The Legacy of George Washington Carver: How His Brilliance Motivates Artists Today

George Washington Carver's creative scientific and artistic legacy is honored in the "World Without End" exhibition, which also highlights his impact on contemporary artists and innovation.

In the art world and in the wider world, Black Americans' relationship with the American South is historically viewed as one of enslavement and oppression, with little consideration given to the scientific and creative advancements that both preceded and followed emancipation.

With its current show, World Without End: The George Washington Carver Project (on view until March 2), which launched last autumn as part of the Getty Foundation's PST ART exhibition project, the California African American Museum in Los Angeles wants to alter that constrained perception. The program honors George Washington Carver for his long-overdue contributions to science as well as his less well-known artistic endeavors. The exhibition, which was cocurated by independent curator Yael Lipschutz and CAAM executive director Cameron Shaw, attempts to demonstrate how Carver's inventiveness drove his technological innovations.

Born into slavery, Carver was a pioneering scientist and educator who gained notoriety in the early 1900s for his numerous agricultural innovations, many of which the self-described "people's scientist" purposefully kept unpatented. Carver's use of peanuts and sweet potatoes, organic fertilizers, clay-derived dyes, and crop rotation—all of which are now hailed as cornerstones of contemporary farming and conservation practices—as well as his innovative plant-based approaches to medicine and engineering that prioritized sustainability over profit, were ahead of their time.

In order to create the show, Lipschutz and Shaw combined pieces by modern artists with historical documents pertaining to Carver's scientific heritage. In an attempt to show how innovative and progressive George Washington Carver was, as Shaw stated, Lipschutz had thought of this strategy even before the Getty declared "Art & Science Collide" as the topic for this year's PST ART. Shaw agreed when Lipschutz presented the concept to CAAM because it embodied the organization's goals of focusing on African-American history and modern art.