If you think about it, a gallery is a lot like a garden. The Willful Plot, curated by Melanie O’Brian at the Belkin Art Gallery, explores how cultural narratives of wilderness and civilization propagate in the site of the garden. Critical queer theorist Sara Ahmed’s articulation of willfulness as a form of anti-authoritarian resistance is at the root of O’Brian’s curation: to be self-willed rather than being full of will, of someone else’s will. Yet the tensions that germinate in the garden—between private and public, cultivation and chaos—occupy the white space of the gallery, too.