Events Across NSM

In the Beginning: Paleontology and the Alchemy of Deep Time: a lecture/performance with Nicolas Baird Wednesday, March 4, 12:15 Pizza lunch served at 1pm (please RSVP on the CFA event page to help us get a head count). Fossils reveal more than any other objects about the deep history of life on Earth. In this lecture/performance, the audience will be guided through the gardens of time, pausing to admire spectacular fossils as Nicolas Baird illuminates the complex processes of evolution. Drawing on both art and science, the experience invites viewers to imagine the world before it became the world we know, and the worlds before that. Nicolas Baird is a paleobiologist, artist, writer, and performer based in New York City, currently pursuing a doctorate in Earth and Environmental Sciences. Their work across both art and science frames the world as a network of strange kin. Through photography, poetry, and performance, Baird explores themes of mutability and adaptation. In their scientific research, they look deep into the past to understand how bodies, landscapes, and climates have shaped one another over time. They bring these threads together as co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, a continuously evolving collaborative organism that creates and commissions artworks as tools for imagining and building multi-species futures. Presented by the Creative Campus Initiative of the Center for the Arts, which supports cross-disciplinary collaborations that center the arts as a way of teaching, learning, and knowing.