Brad Smith’s “Greenfield” project featured as cover story on MQR Mixtape

Professor Brad Smith’s recent project titled Greenfield is featured as the Fall Quarter, Issue 3 cover story on MQR Mixtape, the online imprint of Michigan Quarterly Review. With Greenfield, Smith reseeded 5,000 sq. ft. of suburban lawn with an experimental field of grasses and plants native to the midwestern plains of North America. He has subsequently deliberated the culling of non-native, invasive, but naturalized species from the evolving meadow vs. allowing them to compete with the natives insinuated into this reformation attempt. Part of the project includes photomicrosopic and macroscopic documentation of the explanted and volunteer arrivals to the field, to portray the array of life striving to make a home in this newly disturbed ground.

MQR also features Smith’s earlier work depicting human embryos through a wide range of styles, from data to decoration, including techniques of visualization, illustration, expression, and commodification to consider its moral, political, social, religious, and cultural status.

The editor of MQR, Justin Balog, states: ​“The arts are the scientific inquiry of the self. My goal…was to dissolve science and art into their resolute particle,” and further states, ​“Brad Smith’s microscopic and embryonic artwork dazzles and haunts in both their final renderings and in craft.”