The Horizon of a meadow invites you to experience something entirely new, at the crossroads of art, ecology, and community. As interior renovations temporarily make the exhibition spaces inaccessible, the museum is launching an ambitious project by transforming its living spaces, the entrance hall, auditorium, library, and meadow, into places for reflecting on our relationship with living things and today’s contemporary challenges.
At the heart of this initiative, artist Emmanuel Louisgrand turns the museum into a site for sensitive experimentation. With Parcelle 64, Jardin laboratoire, he transforms the hall into a participatory garden where everyone is invited to help create the vegetable patch. In the meadow, a tulip plantation, Una linea di tulipani, follows the rhythm of the seasons and extends this reflection on living systems. Influenced by figures such as Joseph Beuys and the Arte Povera movement, the artist develops a practice rooted in long-term thinking, blending art, nature, and social interaction.
Outside, on the forecourt, the museum revives The House of Dust, an iconic work by Alison Knowles, originally created in 1967 with composer James Tenney within the context of the Fluxus movement. Reconstructed in collaboration with the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Saint-Étienne and the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design, this inhabitable sculpture becomes a space for experimentation, encounters, and activities open to everyone.
The auditorium also presents a film program from the Cinémathèque de Saint-Étienne, tracing from 1947 to 2006 the deep connections between working-class culture and gardening practices, where necessity, pleasure, and poetry intertwine.
Echoing these initiatives, the Jean Laude Library presents Échos végétaux, a visual and editorial journey dedicated to forms of living nature. Through books and artists’ publications, the exhibition explores how nature — trees, flowers, landscapes — becomes at once a subject, a material, and a source of inspiration. From Land Art to contemporary practices, it invites us to rethink the way we inhabit the world and to renew our perspective on ecosystems.
Free and open to everyone, The Horizon of a Meadow transforms the museum into a living, collective, and evolving space where art becomes a tool for imagining new relationships between humans and the environment.