James Carpenter discusses overseeing RISD’s Nature Lab. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 01:59.

James Carpenter: Well the woman who started it was—her name was Edna Lawrence. And she began it probably in the—I’d say even in the thirties. So it really became part of the core freshman program—every student had to take a class. Primarily a drawing class in the Nature Laboratory and she actually sort of taught that class. It was on detailed drawings of, you know, natural forms basically—shells or butterflies, whatever. So you actually had to, one day a week, you were in there drawing something, usually bones, or something. Anyway, I was—because I had done botanical illustration before I got to school I was sort of interested in what she was doing. And I’d always had an underlying interest in natural history and when I was even a student at RISD, I used to work the summers down in South America for the Food and Drug Administration and collecting plants basically. So anyway, I used to bring her things, I really liked her and I liked what she was trying to do, so I was using [inaudible] to bring it back. So when I was teaching at Berkeley she just wrote me a very nice letter, just saying, you know, she thought she wanted to retire and was concerned about what would happen to this Nature Lab and would I consider coming back and taking it over so—I thought it was a good idea.

Barb Elam (BE): Yeah, no, it’s great. Is your name on any of the—are you listed as a donor for the—

JC: Oh, no, I don’t know about that.

BE: For the specimens from South America?

JC: No, I don’t know about that, but I did a lot of little expeditions with students down to you know Arizona to collect cacti and stuff like that, and then I sort of shifted the course actually a little bit from purely nature drawing to actually more natural processes like [inaudible] camouflage and migration. And you had all students, you had architecture students or sculptors. So it was really trying to talk about principles of natural history that influenced all these different disciplines. So we, yeah, had a good time there.