Event List
How Were Anti-Cancer Drugs from Nature Discovered in the Past? How is it Done Today?
From 7:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
From early discoveries rooted in traditional remedies to today’s cutting-edge laboratory techniques, the search for anti-cancer drugs in nature has evolved dramatically. How Were Anti-Cancer Drugs from Nature Discovered in the Past? How is it Done Today? Explores how scientists have historically identified powerful natural compounds, and how modern research continues to uncover new possibilities using advanced tools and interdisciplinary approaches. Gain insight into the journey from plant and fungal sources to potential therapies, and how innovations in chemistry and biology are accelerating the discovery process.
Nicholas Oberlies leads a dynamic lab of researchers from undergraduate to postdoctoral levels, focused on understanding the chemistry of nature to discover compounds that benefit humankind, especially anticancer and antibiotic drug leads. He earned his B.S. from Miami University and Ph.D. from Purdue University. After postdoctoral work in industry and at RTI, where he advanced to direct the Natural Products Laboratory, he moved to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. There, he leads efforts to develop new compounds from natural sources, with a focus on anticancer fungi and the safety and quality of herbal remedies.
Gathering Council
Virtual Program
From 7:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
Gathering Council is a guided exploration of extended cognition and the idea that thinking is not confined to the brain, but emerges through our relationships with body, environment, and community. This program invites participants to reimagine illness, ecological instability, and social upheaval not as isolated crises, but as entangled experiences that can deepen perception and connection. Through reflective dialogue and embodied practices, we will explore how intelligence is distributed across systems, human and more-than-human, and how attuning to these wider networks can offer new pathways for meaning, resilience, and collective care.
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Sophie was raised by house cats, puff balls, possums, raccoons, and an opinionated, crippled goose. In every neighborhood she’s ever lived in she has been known as “the walker”. She believes strongly that all thinking happens interstitially – between beings, ideas, differences, mythical gradients.
More-Than-Human Medicine Artist Talk
From 7:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
Join exhibition co-curator and 2025 Lloyd Library & Museum Artist-in-Residence Sara Torgison for a talk on More-Than-Human Medicine, an exploration of human interdependence with plant and animal species that have supported our wellness across centuries. Torgison will discuss her use of craft processes as a way of reclaiming time, from researching plants and carefully stitching them into fabric to rendering animals as precious, quasi-religious archetypes. Drawing on histories of both craft and fine art, the work reflects on the intimate, ephemeral relationships between humans and the materials they engage, foregrounding care, devotion, and material connection.
Sara Torgison is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in ceramics and fiber art. She received an MFA from the University of Cincinnati Department of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning and a BFA (ceramics) and BS (Zoology) from Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, CA. Her work often blends media, extending finite and fragile surfaces to emphasize and inhabit marginal spaces. Strange alliances formed in passages between hard and soft substances are resonant of the shifts inherent in navigating public and private life, and the distance between self and other. Sara teaches ceramics at Queen City Clay, is seasonal faculty at the University of Cincinnati, and works as a preparator at the Weston Art Gallery in Cincinnati, OH.
Fungal Communication
From 7:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
Fungal Communication invites audiences to rethink what it means to communicate with the more-than-human world. Blending mycology, philosophy, foraging practice, and reflections from her debut book Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life, Gabrielle Cerberville explores fungi not as metaphors for connection, but as living beings whose ways of sensing, exchanging, decomposing, and world-making challenge human assumptions about individuality, intelligence, and relationship. Cerberville ponders how foraging could renew practices of attention, reciprocity, humility, and responsibility.
Gabrielle Cerberville, otherwise known as Chaotic Forager and sometimes as the Internet’s Mushroom Auntie, is a celebrated foraging educator, community mycologist, climate advocate, and author of Gathered: On Foraging, Feasting, and the Seasonal Life. A current PhD student at the University of Virginia in the Music Composition and Computer Technologies program, Gabrielle researches the intersection between art, science, and our responsibility to understand, protect, and communicate with the natural world.
Beyond the Gate Opening Reception
From 5:00 p.m. until 8:00 p.m.
Kent Krugh’s multi-exposure images in Beyond the Gate invite viewers to experience time as layered and interconnected, linking past, present, and future through evocative portraits of trees. Expanding on his acclaimed series Inside the Gate, Krugh superimposes moments at sites deeply rooted in the Lloyd Brothers' history from the woods of Crittenden, Kentucky, to Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum, and Ithaca, New York. His organic, botanical imagery conveys reflection, patience, and a sense of calm while honoring place, history, and memory.
