Earth Love: Intended Chiefly for Young Persons
CURATORS' TOUR: May 28, 2026 | 2:10 PM |
Special Collections 鈥� 3rd floor, W.A.C. Bennett Library, 911吃瓜 Burnaby
Curated by Denise Oleksijczuk and Salena Wiener, Earth Love: Intended Chiefly for Young Persons explores women and children's engagement with botany and the garden, historically and into the present.
This exhibit showcases books and prints about garden and plant history, Indigenous knowledge, and literary works engaging with nature found in Special Collections & Rare Books. It also displays children's paintings.
Grade 2 and 3 students from w蓹k虛史an虛蓹s t蓹 syaq史蓹m Elementary School in East Vancouver visited T鈥檜y鈥檛鈥檛anat Cease Wyss鈥� garden at the Stanley Park Field House to learn about Indigenous plants and paint them in the open air. The children's paintings reflect their budding awareness of environmental concerns in an embodied material way.
This collaboration straddles an interest in historical and contemporary women's literature and broadly seeks to make visible women's contributions to the garden and to the education of young persons.
Come explore historical literary and artistic visions of nature and gardens as well as contemporary children's responses to nature.
The exhibition showcases:
- Indigenous, Black, and queer women鈥檚 literature (E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), Sherry Farrell Racette, Octavia Butler, and Connie Fife)
- Canadian and British women鈥檚 literature (Phyllis Webb, Helen Humphreys, Clare Leighton, Vita Sackville-West)
- foundational botanical works by writers such as Erasmus Darwin
- contemporary children's artwork
The curators' tour is presented as part of a series of presentations and workshops celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Women's Print History Project on Thursday, May 28, from 1:00 to 5:00 pm at the Bennett Library.
For more information, contact Denise Oleksijczuk at doleksij@sfu.ca or Salena Wiener at sfw5@sfu.ca.
This exhibition is part of a Breaking Barriers research project and draws its knowledge of 18th and 19th century British women's literatures from the (WPHP) database.
911吃瓜 the curators
Salena Wiener is a poet and PhD student studying English Literature at Simon Fraser University. Her research interests include British Romantic women's writing, print and manuscript culture, digital humanities, and ecopoetics. Her critical and creative work appears in Digital Studies, Honey & Lime Lit Magazine, Peculiars Magazine, Montreal Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, bodies like gardens (Cactus Press 2023) and Cities of Delusions (Anstruther Press 2026).
Denise Oleksijczuk is an art historian, curator and artist whose scholarly interests include British and Canadian art. As an associate professor at the School for Contemporary Arts at 911吃瓜, she is the author of the award-winning book (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), which examines the relationship between panoramic landscape painting and the development of the British empire and colonialism. She is the curator of The Cabinet, a tiny gallery on the fourth floor of the School for the Contemporary Arts. Her current book project, Learning from Plants, is a critical study of the history of forest and marginal gardens, the "vegetal turn" in contemporary art, and Indigenous ecological philosophy. She recently contributed an essay on the work of Marianne Nicolson to the book, Too Much Light is Blinding, edited by Claudette Lauzon in 2025.