George Gessert was born in 1944 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He received a BA in English from U.C. Berkeley, and an MA in painting from U.W. Madison. Since 1985 his work has focused on the overlap of art and genetics. He has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. In 2005 he was a awarded a Pushcart Prize, and in 2007 David Foster Wallace included one of his texts in Best American Essays. His up coming book Green Light: Toward an Art of Evolution, will be published by MIT Press.
For the lecture Ornamental Plant Breeding for the 21st Century, Gessert will discuss past and current uses of biotechnology to create new kinds of ornamental plants. Oregon is playing an important role in these efforts because of the red iris project, initiated by Cooleys Irises in Silverton. Engineered ornamentals such as the red iris raise many questions, but he will focus on just one: what aesthetic criteria or assumptions are shaping the new plants? Answers to this question suggest that the time is long overdue for ornamental plant breeding to be considered an art.