Forest Stearns Exhibition

The UC Botanical Garden is pleased to present The Intention to DRAWEVERYWHERE, an exciting multi-dimensional exhibition featuring Bay Area artist Forest Stearns.

This exhibition celebrates a year of his Artist in Residency (AiR) at the UC Botanical Garden at Berkeley. The collaborative project created a participatory site activation proving that intentional observation of nature, made personal through creative expression, reveals its profound significance to both our lives and our professional practices. Come to the exhibit and discover how Forest inspires the ecosystems of both Art and Science through a non-traditional artistic practice and the facilitation of dynamic residency programs.

During the exhibition, there will be the opportunity to see the artist at work, including:
Plein AiR Patrol Blitz | Two dates!
Saturday, April 11, 9:30 am-12:30 pm REGISTER
Friday, April 17, 9:30 am-12:30 pm REGISTER
All are invited to the Plein AiR Patrol experience to draw/paint outdoors at the Garden alongside Forest and the visiting public. (Membership required for 9:30-10:00 am window.)

Forest Stearns Open House
Sat, April 18, 10:00 am–1:00 pm
Drop-in to meet the artist as he actively works on an art piece in the Julia Morgan Hall exhibition.
ADMISSION

The Verb: The Art of Showing Up
At the heart of Forest Stearns’ residency is the Plein AiR Patrol. Each month, an open-invitation brings a diverse group of individuals to gather in the collections to engage in a rigorous, shared practice of outdoor drawing, painting, and nature journaling. Transforming the Garden into an interactive studio, this is the living embodiment of the Creative Exchange, a DRAWEVERYWHERE philosophy of site-artist-participant engagement. Participants actively shadow the artistic process, tapping into the profound energy of the natural world—an exercise that extends into an Urban Animism that fosters a unique, accountable relationship with our environment. We protect what we care about, and we care about what we truly understand.

The Noun: Scaling Observation into Industry
The botanical observations made here—studying the geometry, tension, and organic flow of the collections—do not stay within the Garden gates. For Principal Artist Forest Stearns, this environment is a primary research facility.
These rigorous natural studies are the “seeds” that scale outward into monumental projects. The exact intentional observation used to study a leaf is applied to humanize the opaque world of quantum computing or bridge natural energy with aerospace technology. This residency is part of a larger movement proving high-level creative problem-solving requires a deep, ongoing partnership with nature.

On-view in the Exhibition
This collection of work celebrates both the shared practice and the scalable product, featuring:

• The Practice: Intimate, on-site studies at the Botanical Garden capturing the immediate discovery, rhythm, and optimistic shared reflection of the Plein AiR Patrol.

• The Product: Large-scale canvases translating nature based observation into expansive, graffuturist expression, demonstrating how intentional research scales into major professional productions. These include the original large-scale canvases that will be exhibited on quantum computers in Google’s Quantum AI lab in Santa Barbara.