[DRAFT] From October 2024 - July 2025, The Milstein Center at Barnard College hosted Trigger Planting, 2.0 - a collaborative project by Kadamabari Baxi, Maureen Connor, and Landon Newton which explores the ever-changing nature of reproductive rights and abortion access in the U.S. and globally. Mounted during a presidential election season in the US, which resulted in the announcement of a second Trump administration and the crest of a right-ward turn in US politics, this exhibition provided a venue for visitors to explore how political decisions shape both our literal and figurative landscape. In this case, in the wake of the end of Roe v. Wade, policies restricting abortion have exploded the United States map into an archipelago of different and unequal experiences of reproductive health access.

The original Trigger Planting installation showed at the Frieze art fair at The Shed in 2022, as a response to the supreme court decision to end the federal protections on abortion through Roe v. Wade. The artists’ work used live plants historically used as abortifacients and herbal remedies to manage fertility, and placed them through a map of the US in the places where abortion access would be restricted or banned. We adapted this work for an indoor site - transforming the living display into an archive of dried herbs hanging in the gallery, and planting an external garden. The garden continues to thrive in a plot and set of planters outside the Milstein building, providing an open air venue for future conversations.

Trigger Planting 2.0’s presence on campus helped to extend and rekindle decades’ long public discourse at Barnard about reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. In 1981…

In 2023, BCRW held a symposium in honor of Dana Ain-Davis’s ethnographic study Reproductive Injustice (2021), in which Dorothy Roberts spoke about the multivalent definition of reproductive justice as the ability to choose not to get pregnant, not to give birth, as well as the right to have a child and be able to raise them in safe, sustainable communities. She reminds us that "laws that permit abortion are laws that are freedom enhancing laws.”

“The test is freedom.. and then it all becomes clear if you use that test what is…what policies are enhancing people's ability to thrive freely in a society. What policies on the other hand are punishing people for unmet human needs?” (Dorothy Roberts, " Reproductive Injustice Symposium Keynote," BCRW Youtube Channel, Dec 15, 2023)

[photo TK]

Throughout the year, the installation team worked together with Professor Baxi to expand the story told by the exhibition – Incorporating student research, mapping, timelines, firsthand accounts from practitioners, and collecting data for case studies of abortion access in several countries around the world. In April 2025, we mounted a new component, Polyphonies: Global Abortion Voices, a multi-dimensional visualization that investigates how abortion laws are changing around the world, and how abortion providers, activists, and seekers are responding to and influencing these laws.

The group research resulted in a large-scale infographic. Each column sketches the historical trajectory of laws governing the choice to terminate a pregnancy, along with selected moments of activism, and the current national policies, including gestational limits, required consultations, and other barriers that shape access. The audio clips capture recent discussions with practitioners, journalists and movement organizers. Students Viktoria K. Dauer, GS ‘24, Jasmine Gates ’25, Silvia Giordano ’25, and Mengxi Xin, GSAPP ’27 researched case-studies, edited media clips, conducted interviews and co-designed the Polyphonies exhibition.

This digital project serves as both an archival record of the many ephemeral encounters that took place within the exhibition period, and a handbook for future installations. We encourage readers to re-purpose the information, data, and resources linked here, and ignite conversations in their own communities about about the future of reproductive justice. - Miriam Neptune

* Introduction - mneptune@barnard.edu

* Combine current gallery text with overview of approach to this book, with editing by kbaxi@barnard.edu

* A field guide, more than exhibition catalogue; framing/ongoing/contextualizing; discussion of the process and research; what “field” is it that we are talking about?

* the nation state as a field

* the ecosystem

* experiential field

Not being able to being able to keep up with current events

First Trigger Planting