Tree Watching

Aziza Gibson Hunter, Niama Safia Sandy, Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, Vetiver

Guest Curated by Maleke Glee

Tree Watching

Tree watching refers to the meditative practice of observing trees. Across cultures, trees have long been understood as custodians of history and portals to the spiritual realm. Here, we also acknowledge trees as watchers of our personal and collective lives—another kind of archival medium, legible only to those who revere them. Memory becomes a tool through which artists recreate real landscapes while also depicting psychological ones. In Zoë Charlton’s practice the lines between the real and imagined blur within the pictorial field and we see a sustained connection between figure and landscape. Materially, through papermaking, large-scale drawing, collage, photography, and installation, she shares her related explorations by collaborating with curators and artists. 

Curated by Maleke Glee, Trees Watching responds to Charlton’s conceptual practice, in which landscape becomes a site for considering the body’s relationship to land and inheritance, bringing into conversation the practices of several accomplished artists. Though rendered differently from Charlton’s practice, these artists source inspiration from familiar lands, ancestral memory, and the expansive legacies of their diasporic communities.  Tree Watching presents the work of Aziza Gibson-Hunter, Vetiver (Vonne Napper), Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, and Niama Safia Sandy, artists united by their engagement with and reverence for the natural world. Their practices consider both natural and psychological landscapes, allowing the physical and metaphysical to meet through land stewardship, medicinal knowledge, foodways, socio-political histories, and the cultures held by the land’s inhabitants.

While trees may look different from one place to another, they grow according to a shared logic: at different paces, to different heights, bearing different fruit, yet remaining rooted as they reach upward toward the sky. Similarly, these artists draw on their cultural and aesthetic lineages to ground practices that bloom toward personal enlightenment, higher consciousness, and self-actualization.

Tree Watching blurs the lines of witness—between observer and observed, memory and presence, rootedness and transcendence. In this suspension, submission to the spiritual becomes possible. We are reminded of Indigenous ways of being and thinking with ourselves, with one another, and alongside the earth. For Charlton and Glee, authorship is not treated as a closed or solitary position. It is shaped through invitation, interpretation, collaboration, and public acknowledgment.

Gallery 2
June 5 — November 29, 2026