World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project

George Washington Carver was a pioneer of plant-based engineering and one of the nation’s earliest proponents of sustainable agriculture. In the early 1900s he built his “Jesup Wagon,” a moveable school, to share soil and plant samples, equipment, and other agricultural knowledge with farmers. Carver’s then-radical ideas—organic fertilizers, crop rotation, and plant-based medicines and construction materials—are now recognized as the forerunners of modern conservationism. A trained and practicing artist, Carver used sustainable materials such as peanut- and clay-derived dyes and paints in his many weavings and still-life paintings. World Without End showcases Carver’s rarely seen artworks alongside his laboratory equipment, paint samples, and formulas. The exhibition also features contemporary artists, scientists, and engineers working in dialogue with Carver and his interests in nature, biology, activism, and sustainability, among them Los Angeles-based assemblage artist Judson Powell, whose research into Carver inspired the exhibition. Both the exhibition and its catalogue include previously unpublished material documenting Carver’s life and work at Tuskegee University