The Lichen Museum with A. Laurie Palmer (Art after Nature 4)

Lichens are composite organisms made of a fungus and an alga or cyanobacteria thriving in a mutually beneficial relationship. The Lichen Museum looks to these complex organisms, remarkable for their symbiosis, diversity, longevity, and adaptability, as models for relations rooted in collaboration and nonhierarchical structures. Author A. Laurie Palmer channels the personal, the scientific, the philosophical, and the poetic to imagine a radical new approach to human interconnection. Palmer is joined in conversation with Art after Nature series editors Giovanni Aloi and Caroline Picard.

A. Laurie Palmer is an artist and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Dr. Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture.

Caroline Picard is a writer, cartoonist, curator, and executive director of Green Lantern Press.

Praise for The Lichen Museum:

"A deeply engaging, provocative, humorous, and moving account of why we should pay more attention to lichens. As lichens can be found anywhere, the entire surface of the earth becomes the lichen museum." —Heather Davis, author of Plastic Matter

"Meditative and inquisitive." —Foreword

"Reading this work feels like taking a series of walks with a particularly curious and sensitive companion, consistently attentive to otherwise neglected facets of the actual environment." —e-flux

Learn more about The Lichen Museum at the University of Minnesota Press website.