This year, the Samek Art Museum and the Weis Center for the Performing Arts have come
together under one unifying theme: trees. It is more than coincidence, more than a shared
image. It is a collaboration that asks us to think about growth, process, and connection across
art forms, and to experience how these lessons move between the museum and the stage.
At the Samek, Gina Siepel’s exhibition To Understand a Tree anchors the season. The project,
created over six years in communion with a single tree, blends ecology, queer experience, and
environmental philosophy into a living portrait of interconnection. But the exhibition does not
stand alone. Every Thursday, the Samek hosts Tree Talks at the museum at 4:30 p.m., a campfire-style gathering with coffee and conversation that explores trees from every angle. One week, it might be the science of orchard management, another the stories of local logging history or a live
spoon carving demonstration. Together, these talks cultivate a community of curiosity, showing
us that trees are not just symbols but living presences with histories and responsibilities
attached.
That same spirit of process and interconnection carries across to the Weis Center. The
season’s performances unfold like a forest of voices and disciplines. Kings Return opened the
year with harmonies that reminded us how something small can draw an entire community
together, much like a seed gathering energy for growth. The André Mehmari Trio followed with
music as reflective and intimate as a bud slowly opening, inviting each listener to form their own
relationship with sound. National Geographic Live’s From Roots to Canopy mirrors the Samek’s
Thursday talks, bridging storytelling, ecology, and science in a multimedia performance that
takes the audience on an arboreal journey. Later in the year, Artemis presents Arboresque, a
jazz performance modeled on the branching of trees, while David Lang’s before and after
nature, performed with the Bucknell Choir, turns choral music into a meditation on our
environment. Even works that might seem far afield, whether Irish folk, Indigenous instruments
with new technologies, or the physical poetry of Pilobolus, find their way into this shared theme
of rootedness, transformation, and connection.
Together, the Samek and the Weis Center remind us that understanding trees is not only about
looking outward but also about looking inward. Siepel’s patient communion with a single tree
becomes a mirror for the patience required of artists, dancers, and musicians who shape their
craft over time. The Thursday talks open conversations about trees as culture and as science,
while Weis performances turn those conversations into lived, collective experiences. One invites
us to sit in reflection, the other to gather in sound and movement, but both cultivate the same
idea: that art and nature are never separate, and that our responsibility to each is intertwined.
This year is not just about visiting a gallery or attending a performance. It is about entering into
an ongoing dialogue between spaces, disciplines, and people, and allowing that dialogue to
change the way we see. In the museum and in the concert hall, we are being invited to pause,
to listen, and to honor the process of growth. What begins in roots and branches continues in voices, gestures, and stories, and together they remind us that both trees and art are ways of
understanding what it means to live in connection.
-Shaheryar Asghar, Class of ’28