Carolina Caycedo, Mamma Nettle Wheel, 2023, acrylic mural. Courtesy of the artist and Instituto de Visión, Bogotá/New York. Photo: Thomas Clark

Carolina Caycedo’s site-specific, multi-part installation Power to Nurture (2023) includes murals, tapestries, and signs, indoors and out, dedicated to what the artist describes as “the feminine and feminist labor of care at the center of environmentalism.” Caycedo, who rejects the landscape genre for suggesting a window onto the land, and thus a separation from it, instead prefers portraiture—of both plants and people, and indeed those who cultivate and defend the land. The portraits here derive from the artist’s engaged, place-based research, which she terms “spiritual fieldwork,” and include an homage to Ella Besaw, an herbalist of the Mohican people, on whose ancestral land the Clark now stands. Several elements of the installation were produced in collaboration with students in the Williams College Art Department. Caycedo’s works are on view in and outside the Conforti Pavilion in the Clark Center building.