TRigger planting 2.0

The Milstein center, Barnard College October 9, 2024 - May 22, 2025

Trigger Planting 2.0 Sketch Barnard Campus: October 2024-August 2025; TRIGGER PLANTING Installation at Frieze Art Fair New York: May 18–22, 2022

Trigger Planting 2.0

Collaborators: Kadambari Baxi, Maureen Connor, Landon Newton

Curator: Miriam Neptune
Advisors: Keith Gabora, Nick Gershberg

Interns: Erinma Adaeze Onyewuchi, Silvia Giordano

Trigger Planting 2.0, an installation at The Milstein Center for Teaching and Learning addresses the changing conditions of reproductive rights in the United States and across the world. Opening on October 9, just one month before the presidential election, the year-long project assembles medicinal plants, data, maps, and research drawn from local, national, and international sources, in the Milstein Lobby and outside gardens. Collectively, the exhibition surveys the shifting political, legal, social, and environmental landscapes and advocates for forms of expansive reproductive justice and ecologies of resistance. A series of evolving installations throughout the year reflect on abortion care since the Dobbs decision.  

TRIGGER PLANTING was first exhibited at Frieze NY, in May of 2022, presented by how to perform an abortion and A.I.R. gallery in partnership with National Women’s Liberation. Installed just a few days after a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked to the press, it featured a large United States map on which abortifacient and emmenagogue herbs marked the 26 States with trigger laws, near-total bans, six-week bans, and or State constitutional amendments that prohibit protections on abortion. These laws went into effect when the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade in June, 2022.