continue for thousands, yes, million years to come [music]