Juliana Cerqueira Leite & Zoë Claire Miller

Beverly’s presents Zoë Claire Miller and Juliana Cerqueira Leite’s Garden. This new site-specific installation continues the duo’s international collaboration. For Beverly’s, Miller and Leite have transformed the bar into a lush herbal garden with sculptural planters for medicinal herbs, wall-hangings, scents, grow-lights, and recipes to cure and aid women’s issues.

Having met during the Moscow Young Art Biennale, Berlin-based Miller and Brazilian/American Leite began working together as a means to explore feminist themes and corporeal concerns. Their collaborations have always involved site-specific components, often including humor, and have been exhibited at Landing Strip Berlin, Kunsthaus Erfurt, RM Basics Munich, and now Beverly’s New York.

Throughout this country's history, American women of all different backgrounds have used natural remedies for family planning, adopted local plant knowledge, and learned about their bodies through the study of plants. Women produced herbariums (books of pressed plants that were identified and labeled), historically important texts and regional catalogues, and became proficient in plant-based medication. Herbs and other plants were used as natural contraceptives, emmenagogues (menstruation starters) and abortives.

This female-shared knowledge that had been passed down for countless generations has been largely erased from our memories by the pharmaceutical industry’s professionalization and capitalisation of the medical field. Perhaps in a time when many doctors overprescribe expensive medications, and when a newly appointed Supreme Court judge speaks more confidently about his love of beer than for his support for women’s rights, we can benefit from revisiting some of the practices and investigations of our female ancestors.