LUCIA ZEZZA | DATE 5/17/2026

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents the launch of Ben Thorp Brown's 'Cura's Garden'

Sunday, May 17 at 4 PM, Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore presents artist Ben Thorp Brown in conversation with Valentijn Goethals, Annie Godfrey Larmon and Robert Wiesenberger for the launch of Cura’s Garden, published by Inventory Press, Roma Publications and Kunsthal Gent.

RSVP here for free. *Please note that space is limited to 50 seats.

Pre-order a signed copy here.

Cura’s Garden is a long-term immersive exhibition by Ben Thorp Brown, developed with Belgian landscape designer Jan Minne in the medieval garden of Kunsthal Gent, a former Carmelite monastery. Inspired by the Roman myth of Cura, the installation combines trees, flora, fog, sculpture, and sound into a dense, indeterminate sensorial environment that reimagines Arcadia while testing the limits of paradise.

This richly illustrated volume, organized around the seasons, features vivid documentation across two years of the garden’s young life alongside linocut botanical prints by the artist’s mother, Cary Thorp Brown. New essays by Laura McLean-Ferris, Laurie Cluitmans, and Robert Wiesenberger explore the conceptual, formal, art historical and affective valences of Cura’s Garden, and a roundtable conversation between Brown and Laura Herman, Jan Minne, and Valentijn Goethals considers the history and development of the project, from the artist’s 2019 film Cura, a precursor to the garden, through present concerns around the maintenance and unfolding nature of this site-specific work.

“The Cura myth, which was recorded in Fabulae, a book attributed to the Roman grammarian Gaius Julius Hyginus (d. AD 17), is an origin story of humanity born from clay. To briefly recount: Cura, a goddess who personifies the principles and concepts of care, is crossing a river when she sees some muddy clay and thoughtfully molds from it the body of a person. She asks another god, Jove (or Jupiter), to give her figure the breath of life. He does, and afterward a conflict arises over the naming and ownership of the creature. As Jove and Cura argue, Tellus, the goddess of the Earth, interjects that, since the clay was taken from her body, it should share her name. The dispute is resolved by Saturn, who decides that when the creature dies its body shall be returned to Tellus, and its soul will be returned to Jove, but Cura will possess it for as long as it lives. Because it was born from the soil (“humus”), it shall be called a “human.” Saturn’s decision binds this new being to a discrete temporal framework — a lifetime — rather than to the more boundless forms of duration that govern both the realm of the gods and the region of pure materiality, which is inclined to transform, not end.

Cura, as care, holds together material that will eventually be redistributed, meaning that to live as a human is to be in the realm of care.”

Laura McLean-Ferris

Ben Thorp Brown (b. 1983) is an artist based in New York. He atten­ded the Whit­ney Muse­um Inde­pen­dent Stu­dy Pro­gram, and is a gra­du­a­te of Wil­li­ams Col­le­ge and the School of the Art Insti­tu­te of Chicago. He has presented recent solo museum exhibitions of his work at CAPC Musée d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, Kunsthal Gent, Jeu de Paume, and the St. Louis Art Museum. His work has been featured in significant group exhibitions including Empathy Revisited: Designs for More Than One at the Istanbul Biennial, The Supermarket of Images at the Jeu de Paume, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1904-2016 at The Whitney Museum, and Greater New York 2015 at MoMA PS1. He is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and has received awards from Creative Capital, the Graham Foundation, the Shifting Foundation, and was an artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.

Valentijn Goethals is a designer and musician. Educated as a graphic designer, Valentijn’s activities range from collaborating with artists and designers on various graphic design projects to curation and playing the guitar in the band The Black Heart Rebellion. He is a member of the artist collective Smoke & Dust founded in 2008. In 2013 the collective took over an abandoned welding factory in Dok-Noord Gent and turned it into a transdisciplinary art platform called 019. In 2018 they started another venue in a former monastery located in the center of Gent, now called Kunsthal Gent, where Valentijn is curator among other roles.

Annie Godfrey Larmon is a writer and editor based in Garrison, New York. Her essays, reviews, and interviews have appeared in apricota, Artforum, BBC Culture, Bookforum, CURA., Even, Frieze, MAY, the Miami Rail, Spike, Texte zur Kunst, Topical Cream, Vdrome, WdW Review and the White Review. The recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for short-form writing, she was the publications editor for the inaugural Okayama Art Summit and is a former international reviews editor of Artforum. As an editor, she has also worked on books for MoMA, MoMA PS1, Blank Forms, and the Hessel Museum of Art. Larmon has been a writer-in-residence at the LUMA Foundation in Arles, France; Mahler & LeWitt Studios in Spoleto, Italy; Cuttyhunk Island Writers’ Residency; and Eighth House in Rochester, Vermont.

Robert Wiesenberger is the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum. He was formerly Curator of Contemporary Projects at the Clark Art Institute and Lecturer in the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. His interests span modern and contemporary art, design, and architecture, with a special emphasis on ecology and the more-than-human world.

Artbook @ MoMA PS1 Bookstore
Ben Thorp Brown: Cura’s Garden
Sunday, May 17, at 4 PM EST
22-25 Jackson Ave (at 46th Ave.)
Long Island City, NY 11101
(718) 433-1088
RSVP and pre-order a signed book here.