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Common Knowledge collaborated with Bureau Europa. For the edition 9 we have invited Jeroen Laven of Stipo, for a lecture on urban development, social-spatial strategy and how creative are the driving force behind the new economy.
Afterwards a dialogue focused on the City of Maastricht raised interesting topics and needs.
2024-11-28 Crown Princess Victoria at Forma's collaboration conference on seas and water: Knowledge that leads to action
Pictured: Crown Princess Victoria
Special Knowledge Forum in celebration of World Environment Day 2018 at ICIMOD. This Knowledge Forum is co-sponsored by the Royal Norwegian Embassy, the Nepali Times, Doko Recyclers and ICIMOD.
Photo: Jitendra Raj Bajracharya/ICIMOD.
2003 Nature Knowledge Workshop sponsored by the Natural Science Section, conducted at Camp Metoche near Barton Flats in the San Bernardino Mountains. Naturalist/entomologist Steve Kutcher giving on of his memorable bug workshops.
Digital photograph by Bob Cates.
Donor: Bob Cates. Credit:
Bob Cates Collection, Sierra Club-Angeles Chapter Archives.
Session #218 Putting knowledge management and learning into practice in large development programmes. Presentation by Helen Gillman and Jurgen Hagmann
Photo taken by Claudio Papapietro at the 2025 Native Knowledge 360 Teach-In at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian.
Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World
May 18 - November 2, 2025
Locations West Building, Ground Floor, Gallery 23
Experience the wonder of nature through the eyes of artists. Look closely at art depicting insects and other animals alongside real specimens.
Art played a pivotal role during the dawn of European natural history in the 16th and 17th centuries. Advancements in scientific technology, trade, and colonial expansion allowed naturalists to study previously unknown and overlooked insects, animals, and other beestjes, or “little beasts.” Artists such as Joris Hoefnagel and Jan van Kessel helped deepen and spread knowledge of these creatures with highly detailed and playful works that inspired generations of printmakers, painters, decorative artists, and naturalists.
A delight for all ages, this exhibition features nearly 75 of these paintings, prints, and drawings in a unique presentation alongside specimens and taxidermy from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Learn about the rich exchange between artists and naturalists that sparked a fascination with earth’s living creatures, big and small. See how this intersection of art and science continues to inspire us today in a new film by artist Dario Robleto.
www.nga.gov/exhibitions/little-beasts-art-wonder-and-natu...
Nothing sits still in Jan van Kessel’s pictures. Dotted with amber-flecked beetles and marbled moths, the Flemish painter’s oils stir with life. In them, butterflies—some lemon yellow, others pearl grey and daubed with green—perch on rosemary leaves. Velvety bumblebees tiptoe over paper-thin blossoms. If insects, as the English naturalist Thomas Moffett wrote in 1590, are for the “delight of the eyes” and the “pleasure of the ears”, then these pictures are pure joy.
Arrayed in the National Gallery of Art show Little Beasts: Art, Wonder and the Natural World, in Washington, DC, are paintings and prints by Van Kessel and Joris Hoefnagel, among others, from 16th- and 17th-century Europe, when expanding trade routes brought the study of nature—and nature as art—to new heights. In the Flemish port city of Antwerp (its harbour once dubbed the market of “all of the universe”), Hoefnagel and Van Kessel responded to the surge in demand, inflecting their pictures with black- and silver-quilled porcupines, fire-red salamanders and checkered caterpillars, all with a studied delicacy. Here, the minute is monumental.
Hoefnagel travelled widely, fixing his gaze on the small and intricate. As a luxury merchant, he ventured to France and Spain, of which he noted: “He who has not witnessed Seville has not witnessed miracles.” Art lovers in Europe commissioned pictures of their own acquired miracles or cabinets of curiosity. And the curiosity ran deep. Hoefnagel made 300 watercolour miniatures for one series, and Van Kessel’s oeuvre included more than 700 works.
What is most striking about these pictures, set against the gallery’s pistachio and brick-red walls, is their masterful detail. Hoefnagel works with a surgeon’s precision, drawing out each cell of a dragonfly’s gossamer wing, its lime-green body awash in liquid-black abstraction. To his tortoiseshell butterfly, he added touches of gold; to fish scales, gauzy silver paint. In one picture, Van Kessel signed his name in feverish-red caterpillars and emerald-scaled serpents, jewel-like spiders hanging down, tauntingly, over the painting’s edge.
To be that attentive to nature, to let the world wash over you, seems a particular kind of gift. In the same way one loses the train of a conversation when suddenly fixating on something beautiful, Hoefnagel and Van Kessel seem to linger in the very act of looking. There is a tenderness to this work, an intimacy. “Stay a while,” they seem to urge. “Go on looking.”
Their attentiveness had a spiritual posture too. These pictures were a reminder of divine providence, of God’s grace made manifest. As the English naturalist John Ray wrote in 1691: “If man ought to reflect upon his Creator the glory of all his works, then ought he to take notice of them all, and not think any thing unworthy of his cognizance.”
Time spent observing is never wasted. Consider Hoefnagel’s elephant beetle, sinuous and copper-dappled, its horn curved like a thick eyelash. It sits below an inscription from the Book of Psalms: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” It is from that vantage point—low to the ground and seeing the world anew—that these artists delighted in nature and its splendours. The elephant beetle, believed at the time to have originated from its own ashes, evoked Jesus Christ’s resurrection—as did the butterfly, emerging from a cocoon into a state of winged brilliance. (Moffett wrote that the butterfly’s sapphire wings can “shame the peacock”.)
Shame runs throughout the show, too, tinging it with a pathos that hangs lightly, never feeling like a burden. Take the Neapolitan artist Teodoro Filippo di Liagno’s series of etchings of animal skeletons. One, of a heron, is carefully attended to—its needle-sharp limbs sloped inwards like a ballerina at rest. The memento mori seems weightless, suspended in time. One gets the sense that even the macabre here was done in a spirit of playfulness. As Jacob Hoefnagel, Joris’s son, inscribed on one of his father’s pictures, the work is “freely communicated in friendship to all lovers of the Muses”. Love abounds in all these works.
One of the final pieces in the show is Van Kessel’s Noah’s Family Assembling Animals Before the Ark (around 1660). Strewn with tomato-red parrots and turkeys ringed in charcoal, it is a work of close study, of fear giving way to hope. The flood is at hand, but Van Kessel privileges beauty, unfettered. There will be hardship, it pronounces, but also sublimity, something wondrous and beyond imagination.
The lush essays of the American naturalist John Burroughs come to mind. In one, he recalls the thrill of catching a bee in his hand: “Though it stung me, I retained it and looked it over, and in the process was stung several times; but the pain was slight.”
www.theartnewspaper.com/2025/05/22/national-gallery-art-w...
observer.com/2025/07/exhibition-review-little-beasts-art-....
The Marvelous Details of Joris Hoefnagel’s Animal and Insect Studies
Scroll to discover tiny brushstrokes, hidden meanings, and the immense impact on our understanding of the natural world.
www.nga.gov/stories/articles/marvelous-details-joris-hoef...
Smithsonian Scientists on How Artists Depicted Five Curious Creatures
When did you first see the pattern of a dragonfly’s wing? Or learn that giant mammals roam the ocean? If you had lived in Europe in the 16th or 17th centuries, your first exposure to the wonders of the natural world may have been through art. Artists of the period helped share newfound knowledge of insects, animals, and other beestjes or “little beasts.”
Our exhibition Little Beasts: Art, Wonder, and the Natural World pairs paintings, prints, and drawings from our collection with specimens and taxidermy from the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Specialists from the museum helped us identify some magnificent (or mysterious) animals. Find out how artists represented, or sometimes misrepresented, the creatures in their works.
www.nga.gov/stories/articles/smithsonian-scientists-how-a...
Our knowledge is what we know about anything and everything. What do we know about anything and everything? What can we know about anything and everything?
The knowledge exchange held from September 6 to September 8, 2016. The event is hosted by Indonesia Agency for Agriculture Research and Development (IAARD) and attended by National Agriculture and Forestry Research Institute (NAFRI) Lao PDR, Department of Agriculture (MAF), Lao PDR, and Indonesian Agency for Meteorological, Climatological and Geophysics. It aims to feed back the learnings into process of developing and improving climate information services for agriculture in Lao PDR
Photo by: GIZ
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In the last edition of Common Knowledge 2013-2014 cultural professionals with interesting ideas and projects were in the spotlight. A team of coaches helped creatives to prepare the best pitch, which they presented in front of a jury and advisory board, and of course nice audience.
Photo © Alan Reinders
In the last edition of Common Knowledge 2013-2014 cultural professionals with interesting ideas and projects were in the spotlight. A team of coaches helped creatives to prepare the best pitch, which they presented in front of a jury and advisory board, and of course nice audience.
Photo © Alan Reinders