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Jean SchmittThreshold Ecologies
June 5 - August 22, 2026
Main Gallery
First Friday Openings | 5-8pm
June 5th | July 3rd | August 7th
This work comes from shared routines with other living things: worms eating my kitchen scraps, wheatgrass leaning toward the light, and vultures I track as they ride invisible spirals of warm air overhead. What began with nature-as-metaphor has become a kind of studio commons, where authorship is loosened from the single artist and shared among many hands, bodies, materials, and motions.
I once thought of revolution as a singular, monumental change. Now I see it as the accumulation of many small acts, slowly shifting how we think and relate—from the singular and monumental to the small and multitudinal. In this exhibition, all of these partners are here: microbes under the microscope, scraps turning to soil, roots and fungi trading sugars, the slow courage of repeated gestures. The worm, transforming what we throw away into rich ground, becomes one kind of doula; the vulture, circling and returning bodies to sky and soil, becomes another. Their lines—the tunnel and the spiral—hint at a quiet ontological turn away from the solitary hero toward a world where many worlds fit.
The works in Threshold Ecologies carry these turns into material form: stacked porcelain pillars, produced with master ceramists in Jingdezhen, China, and drawings where worm trails and vulture flights leave their own line language on paper and stone. Inside the pillars, worms and wheatgrass tend their cycles, turning waste into living structure. Together, these works ask what kinds of small revolutions we might already be practicing, and how we understand ourselves within something shared, circular, and much larger than we could have imagined.
Artist Statement:
My daily work begins with soil ecologies: feeding kitchen scraps to composting worms , viewing vermicompost under the microscope, and noticing how roots, fungi, and microbes carry out their work underground. From this comes the Worm Tureen series—stacking porcelain vessels that function as living composting systems and sculptural columns. Produced with master ceramists in Jingdezhen, China, the historic porcelain capital, these forms carry centuries of material knowledge into a living, composting present. Inside their ornate structures, worms transform waste into soil and wheatgrass pushes upward, creating a circular system where scraps become juice shared in community and the pulp returns to the worms. These tureens reimagine decorative objects as thresholds between private habit and collective responsibility.
Drawing is another way I think with more-than-human partners. In large graphite works, I render studio worms at human scale over eighteen months, searching for a “vermicular vernacular”—a line language of worms that mirrors the slowness of soil-making. In other pieces, worms trail wheatgrass juice directly across paper, or their pathways are etched into stone as “future fossils,” asking what traces of our shared actions might remain millions of years from now.
For more than two decades, vultures have accompanied this work as recyclers, harbingers, or even doulas, revealing invisible thermal spirals as they ride warm air currents. By translating their flight lines into sculptural reliefs, I try to make visible the forces that carry us—ecological, social, and spiritual—and to ask how small, ongoing revolutions in our daily lives might add up to different ways of living together in troubled times.
Artist Bio:
Jean Schmitt is a multimedia artist and educator based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and Assistant Professor in the School of Art at the University of Arkansas. Her work spans living sculptural systems, drawing, and installation, engaging ecological processes of decomposition, soil-making, and renewal. Schmitt is a co-founder of the Prairie Pedagogy Research Group, has a longstanding collaboration with Kichwa filmmakers (APAK) in Ecuador, and frequently works with mathematicians, technologists, and scientists. Her work has been exhibited most recently at the Poincaré Institute Museum in Paris and the Taoxichuan Studio Gallery in Jingdezhen, China, with additional exhibitions in Boston, Kansas City, Madrid, Quito, and Cuenca.
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2012 Baltimore, Kansas City, MO, United States, Missouri 64108
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