The JoAnn Verburg exhibition is the culmination of a four-year project in Italy-photographing the olive orchards and sacred trees of Spoleto, revealing her profound interest in the reciprocity between humans and nature. The artist has made annual visits to Spoleto since 1984 and recently purchased a home there with her husband, poet Jim Moore.

The design of the exhibition and its accompanying materials speak to the mystery of sacred landscape and the complex dynamic of living cycles, agriculture, and commerce. Its arrangement reflects a sensitivity to the architecture, the scale of the viewer, and the relationship between implied and actual time-issues more often linked to installation art, architecture, or theater, than to conventional photography. Verburg acknowledged the olive tree as a powerful metaphor for exchange, a living form essential to Italian culture. She made a gift of these works in her presentation of living cultural icons that do much to stimulate our own wonder and questions about indigenous relationships with landscapes and what we consider sacred in nature.

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