Suzette Martin, “The Sacred Theory: Deluge and Conflagration,” installation view at Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, 2023

Our Environmental Future, Rooted in the Past:
The Renaissance of the Earth Artist in Residence at the Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst, 2025-2026

Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein


The Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies at UMass Amherst invites 2 to 3 artists each year to engage with their Renaissance rare book collection and activate their grounds through related art projects. Focusing on both teaching and activating, the “Renaissance of the Earth” residency allows for a distinct projects that make the past alive again while innovating with inter-disciplinary knowledge and collaboration. Liz Fox, Program Coordinator, and Marjorie Rubright, Director, are focusing this year’s residency focuses on Earth and Air. Applications are due by July 31st.

For more information on the Kinney Center at UMass Amherst: The Renaissance of the Earth : Arthur F. Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies : UMass Amherst

For more information the Artist in Residency at the Kinney Center: Residencies — Renaissance of the Earth

“Small Bursts of Knowledge Series”, Artist Brandon Graving and Liz Fox, PhD. Arts & Academic Programs Coordinator | Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at UMass, Amherst, Ma. excitedly review Brandon's newest sculptures for her solo exhibition

Liz and Marjorie, This Kinney Center residency is especially unique. How does the Kinney Center’s programming lend to collaborative work, especially with environmental artists?

The Kinney Center is home to the Renaissance of the Earth, a project that revolutionizes what it means to engage the early modern past with questions about our environmental future. Renaissance of the Earth puts students, artists, and scholars at the center of an interdisciplinary research model with the goal of discovering diverse avenues for creating sustainable and equitable life.

Environmental artists play a central part in the Renaissance of the Earth project. During their residency, artists research and explore our rare book collection, often work hands-on in our historical gardens, and bring us new ways of thinking about the connections between the Renaissance and our world today. Artists offer masterclasses, performances, exhibits, and other programs that engage students, researchers, and the public. Our artist-centric events foster space for creative inquiry and encourage collaborative and cross-disciplinary relationships to flourish.


Kitchen Garden at the Renaissance of the Earth at the Kinney Center for Renaissance Studies, UMass Amherst

Having visited last summer, I was struck with how beautiful the Kinney Center grounds are in such a gorgeous and varied natural landscape. And with that kitchen garden area. What a dream. What are some particularly inspirational aspects of your location in Western Massachusetts?

We sit on 28 acres of a biodiverse landscape. Artists, scholars, and students find all manner of  inspiration here. Students studying sustainability and permaculture experiment using our land as a laboratory and get hands-on experience with methods in soil sciences, for instance. The UMass beekeeping club has built their hive in our meadow. Professors bring their classes for practica in plant identification and landscape design and students have set up wildlife cameras to document animal habitats. A lot happens here!

In addition to our outdoor eco-systems, we have a reading room, gallery, and library that feature rotating exhibits of rare books and art. The library’s special collections include over one thousand rare books and manuscripts from 1375 - 1750. These books invite visitors to explore the inherently interdisciplinary nature of the Renaissance, from its literature, music, and art, to the sciences of anatomy, botany, geology, and cartography. Our visitors love learning that the Renaissance was “pre-disciplinary”: a radically different way of thinking about the world than siloed “departments” would have us believe. Then, it was as common to be both an artist and a scientist, a botanist and a poet. To choose would have been entirely counterintuitive.

Andrea Calouri, Mapping Terroir: Memory & Myth, Exhibition Published on Jun 15, 2022 https://issuu.com/umasshfa/docs/mapping-terroir-catalog

An interdisciplinary center in keeping with in renaissance both in study and practice! What do rare books and historical knowledge teach about how to reshape and build resilience for our environmental future?

Scholars of the premodern world have been at the vanguard of environmental history and eco-criticism in the humanities, exploring how seemingly- presentist conversations regarding environmental disaster, sustainability, and resilience traffic in ideas, metaphors, and modes of thinking whose roots extend into the Renaissance. The mission of Renaissance of the Earth is to go further: organizing collaborative research across interdisciplinary scholarly communities and the public to consider how early modern habits of thought and practice might aid in imagining alternative forms of habitation and cultivation of the earth. As a multidisciplinary project, the Renaissance of the Earth aims to reimagine our approaches to the past and its relation to the present by exploring the legacies of early modern environmental injustice.

Susan Montgomery, “Poisonous Revenge”, Mixed Media Print, Kinney Center Renaissance of the Earth 2023-2024

This is such a necessary and urgent legacy and there is so much to be learned from the past. What have been some impactful approaches to environmental justice through your center?

Both humanists and earth scientists contend that the rise of globalization in the Renaissance marks the dawn of a geological epoch: “the Anthropocene.”  This epoch was inaugurated with both the extraction and transportation of natural resources and the forced migrations of human beings around the globe. It was the moment of the trans-atlantic middle passage as well as the extraction and redistribution of natural resources around the globe. The

Renaissance of the Earth project is committed to exploring those connections that present us with the most challenging legacies: extractive colonialism, racism, forced human migration, and the asymmetries of environmental devastation around the globe.

For instance, we sometimes start with the micro at a very local level. Our students in a Permaculture Design and Practice course here at UMass recently grappled with a single question: What does land acknowledgement look like here? “Here” being a Renaissance Center at a land-grant institution in Massachusetts and “here” being a landscape whose indigenous histories are often effaced by the supplanting of state institutions, like our own. Drawing from our library, their coursework, and involving intense independent research, student responses to this question varied from implementing alternative land management practices to creating signage and pathways that invite visitors to engage with both indigenous knowledge systems and the specific local histories of settler colonialism.

Madge Evers with “Candle, Show Me the Way” mycelium Print during Kinney Center Residency 2022, Photo Credits Jill Kaufman

I find it so refreshing that the Kinney Center is able to practice what it preaches. Your institute really brings the learning to life. How do practitioners and students to engage at the Kinney Center differently than academic research study alone?

We imagine our rare book library first and foremost as a teaching library, meaning that we make our materials accessible and place books in the hands of students and artists alike. We also encourage students, artists, and the public to move back and forth from our library to our outdoor landscape to discover not only what they might learn, but what they might do.
In the Renaissance knowledge and modalities of learning were not siloed into different academic disciplines. There were no “majors” and “departments”. People studied history, science, religion, agriculture, philosophy, and classical literature because they understood them to be within related knowledge systems. So, at the Center, we prize both book knowledge and hands-on learning. For instance, understanding soil composition was essential to increasing the yield of crops in practice, so both knowledge and skill arise out of observation and engagement. Our students take our books out into our orchard, for instance, to discover how to improve the life of our apple trees by adding to the biodiversity of plants that grow beneath each tree (called, companion planting), a practice they knew well in the Renaissance.  

Since your rare book library focuses on teaching, do invited artists contribute to activating your goals and visions? How do they help students do?

Artists are catalysts for interdisciplinary programming at the Kinney Center and play a central part in the Renaissance of the Earth project. One recent artist in residence is ecoartspace member, Suzette Marie Martin, whose exhibit Apocalypse: Science and Myth in 2022-2023 offered viewers an allegory of consequences for industrialized humanity’s cumulative, destructive behaviors, by layering data from climate and environmental research with the Biblical tale of banishment from paradise, returning to past stories of apocalypse to highlight our current eco-anxieties. Her catalogue can be found here.

One of our ambitions with our Artist in Residence Program more specifically is to foster interdisciplinary explorations and cross-campus collaborations. Suzette’s original work “Tipping Points” was featured in The Futuring Lab (Architecture Department) exhibit “Elemental Futuring” which included short talks from artists, scholars, and climate scientists. Happily, as a direct outgrowth of her residency at the Kinney Center, Martin was selected as a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.. She is now at work on a new project creating an herbal centered on biodiversity loss with the research she embarked on here at the Kinney Center and continued through the Folger. The afterlife of the Renaissance of the Earth is almost immeasurable!

Thank you so much Liz and Marjorie! This residency sounds like such a dream!