Alan Sonfist Retrospective: Trees Talk, I Listen Hardcover – August 6, 2025

Alan Sonfist Retrospective: Trees Talk, I Listen offers an intimate and expansive portrait of Alan Sonfist, whose groundbreaking artworks have, for over half a century, transformed the way we remember and relate to the natural world. From the hemlocks that first whispered to him as a child to the burned edges of the Bronx visible from their branches, Sonfist’s art emerges from lived experience—a boy shaped by trees, stone, and soil amid a city in collapse. His artworks are not representations of nature, but direct acts of restoration and remembrance: native forests planted in urban spaces, bronze castings of fallen branches, earth pigments gathered from riverbanks. Each work marks a site where time, memory, and nature converge.Sonfist’s vision, first articulated in his 1968 essay Natural Phenomena as Public Monuments, proposed a radical rethinking of public art—one in which springs, forests, and native species would be honored like heroes of history. This led to Time Landscape (1965–present), his iconic living artwork in downtown Manhattan that reintroduces precolonial flora into the city grid. Built through years of collaboration with botanists, planners, and local communities, Sonfist’s artworks invite us into a broader sense of belonging—where trees are kin, acorns are children, and the land itself holds stories worth preserving. Trees Talk, I Listen is a moving tribute to an artist who listens to the Earth as both archive and oracle, and who calls on us to do the same. Read more