Friday, May 1
6:00 – 9:00 pm
1619 Prospect St
Botanical Bodies features wood burnings by Nasreen Khan and photographs by Rachel Schwebach. A collaborative ethnography with fellow sex workers, the exhibition brings together visual work and audio recordings from participant interviews. Together, these pieces explore the long history of linking women and plants—two subjects often romanticized, controlled, and exploited under patriarchal capitalist systems—and reclaim that connection on new terms.
Support Indy’s social-justice themed gallery featuring artists of marginalized identities!
During the Enlightenment, botany was charged with sexual meaning. Carl Linnaeus’s system for classifying plants focused on their reproductive parts, using language so suggestive that some people considered botanical study improper. Later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, botany became one of the few sciences women were encouraged to pursue because it was seen as gentle, beautiful, and appropriate to the home. But that access came with limits: many of the plants women studied arrived through colonial trade, while Indigenous plant knowledge was ignored or erased.
Class shaped this story too. For wealthy women, flowers could represent education, leisure, and taste. For poor and working-class women, they were often tied to survival. Selling flowers in the street was one of the few jobs available, yet it was deeply moralized—day sellers were praised as respectable, while night sellers were often assumed to be sex workers. Botanical Bodies returns to this history to ask who gets to be admired, who gets to labor, and who gets to define the meaning of women’s bodies today.
Botanical Bodies highlights the overlooked women whose lives under capitalism can never fully bloom into a world of their own making. The exhibition centers these women as vital figures on the path toward working-class liberation from exploitation and oppression.
About the artist: Nasreen Khan
Nasreen Khan is an Indianapolis-based multidisciplinary artist whose work transforms personal history into acts of visual testimony. Drawing from a life shaped by movement across West Africa, Indonesia, New York City, and the American Midwest, Khan creates paintings, murals, wood-burned works, and mixed-media pieces that examine belonging, race, gender, faith, and the layered realities of immigrant life. Her practice is rooted in lived experience, yet speaks broadly to displacement, resilience, and the search for home.
Khan is especially known for her use of pyrography—burning imagery and pattern into wood, often sourced from fallen Indiana tree limbs—then layering paint, varnish, and symbolism onto the surface. Through this process, ordinary materials are reclaimed and given renewed life, mirroring themes of survival and transformation that run throughout her work. Khan’s practice stands out for its intimate fusion of craft, storytelling, and social reflection. Her imagery often centers women, mothers, spiritual archetypes, and communities historically pushed to the margins. Whether confronting colonization’s erasure of South and Southeast Asian women, exploring the divine feminine, or honoring the dignity of working-class neighborhoods like Haughville, Khan’s art insists on visibility for lives and histories too often overlooked.
Featured photo: Orchid in the Lincoln Park Conservatory. Photo credit: Nasreen Khan