JAN 11-APR 27, 2025
KIJA LUCAS: Hidden Histories
Kija Lucas uses photography to explore home, heritage, and memory.
Through the seemingly neutral lens of scientific photography, Lucas emphasizes the beauty of her botanical subjects to speak to the embedded layers of history and meaning that impact our understanding of society. Lucas’ images invite us to consider the ways our environment shapes each of us, as well as the generations who have come before us.
Lucas’ father was a gardener, and his devotion to the plant world cultivated her interest in exploring her roots through the lens of the natural world. She highlights not only indigenous and introduced (non-indigenous) botanical specimens, but also the tools used for plant propagation. Captured through photographic scans, her specimens are found at sites essential to her personal history throughout the Bay Area. Hidden Histories includes many plants specifically found on this campus and speaks to the many layers of use and cultivation embedded in this landscape.
Lucas grounds her work in direct opposition to 18th-century botanist Carl Linnaeus’ system of taxonomy. In Systema Naturae (1735), Linnaeus established a rank-based classification of organisms that still serves as a foundation for biological understanding and that ultimately served as the model for the construction of scientific categories of race and sexuality. Questioning how we choose what is considered “natural,” “beautiful,” and “useful,” Lucas treats the cultivated plants, weeds, native, and non-native species she gathers equally, challenging the scientific framework society has inherited from Linnaeus.
Kija Lucas: Hidden Histories is supported by The Jay DeFeo and Hung Liu Endowments and the William and Marilyn Mary Endowment.