Witness Tree

Rosalind Sutkowski

Open starting April 19

Tree of Life

Natessa Amin

Opens Sepetmeber 2026

Exhibiting location

John James Audubon Center

With more than a century of conservation history, Audubon's mission is to protect birds and the places they need, today and tomorrow.

The John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove is situated on a historic 18th-century site, the farm where John James Audubon lived when he first came to America from France in 1803. It was here that he developed a technique for drawing birds "from life" that would make him one of the world's best-known wildlife artists. The hundreds of life-size bird portraits in his seminal work, The Birds of America, helped inspire the formation of the National Audubon Society.

The property includes the original three-story farmhouse, built in 1762, miles of nature trails along the Perkiomen Creek, and a brand-new building featuring indoor and outdoor exhibits focused on birds, art, and conservation.

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Witness Tree

Witness Tree is a site-responsive installation by Rosalind Sutkowski in the historic house at the John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove. The installation will be on view beginning in April 2026. In Summer 2025, Rosalind visited the site to explore the local ecology and take tree measurements in order to determine their approximate age.

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About the artist

About the artist: Rosalind Sutkowski

Rosalind Sutkowski is an artist whose work explores how the medium of photography intersects with new technologies. She utilizes a process of extruding two-dimensional photographic imagery to three-dimensional bas relief, incorporates microprocessors with imagery and experiments with different materials and scale to bring aesthetic value, haptic sensory and sound to the photographic image. Her research includes sensory aesthetics, design thinking and studies on the blind. Rosalind has an MA in Design Research from Drexel University.

Artist website

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Research Location

Audubon Center

The John James Audubon Center at Mill Grove sits on land where John James Audubon lived when he first came to America from France in 1803. The historic house still stands and is open to the public, along with a dynamic visitor's center built in 2019.

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Tree of Life

Amin created a series of sculptural installations that explore how multiple visions of the American Dream can live within one body, one family, and one home, with a focus on Christian and Hindu iconography and ideology of her own family history.

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Artist Information

Natessa Amin

Natessa Amin is a visual artist based in Philadelphia. Amin makes paintings, sculptures, and installations that create worlds and environments questioning where we come from and where we are going. With a sensitivity to materiality, Amin explores issues of transcultural identity through her personal heritage and addresses themes including memory, duality, spirituality, and post-colonial narratives. Throughout the work, a lexicon of symbols alluding to notions of creation and destruction decorates the surfaces of Amin's paintings and sculptures. These symbols form an ongoing narrative that maps the artist's dual family heritages and connection to the Indian diaspora in Southeast Africa and her upbringing in Pennsylvania.

Artist website

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Research Location

Winterthur Museum, Gardens, and Library

Today’s creativity can be inspired by objects from the past. Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library is a historic mansion featuring one of the most significant collections of American decorative arts in the world. These objects and our library collections help us broadly understand the artistic, cultural, social, and intellectual history of the Americas and everyday Americans in a global context from the 17th to the 20th centuries. As part of the Radical Americana initiative, Winterthur offers an experience to inform or inspire your own creative process, to provide respite and an opportunity to observe the natural world, and to encourage historical research that enhances the contemporary meaning of current work.

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Full project

Radical Americana

For the Semiquincentennial, The Clay Studio is leading Radical Americana, a series of exhibitions organized by a consortium of Philadelphia’s arts and cultural institutions. Each celebrates how artists today are continuing the city’s robust legacy as a center for art, skill, and civic engagement. The 45 artists researched and were inspired by the art and history of Philadelphia in 1776, and the subsequent commemorations in 1876, 1926, and 1976. The artists' new work will add their voices to current dialogue about our nation’s present and future, inspire civil dialogue, celebrate Philadelphia's diversity, and continue the rich tradition of creativity in our city.

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