George Washington Carver Exhibition Looks at How a Scientific Genius Still Influences Artists Today

Historically, the relationship between Black Americans and the American South—in both the art world and the world writ large—is reduced to that of oppression and enslavement, with little attention paid to the creative and scientific innovations that both preceded and followed emancipation.

The California African American Museum in Los Angeles hopes to change that limited understanding with its current exhibition, “World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project” (on view through March 2), which opened this fall as part of the Getty Foundation’s PST ART exhibition initiative. The show gives George Washington Carver his long-overdue flowers, not just for his scientific prowess but also for his less celebrated work as an artist. Cocurated by CAAM executive director Cameron Shaw and independent curator Yael Lipschutz, the show aims to illustrate how Carver’s creative thinking fueled his technological advancements.

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Carver, an innovative scientist and educator who was born into slavery, was renowned in the early 20th century for his myriad agricultural inventions—often left unpatented by the self-proclaimed “people’s scientist” by design. Carver’s pioneering plant-based approaches to medicine and engineering, which privileged sustainability over profit, were ahead of their time, as were his applications of peanuts and sweet potatoes, organic fertilizers, clay-derived dyes, and crop rotation, now heralded as foundations of modern farming and conservation practices.

To realize the exhibition, Lipschutz and Shaw paired archival material related to Carver’s scientific legacy with works by contemporary artists. Lipschutz had conceived of this approach well before the Getty announced “Art & Science Collide” as the theme for this year’s PST ART, in an effort to “demonstrate how revolutionary and ahead of his time George Washington Carver was,” Shaw said. When Lipschutz brought the idea to CAAM, Shaw said yes because it “epitomized CAAM’s mission in our shared focus on African-American history and contemporary art.”

“World Without End” features the work of 29 contemporary artists across different mediums, including Kevin Beasley, Sheila Pree Bright, Charles Gaines, and Noah Purifoy, whose art is shown alongside rarely exhibited materials from four archives: Tuskegee University in Alabama, where Carver was a professor for nearly half a century; the Tuskegee National Park Service; the National Parks Archive in Diamond, Missouri, where Carver was born; and the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. (Carver developed a notably close relationship with Ford, who looked to Carver for ideas about biofuels and sustainable practices in the automobile industry.)

In gathering these works, we see just how much of a touchstone Carver has been for generations of artists. The exhibition opens with a collaboration between sculptor Karon Davis and painter Henry Taylor, who contributed a sculpture of Carver in Davis’s signature white plaster standing next to a Taylor-esque scientific painting of a collard green plant, ‘Call Her Green’ Plant (2024). Commissioned by CAAM for the exhibition, the joint piece recreates a famous 1892 photograph of Carver, seen as an artist at his easel. Nearby are several text-based drawings by Judson Powell about Carver’s legacy, including “LET NOTHING BLOCK MY SUNSHINE,” “ART WHERE SCIENCE MEETS SPIRIT,” and “WOW: WAR ON WASTE.” Linda Dounia Rebeiz’s Once Upon a Garden, a machine-generated AI video trained on now extinct African botanical specimens, conjures the legacy of Carver’s reputation as a significant conservationist, while works by the likes of Julie Beeler and Terry Adkins reflect on Carver’s fixation on mycology and color research.

Throughout the exhibition, we see several of Carver’s artistic explorations. Known for his uncanny ability to identify any plant he passed, one wall presents some of the few surviving examples of his botanical paintings and drawings of flowers, plants, cacti, and surrounding landscapes, rendered in muted tones. Nearby is a century-spanning conversation of weaving practices, featuring a knit woven by Carver, who learned the craft from his adoptive parent Mariah Watkins, beside Diedrick Brackens’s tapestry opening tombs beneath the heart (2018). That pairing, Shaw said, aims to show how artists today tap into ancestral knowledge in their work, just as Carver had done a century ago. “Carver was an innovator, but he was building on practices that were taught to him, particularly by Black women,” she said.

Carver too was a conduit of knowledge to the public, publishing popular bulletins—40 of which are on view—that served as guides on specific aspects of agriculture, like “How to Grow the Peanut,” “How to Build Up Worn Out Soils,” or “Saving the Wild Plum Crop.” His school-on-wheels, the “Jesup Wagon,” traveled to share soil and plant samples with members of the Black farming community. New York–based artist Abigail DeVille’s re-creation of Carver’s wagon, Jesup Blessup (2024), serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition. The artist made it using a 1900 Studebaker Carriage Wagon she purchased on eBay from an owner in Northern California that she then covered with shattered mirrors, rope, and burlap. DeVille painted and soaked the burlap, which she called a “humble, rough material,” with an iron red paint, a nod to the fossil-rich soil of the Black Belt where Carver worked. “I try to find the inner spark or life that has existed within the residue of that object,” she said.

For DeVille, Carver’s wagon, which is still used in the state of Alabama today, is “an enduring legacy of his ingenuity” and exemplifies “the urgency in which the information needed to be disseminated, and how vital it was for Black communities to be able to thrive outside of white supremacy and not be wholly dependent upon the system opening up space.”

Color plays an important role in another work on view, Patent to Black Space (2024), by Amanda Williams, who has spent years studying and re-creating a specific shade of blue that Carver developed in his lab. The visual artist has affectionately renamed it “Innovation Blue.” Around three years ago, Williams began researching Black patent holders in post-Reconstruction America when she stumbled upon Carver’s formula for Prussian blue, unique for its reliance on high amounts of iron, which was abundant in the soil around Tuskegee. Because blue does not naturally occur, it “inherently has a value, both because of the mystique and beauty of the color itself, but also the fact that it is synthetic in a certain kind of way,” Williams told ARTnews.

She worked with University of Chicago chemists to reproduce Carver’s 1927 patent, which was “vague enough where it requires some interpretation,” according to Williams. They ended up with an altered recipe that can be scaled up to produce paint in large quantities. At CAAM, Williams has painted a gallery wall with Innovation Blue; on the wall hangs a sample of Carver’s original powdered pigment.

Carver’s Prussian Blue was one of the few creations he did patent, seeing its financial potential via sales as a self-sustaining way to fund his research at Tuskegee. Williams also thought about how an artist like Yves Klein patented his International Klein Blue in 1960, which she viewed as a “masterful [way] in making sure he went down in history as the kind of owner of blue.” With this in mind, Williams set out to “reframe what the ownership of blue can be as a color,” adding: “The ownership of imagination is so critical. I want to use this blue in ways that lead to that. I have a history of using color to call out injustice and to make us question things we take for granted, but this really wants to center itself on that joy and happiness.”

Hana Ward’s contribution to the exhibition explores Carver’s relationship to the natural world through an interpretation of his biography. Her floor lamp, I Found You in a Flower (2023), recalls the trauma of being forcibly separated from his mother during enslavement. Having been sold to a different family against her will, she “never came back,” Ward said. “I could imagine [that loss] would make you search—in everything. He used to go out at four in the morning to the woods behind the house to talk with the plants and that’s how he developed that connection, but I imagine that impetus would come from that longing.”

With “World Without End,” that longing is felt through both the curators’ and artists’ desire to bring Carver’s story, a Black man born into slavery during the Civil War who made significant scientific contributions to American industry, to a wider audience.

“He [made] so many discoveries … but I think that his contributions toward consciousness and our understanding of knowledge and truth is totally overlooked,” Ward said. “I’m excited for that to have its recognition one day.”

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