If you were walking down the brick path between the Regis Center for Art and the Barbara Barker Center for Dance on Thursday afternoon, you may have seen about 30 people crouched near the rain-soaked ground and wondered what they were doing.
Armed with palm-sized triplet magnifying glasses, these people were on a lichen walk, examining local specimens as part of the University of Minnesota Department of Art’s first-ever Lichen Symposium.
From Thursday to Saturday, visitors from across Minnesota and the country convened to discuss and participate in activities surrounding the small, yet endlessly complex, organisms.
Lichen are ecological anomalies. As hybrid colonies of algae or cyanobacteria in symbiosis with fungus, they are plantlike, but not plants — fungal in nature, but not the fungus itself.
The entangled nature of lichen led University professor Diane Willow and the CHANT collaborative, an intercollegiate group of artists and community health equity leaders, to create an event where people can come together across interests to discuss the unique organisms.
“(The Symposium) is both inter- and transdisciplinary,” Willow said the day before the Symposium. “There are some of the artists involved who are very interested in science and then there are a lot of scientists who are very interested in art.”
CHANT, which stands for Culture, Healing, Art, Nature and Technology, began in 2022 and is committed to researching creative interdependence at the nexus of each of those disciplines, according to its official description.
This research brought them to lichen and then to the book “The Lichen Museum,” published by the University of Minnesota Press and written by Alison Laurie Palmer, a professor of art at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Palmer flew out from Santa Cruz for the Symposium and led the lichen walk, an activity that “The Lichen Museum” centers around.
“The lichen museum is absolutely everywhere, and all you have to do is look really closely,” Palmer said to symposium participants before the walk.
Under their magnifying glasses, participants observed shield lichen stretching across ridged tree bark and another species dotting concrete bricks encircling a rock garden that glowed orange under ultraviolet light.
A small child stomped around in rainboots and squealed with delight at each discovery. Lichenologists conversed about species and answered questions from other participants.
Other Symposium activities included screenprinting lichen-inspired bookmarks with Bohemian Press and small-group ruminations about the physical and metaphysical natures of lichen.
Participants wrote questions such as, “Am I a lichen?” “Do lichen taste like they smell?” and “Is God a lichen?” on pieces of paper laser cut into the shapes of different lichen species, which were taped to a wall in Regis East, arranged like a growing lichen colony.
Most interestingly, art professors Amy Youngs and Doo-Sung Yoo from Ohio State University led a two-part activity called Fungal Entanglements. Recreating a performance by the OSU Lichen Likers group, Youngs and Yoo helped participants create costumes by tying fabric scraps to lichen-covered tree branches.
The costumes ultimately became one interconnected piece, entangling the participants with each other. Youngs and Yoo then led the participants in a procession around West Bank that evoked the feeling of being in an interconnected web of life.
Second-year graduate student and CHANT member Mai Tran mostly stood on the sidelines taking photos, so she didn’t participate in Fungal Entanglements.
Tran, however, did contribute six, nine-foot-tall, 38-inch-wide woodblock prints, one for each color of the rainbow, that hung in the Regis East lobby during the symposium, a project she called her greatest achievement of the semester.
The prints depict the Star Rosette Lichen, a species that has been recorded in 75 of Minnesota’s 87 counties, according to MinnesotaSeasons.com.
Tran said the 32-by-72-inch block used to make the prints took two weeks of nonstop carving, a process she said would normally take her three to six months.
With assistance, the prints were created across two 12-hour days in the printmaking shop. A time-lapse of the process played on a screen in the lobby.
Tran sought to create something reflective of where she lives, and found that the black spots of the Star Rosette evoked Minnesota’s lakes and that its arrangement took the shape of a river, the same setting where she first found the lichen.
Overall, Tran said she came away from the Symposium with a new perspective on lichen and knowing a lot more about them.
“We don’t think of (lichen) as pretty or helpful, but now I want to pay more attention to them,” she said. “It’s good to open that to the public, and hopefully we can make the world better.”