Fruitful Encounters

Story by Kiki Volkert
Photography by Betsy Manning, KLN ’87, CLA ’08, and Ryan S. Brandenberg, CLA ’14
Illustration by MeiLi Carling, TYL ’24

It’s late winter on Temple’s Ambler Campus. Outside, the trees prepare to break their long winter dormancy. Inside a Dixon Hall classroom, horticulture and landscape architecture students take off their coats and settle into their seats. On the workspace in front of them, the blades of palm-sized knives glisten in the sun beaming through a window. From buckets of soil lining the classroom walls jut stems that contain roots, or rootstocks.

At the front of the classroom, contemporary artist Sam Van Aken welcomes the students to a workshop on grafting. The horticultural technique, with roots dating back to 1800 B.C., entails attaching part of one plant to another so they grow as one, sharing resources while each still produces its own unique fruit.

With a command over the knife and the students’ attention, Van Aken demonstrates how it’s done: He makes a swift angled cut to the two components—the rootstock and the young shoot of another plant, or scion—and fuses them together with electrical tape.

Four Tyler School of Art and Architecture working on cyanotypes outdoors

For cyanotype prints, students gathered plants from Tyler’s natural dye garden which was planted by students in the fibers and material studies program.

As Van Aken simultaneously shares the long history of grafting, students’ eyes light up as new branches form in their understanding of horticulture.

After mapping the historic transatlantic traversing of fruit trees through generations, Van Aken summarizes his fascination: “These fruits aren’t just agricultural products. They are cultural objects and embedded in them is the history of civilizations around the world.”

This workshop kicked off Van Aken’s weeklong visit as Tyler’s eighth annual Jack Wolgin Visiting Artist. Multidisciplinary in nature, his work explores the intersection of communication, botany and horticulture. Last year, for example, he worked in Crete to restore an ancient forest.

For the rest of the week he shared his expertise with students through experiential seminars and lectures that integrate art, science and horticulture. The visit culminated in the planting of a “Tree of 40 Fruit,” a living art piece made by grafting 40 varieties of stone fruits together, in Tyler’s central greenspace courtyard on Main Campus.

“At Tyler, we are invested in making this artist residency program cross-curricular. Sam was selected because of his singular ability to merge art and plant science, paired with his talent for engaging students,” says Susan E. Cahan, dean of Tyler, a school encompassing art and design disciplines as well the study of natural and built environments.

“Visits by artists like Sam enable Tyler to expand its offerings in meaningful cross-disciplinary, hands-on learning.” says Cahan.

Sasha Eisenman, associate professor of horticulture and chair of the Architecture and Environmental Design Department, concurred with Cahan, describing the value of Van Aken’s visit this way:

Visiting artist Sam Van Aken collaborating with Tyler students

As part of his weeklong visit, artist-in-residence Sam Van Aken led a grafting workshop for students at Ambler.

“Seeing how art, science and nature intersect is valuable for our students as they navigate their careers and align their passions with their professional pursuits.”

—Sasha Eisenman
Associate professor of horticulture
Chair of the Architecture and Environmental Design Department

“Bringing an artist to campus whose medium is trees is an exciting opportunity. Seeing how art, science and nature intersect is valuable for our students as they navigate their careers and align their passions with their professional pursuits.”

As the grafting workshop continues, the students quickly get the hang of it—notching and splicing their branches with ease and grace—and leave the classroom cradling their newly joined plants, which will sprout in a few weeks.

The tree of 40 fruit planted outside of Tyler School of Art and Architecture on Temple's Main Campus

Tyler students watched as Van Aken planted a “Tree of 40 Fruit,” which is a living piece of art created by grafting various varieties of stone fruits together.

Leaving an impression

In Tyler’s outdoor courtyard, students in the Glass, Photography, Fiber Arts and Printmaking departments press botanical specimens onto mixed media. They are preparing to create cyanotypes, a cameraless photographic technique originally developed in the 1800s that uses the sun’s rays and a combination of chemicals to transform paper or fabric into distinctive, monochrome blue prints. Van Aken uses cyanotype as part of his own process for documenting vanishing heirloom and antique fruit varieties.

“I’ve been working with cyanotype in class for a few months now, preparing for this visit, but seeing someone so masterful with the process was incredible,” says Class of 2026 photography major Jami DeLuca.

“Talking with Sam, I realized he’s almost like a detective—tracking down rare plants, researching their history and preserving them through his work. We see the finished cyanotypes, but behind them is this deep scientific process, from gathering materials to the chemistry of printing. It’s a whole new way to think about art.”

Handle with care

Bud-swell, branch union, caliper. These are a few of the terms a tree owner would need to know, Ester Segal, Class of 2026, learned as she viewed the tree from the perspective of its caretaker.

In Associate Professor Bryan Satalino’s informational storytelling class, Segal, a graphic and interactive design major from Brooklyn, New York, and her classmates took on the real-world design challenge of creating a 20-page care manual for the “Tree of 40 Fruit.”

“It’s a whole new way to think about art.”
—Jami Deluca
Class of 2026

For the “Tree of 40 Fruit,” students designed a 20-page care manual using a printmaking method called risograph in which transparent inks are layered one at a time to create mixed colors.

Working in groups, the students combined visuals and text to produce engaging and user-friendly guides. Satalino encouraged students to think carefully about symbols and their meanings and to build upon each other’s ideas to produce something truly collaborative.

“It’s so exciting to see the teams working together, pushing themselves and each other to think and create in new ways,” says Satalino. “This project challenges them to consider not only aesthetics but also clarity, usability and functionality—key elements in any professional design project.”

At the end of the week, Van Aken selected one group’s manual to be distributed to caretakers of his living sculptures across the country. But all of the students finished the class with an important new addition to their design portfolios.

For Segal, the project was an exercise in translating a large amount of data into simple imagery.

“I learned how to take a bunch of information, figure out what’s most important for a user to know and then put that into a visual language,” says Segal. “I had to really think about how it would be understood from a user’s perspective.”

Branching out

On the final day of his weeklong residency, Van Aken planted a “Tree of 40 Fruit” in the Tyler courtyard, positioning it near the school’s natural dye garden. Intending the tree to serve as an aesthetic spectacle that also conserves regional agricultural traditions, Van Aken chose the tree’s fruits specifically for their suitability to Philadelphia weather. Its installation has transformed the courtyard into a place of inspiration and communal gathering.

Transcript

Sam Van Aken: For me, the Tree of 40 Fruits is a lot of things. I like to think they didn’t have it in both realms of being an artwork and also an agricultural product.

Susan E. Cahan: Sam’s been working with our students at Temple’s Ambler campus to create a new Tree of 40 Fruit.

Sam Van Aken: We’re planting a Tree of 40 Fruit right next to the art building at Tyler. When I first started, it was purely an aesthetic conceit–I wanted to make this tree that would blossom into these different colors and would bear all these different fruits. As I got into the project, I realized the extent to which we were losing diversity in all of our foods. And so then, it became about preserving heirloom and threatened fruit varieties. I would be invited to different places to create one, and I would research all the varieties that were historically grown there and worked with local growers so that a single Tree of 40 Fruit becomes an agricultural history of the area.

Sam Van Aken (speaking to a group): You’re taking part in this lineage. It started, in some cases, over 2000 years ago.

Sam Van Aken: Most fruit trees are grafted. When we find a desired variety, we have to propagate it [indistinguishable], which means to take a cutting and to put it onto a new root system.

Susan E Cahan: Now our horticulture students, they always learn how to graft. But this is a unique experience for them because they’re learning how to graft in the creation of a new tree that’s a work of art.

Sophia Lentz and Ana Semetti (students): Seeing that we can mix art and the science of grafting–it honestly did really inspire me, like I have the grafting itch now.

Bryan Satalino: These provide the most memorable learning experiences for students because they’re doing these things in collaboration with not only themselves, but they’re also collaborating with a client in Sam–and that’s really, really cool.

Sasha Eisenman: Finding an artist who spans the gap between working with plants, working with photo, working with printmaking, is really unusual.

Jasmyn Brown (student): With art, it’s a lot of active doing where you’re critically thinking about how to depict an idea, and then with the science aspect, you’re learning about what that thing is and how it works.

Sam Van Aken (speaking to a group): Thank you everybody! It’s been an amazing week with all the workshops–so we’re going to start a Tree of 40 Fruit.

Daniel Gottschalk (student): What I have learned from Sam: to expand the knowledge of grafting put into actual physical experience rather than just book theory.

Susan E Cahan: Years from now, the former students will be able to come and see that tree.

Daniel Gottshalk: I already had a reason to return–to see future progress of other people’s work–and now, as time goes on and people move on and grow with their careers, the tree will grow here. And I’m very excited to see this in the future.

Students attended the planting, and will be able to pick and eat the fruits for years to come.

“What I have learned from Sam is how to put the knowledge of grafting into actual physical experience rather than just book theory,” says Daniel Gottschalk, an MFA student in metals/jewelry/CAD-CAM. “I’m very excited to see this in the future.”

During his visit to Temple, Van Aken was assisted by students in planting a “Tree of 40 Fruit” in Ambler’s arboretum consisting of 40 distinct types of apples originating or historically grown in Southeastern Pennsylvania. As part of his residency, he returned to both of Temple’s campuses this fall to care for the trees at both sites, offer additional learning opportunities and deliver a public lecture on the cultural history of fruit in the Philadelphia region.

“The Van Aken residency was more than just series of workshops and lectures,” says Nichola Kinch, associate dean of academic affairs at Tyler.

“Sam’s visits sparked an ongoing dialogue—one about art, science and the ways in which nature connects us all.”

Launch Gallery