BeansTalk/Stalking Beans: Lewis Hyde and Michael Mercil in Conversation

“I was determined to know beans,” Thoreau said about his work at Walden. For two years, artist Michael Mercil—an associate professor in Ohio State’s art department—has made a place for growing (and knowing) beans at the Wexner Center.

Find out what he’s harvested, as Mercil joins writer Lewis Hyde of Kenyon College in a conversation about art, place, and community. Hyde is the author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (1983) and Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art (1999) and editor of The Essays of Henry David Thoreau (2002). He is currently writing a book in defense of our “cultural commons” from the threat of privatization.

Cosponsored by Ohio State’s Department of Comparative Studies, the Living Culture Initiative in the Department of Art, and the Institute for Collaborative Research and Public Humanities.