Imagining Other Lives: Plant and Animal Perspectives in the Work of William Bartram

Join us for a lecture by Elizabeth Athens, winner of The Athenaeum's Literary Award for Non-Fiction for her book William Bartram’s Visual Wonders: The Drawings of an American Naturalist. Bartram’s drawings of nature were not simply representations of the flora and fauna that he encountered during his life. Instead, they provided a means for him to imagine other lives that were as richly complex as, yet distinct from, his own. As his drawings reveal, he came to understand nature as a finely wrought web in which each organism was of equal significance, experiencing life on its own terms and in its own compelling way.