August 27 – December 07, 2025
About:
Gina Siepel: To Understand a Tree encapsulates 6 years in communion with a single tree. Bridging art, ecology, and queer experience, the project approaches wood as a living being and explores interconnection, habitat, and environmental responsibility. Organized by the Museum for Art in Wood and curated by Jennifer-Navva Milliken.
Related Events:
Tree Time at the Museum
Every Thursday, Sept. 4 – Dec. 04, 4:30 p.m.
Campus, Top Floor, Elaine Langone Center
Step away from your daily routine and join us campfire-style, with a mug of hot coffee or tea, as we explore the vast arboreal world around us. From the science of orchard management to ancient tree lore, from the history of the local logging industry to a live spoon carving demo, each Tree Talk offers a unique perspective on the deep-rooted significance of trees. Join us for one session, a couple, or all of them! Everyone is welcome!
Understanding Trees with Peg Cronin and artist Gina Siepel
Monday, September 29, 7 p.m.
Campus, Top Floor, Elaine Langone Center
Join the Samek Art Museum for an engaging interview as Peg Cronin of Bucknell University speaks with Gina Siepel, the artist behind the Gina Siepel: To Understand a Tree exhibition. They will explore the biological understandings of forest interconnection, environmental philosophy, and queer ecology. A reception will follow at the Samek Art Museum.
Curatorial Text:
To Understand a Tree was inspired by a desire to contemplate a living forest tree and its immediate habitat in a way that challenges and provokes an often-assumed binary between living tree and dead wood. With this inquiry in hand, Gina Siepel embarked on a five-year observation of a single northern red oak tree in its forest environment.
The project is grounded in biological understandings of forest interconnection, environmental philosophy, queer ecology, and Indigenous teachings about human-nature relationships. These studies, along with many hours spent in the forest, encourage a shift in the consideration of the tree as a subject rather than simply an object, which fundamentally impacts ideas of woodworking practice and ecological responsibility. The exhibition is one part of the work, which involves collaboration and public engagement along with site-based study and contemplation. In total, these actions encompass a small-scale way of exploring big questions about the place of humans in the environment, the scale and speed at which we consume natural resources, and the inclusion and exclusion of organisms in a definition of “community.”
Forests are complex and interconnected systems, and in that spirit, To Understand a Tree links material practice and object-making to questions of forest ecology, climate change, and more-than-human personhood.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Gina Siepel (she/they) is a Massachusetts-based interdisciplinary artist, designer, and woodworker. Her artistic practice reflects engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology while integrating conceptual concerns and craftmanship, with a focus on wood as a natural and cultural material. Siepel’s works link various modes of artistic production to other forms of inquiry, including collaboration, social engagement, site-based exploration, and research.
Siepel’s works have been shown in museums and galleries nationally, including the Colby Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the Museum for Art in Wood, Vox Populi Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Amherst College. She holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Maine College of Art. Siepel has taught at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and currently teaches in the Massachusetts College of Art and Design MFA program.
In addition to her role as the MacLeish Field Station Artist-in-Residence at Smith College, Siepel is a 2023 recipient of a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft. She is enrolled in the Field Naturalist Certification Program at Mass Audubon, and is a member of the Greenfield Tree Committee, a volunteer urban forestry organization in Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Installation Images:
Top image credit: GINA SIEPEL, One Half Log, Divided into a Chair and Scraps, 2022
