Dr. Giovanni Aloi on New Art Eco-Models @ UC Berkeley Botanical Garden

The Garden is honored to host author, educator, and curator Dr. Giovanni Aloi, whose work focuses on the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi has published numerous books, including Botanical Revolutions (2025), and is the founder and editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. For this talk co-sponsored by Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archives, Aloi follows the making of the artist myth, as explored in his most recent book I’m Not an Artist (2025), and proposes an eco-cultural model for artistic life.

About the Talk
New Art Eco-models: Reclaiming Creativity in the Age of Infinite Content

In this lecture, Giovanni Aloi follows the making of the artist myth, from the Renaissance master to the modern rebel and creative entrepreneur, exposing institutions, wealth, and exclusions that have sustained it. Against this exhausted genealogy, his book I’m Not an Artist (2025) proposes an eco-cultural model for artistic life. Creativity precedes art. It exceeds galleries and markets, emerging as a generative force through which living beings continually reshape their worlds. Seen ecologically, the artist can no longer be imagined as an isolated genius. The artist becomes an organism among organisms, entangled with collaborators, audiences, materials, economies, and more-than-human agencies. From this perspective, the art world itself begins to resemble a habitat: diverse, interdependent, sustained through exchanges whose value cannot always be measured.

How can ecologically minded artists lead the way to a complete reconsideration of the art world and the future of creativity?