A hothouse of questions about controlling women, fertility, nature
“Love in a Mist (and the Politics of Fertility),” the fall exhibition at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), explores difficult questions of fertility, growth, and control in humans and nature. Inspired by various state legislative efforts to roll back women’s reproductive rights, the show incorporates photos, video, sound, sculpture, maps, and text, drawing on the work of predominantly female artists, designers, and activists to consider what curator Malkit Shoshan calls “the spaces and politics of fertility.” The exhibition centers around the greenhouse as a site of both care and control and explores efforts to manipulate reproduction, from ancient medicinal herbs (the show’s title refers to a flower whose black seeds were once ingested to induce contractions) to the widespread use of synthetic hormones to regulate women’s ovarian cycles, supersize domestic livestock, and accelerate crop growth, and the lasting impacts, said Shoshan. In the audio clip, curator Malkit Shoshan, above,...