Ben Thorp Brown
Cura’s Garden
In 2023, American artist Ben Thorp Brown opened Cura’s Garden, a long-term, immersive exhibition set in the medieval garden of Kunsthal Gent, a former Carmelite monastery. Expanding on the Roman myth of Cura, the project brings together a theatrical assortment of trees and other flora, fog, sculpture, and sound—elements that cohere into a dense, indeterminate sensorial experience. This richly illustrated volume, organized around the seasons, features vivid documentation across two years of the garden’s young life alongside linocut botanical prints by the artist’s mother, Cary Thorp Brown. New essays by Laura McLean-Ferris, Laurie Cluitmans, Robert Wiesenberger explore the conceptual, formal, art historical, and affective valences of Cura’s Garden, and a roundtable conversation between Brown and Laura Herman, Jan Minne, and Valentijn Goethals considers the history and development of the project, from the artist’s 2019 film Cura, a precursor to the garden, through present concerns around the maintenance and unfolding nature of this site-specific work
"Cura’s Garden" by Ben Thorp Brown | 8.75 × 11.75 inches
Ben Thorp Brown (b. 1983) is an artist based in New York. He attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, and is a graduate of Williams College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has presented recent solo museum exhibitions of his work at CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Kunsthal Gent, Jeu de Paume, and the St. Louis Art Museum. His work has been featured in significant group exhibitions including Empathy Revisited: Designs for More Than One at the Istanbul Biennial, The Supermarket of Images at the Jeu de Paume, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1904-2016 at The Whitney Museum, and Greater New York 2015 at MoMA PS1. He is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received awards from Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
