“It’s often the case that curators invite artists to make projects; this time, the artist invited the curator,” says Cole Akers, curator and special projects manager at Philip Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut, who has organized an installation of artist David Hartt’s work at another site of cultural and historical significance: the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Beth Sholom Synagogue in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia. On view through Dec. 19, “The Histories (Le Mancenillier)” references a 19th-century piano composition written by the American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, and the sweet-but-poisonous tropical plant he named it after. Born in New Orleans to a Jewish father and a Creole mother, Gottschalk was “the first to synthesize the classical tradition with African American and Afro-Caribbean song,” Akers says, “anticipating jazz and ragtime by more than fifty years.”