Robin Gimm '14 was the artist-in-residence at the Zilkha Center for Environmental Initiatives during summer 2013. She presents botanical pen and ink drawings and acrylic paintings in an effort to to give visual form to abstracted ideas of sustainability.  

Cricket Creek Farm grilled cheese sandwiches will be served.

In Aesthetic Edibles, Gimm highlights the inherent beauty of plants in detailed ink drawings of common garden varieties. In Polluted Paintings, she addresses a variety of environmental and sustainability concerns, including climate change, food, water pollution, and biodiversity, by reinterpreting famous artwork as if it was created in a polluted world.

Building a Better Mass-Market Tomato

      "The insipid-tomato problem is well known both to salad lovers and scientists. For example, a gene mutation that tomato breeders love because it turns the fruit a luscious red also happens to make it blander. Refrigeration, transportation and other factors also take their toll. Over the decades, the average tomato has become not only less tasty but less nutritious.

       "Enter Dr. Klee, who helped found the Institute for Plant Innovation a decade ago and has been in a quest for a more flavorful and nutritious mass-market tomato ever since.

       "It is easy to find a better tasting and more nutritious tomato. Go to a farmer's market or grow one in the backyard. It is also easy to breed a plant that produces something tastier than a supermarket tomato - cross a sweet heirloom with the supermarket variety. In the greenhouse, Dr. Klee pulls one such hybrid tomato off a vine, and it does taste sweeter. But a hybrid also loses some of the qualities highly valued by commercial growers - it is not as fecund, not as resistant to disease, not as easily grown, not as pretty..."

Keep reading in the NYTIMES   Watercolor by Stephanie Anderson.