Intelligent Design: Interspecies Art is a group exhibition of twenty international artists exploring human interaction with animals through a blend of provocative video installations, photographs, and sculptures.

Artists collaborate with mammals, fish, insects, and other species, which may be domesticated, imaginary, laboratory, modeled, or wild. Curious about the animal’s point of view, artists design their projects as a form of conversation or inquiry about the nonhuman world. Their artwork challenges the anthropocentric perspective of the world, de-centering the human viewpoint, and making it an equal with other animals. This paradigm shift has been compared to the Copernican Revolution in the 16th century, in which the Earth (and therefore mankind) was acknowledged as not being the center of the Universe, ushering in an awareness of plurality, diversity, and relativity in science and the arts.

The exhibition will also stimulate discussions about the differences and similarities of how the arts and sciences approach the world, animals as products, animal rights, conservation, and speciesism, as a form of prejudice against animals. Intelligent Design will be the first exhibition in the U.S. to explore interspecies art, coming on the heels of several exhibitions and conferences in the UK this year that explored the topic in light of this year’s 200-year celebration of Charles Darwin’s birth.