This Thursday, May 4 at 6:30pm join "Exploratory Works" curators -- artist Mark Dion, historian Katherine McLeod and archivist Madeleine Thompson -- for a FREE walkthrough of the exhibition. This exhibition brings to light for the first time an archive of images that illustrate the formation of our modern definition of nature. William Beebe (1877–1962) was one of America's greatest popularizers of ecological thinking and biological science. Beebe literally took the lab into the jungle, rather than the jungle to the lab. The Department of Tropical Research was pioneering in that, under Beebe’s direction, women were hired as lead scientists and field artists. The structure of The Drawing Center’s exhibition mirrors the two salient stages of the Department of Tropical Research's investigations: jungle field station work and floating laboratories for marine biology —revealing that artists and scientists worked closely and productively in the near past and that scientists once understood a...