Oka Doner is an internationally acclaimed artist best known for her large-scale public art commissions inspired by the wonderment and awe of flora and fauna, as well as for her poetic explorations of the human figure. Michele Oka Doner: The True Story of Eve brings together over sixty artworks spanning more than five decades from the artist’s oeuvre, exploring intersections of nature and humanity while posing poignant questions about our collective responsibility for this planet and for one another.

Oka Doner has used a wide variety of natural materials and forms in her decades-long artistic practice—from stones, fossils, and shells to salvaged detritus of botanical and animal specimens that caught the artist’s inquisitive eye—which she transforms into expressive forms using her boundless imagination. The artist explains, “I have always been a hunter-gatherer. Translating my finds into clay allowed me to expand the impulse. No longer was the peach pit extracted from the ripe stone fruit just detritus. I could take it to the studio, study the interior structure, and a landscape emerged.” The natural environment of Miami Beach, where she spent her early childhood and from which she derives her formal vocabulary, has proven a great source of inspiration for the artist. She transforms the natural materials she collects into uncanny sculptures resembling animal and plant forms in a variety of media, including wood, glass, silver, bronze, and wax. Her large works on paper of looming humanoids are made from organic matter, such as dried leaves, roots, bark, fronds, stems, stalk, mulch, and dirt. The exhibition also includes Cocoon and Germinating Seed, both from 1984, which were gifts by the artist to The Ringling in 1989. The two surreal sculptures resemble motifs found in nature that seem familiar but are often overlooked. Rendered in bronze, the natural forms are enlarged and exaggerated, making them appear simultaneously futuristic, ancient, and altogether otherworldly.

The title of the exhibition conjures Eve, the controversial female figure from the Garden of Eden story in the Book of Genesis. Oka Doner points to the paradox of Eve as both the mother of all living things and the bearer of original sin, who ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge and was exiled from Eden. The story of Eve reminds us that we, too, are simultaneously the creators and the destroyers of the fate of this planet ridden with cycles of creation, growth, and decay. Oka Doner states, “The emergent feminist avant-garde coincided with my emergence into adult voice. Closed doors around me were being pierced by the civil rights movement and by the burgeoning gender dialogue. This heightened my awareness of the human body as a physical entity that was at the same time sociological, even abstract.”

The exhibition focuses on Oka Doner’s further integration of human form converging with nature and history and demonstrates her art’s power to challenge distinctions between what is ancient and new, natural and manmade. The highly intuitive works on view pay homage to the local environment while reminding us of our increasingly precarious ecosystem.

Visit The Ringling’s exhibition, Michele Oka Doner: The True Story of Eve, on view through June 2, 2024.