Currently on Display
Sustainability Stories - Minding & Mending Our Ways:
Moving Towards an Intentional Future
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
“Minding & Mending Our Ways: Moving Towards an Intentional Future” is the second iteration of the Ohio State Marion Sustainability Stories exhibition. This year’s theme focuses on the various ways our campus and local community can reflect on the natural world and become more deliberate about our place and actions in it. Consciously interacting with nature results in tangible benefits, including better mental health and an enhanced sense of connectedness with nature. Research tells us that once we become mindful of the impact we have on our natural surroundings—the space we take up, the resources we use, and the waste we produce—we can ultimately make changes to our past behaviors that leads to better, more sustainable choices in the future.
“Minding and Mending Our Ways” features local student research, class projects, and campus and community programs that explore issues of sustainability in Marion and beyond. From designing wellness walks to eradicating invasive species to conducting research into adopting greener consumer practices and manufacturing processes, you’ll see examples of innovative research and experiential learning projects about our natural resources from courses in various disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, geography, and engineering. Also featured are programs that involve sharing houseplants or lending and mending clothing items, citizen agriculture projects that grow fruits and vegetables to share with the community, a successful local farm-to-table business, and volunteers helping to restore the native honeybee population.
This year’s exhibition features “Conversations with Trees,” an interactive display featuring work created by students in Peter Chan’s Visual Communication Design course, as well as a virtual reality demonstration, that celebrates the historic trees that stand in and around the historic Ohio State University’s The Oval.
In each of these examples, we find people intervening to foster awareness of how incredible the world around them can be, and how we can collectively work to improve the ways in which we move through it with care and gratitude.
We obviously encourage you to enjoy the contents here within these gallery walls. We also invite you to take a walk to visit the various sites that extend the message of this year’s showcase beyond the physical space of Kuhn Gallery: The Plant Lending Library in the Marion Campus Library, the various projects in the Larry R. Yoder Prairie Learning Laboratory, The Marion Campus Garden, The Clothes Closet in the Alber Student Center, and even the locations of our community partners (scan the various QR codes in the gallery for directions to specific sites). So please, once you’re done exploring here, go outside, pay attention to world around you, and determine your place in it moving forward.
