From the Classroom to the Desert, Prof. Juniper Harrower [Art] and Her Students are Fighting for the Survival of Joshua Trees.
By Bennett Campbell Ferguson
November 29, 2024
On September 7, the Museum of Art and History (MOAH) in Lancaster, California, opened Desert Forest: Life with Joshua Trees, an exhibition curated by Sant Khalsa (curator) and Reed Art Professor Juniper Harrower (associate curator).
“My main interest is highlighting that Joshua trees are threatened by climate change and by industry,” Harrower says. “I’m really not interested in a sanctimonious, environmentalist approach, though. It didn’t work. Look where we’re at.”
Desert Forest, which is part of the Getty PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, is the opposite of preachy. Created with on-site assistance of Reed students, the project is a visual journey that fuses art, scientific research, natural history, and indigenous knowledge. Khalsa and Harrower have also edited a companion book (a release party will be held on December 3 from 4:30 to 6:30 in Vollum Lounge).
“I feel like sometimes, you can go into work that is too smart, too conceptual,” says Harrower. “Anybody going to [Desert Forest] is going to have a connection to the work and be able to form their own relationship and experience.”
Harrower is part of Reed’s Environmental Humanities initiative, which fosters innovative curriculum, vital scholarship, and collaborative approaches to ecological crisis and the cultural imagination.
Joshua trees have been a profound presence in Harrower’s life. She created heyjtree.com—which allows you to “date” a Joshua tree—and grew up in the Mojave Desert, where a nearby Joshua tree became a final resting place for family pets. “The Joshua tree kind of had its own metaphors because of it being a place for death,” she notes.
Desert Forest is more than an exhibition. In October, Reed art and biology students joined Juniper at Prime Woodland Desert Preserve outside Lancaster to excavate Joshua tree roots, conducting research that could lead to stronger environmental protections.
One of the most meaningful moments of that five-day journey was when Harrower and her students witnessed Los Angeles-based Indigenous artist and shaman Edgar Fabián Frías bless one of the Joshua trees at the preserve. As Edgar spoke, Harrower took a moment to press her forehead against the earth surrounding the tree’s roots.
“I think that we don’t touch the ground enough as human beings anymore,” she says. “We wear shoes all the time, we wear clothing. There is something that’s really amazing that happens when you actually put your physical body onto the ground and feel it—feeling it with your feet, feeling it with your hands, feeling it with your forehead.”
Between the book, the exhibition, and the Reed students’ excursion into the vast desert, Harrower is doing everything within her power to bring as many people as possible into that moment—to help them experience and intimacy with the natural world that is increasingly rare.
“There’s this image people have of the beatific Joshua tree, but we need to talk about what’s happening,” Harrower says. “Trees are dying. How do people consider living in kinship with nonhuman entities? As opposed to a western ideation that has come with colonialism, which is that everything is a resource.”