The Davis Museum at Wellesley College To Show "Botanical Imagery & Exploration"

Written by Florence Dallaglio Sunday, 09 October 2011 00:59

Wellesley, Massachusetts.- The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is proud to present "Global Flora: Botanical Imagery and Exploration", an exhibition linking the history of botanical imagery with the adventure of exploration and effects of globalization on our contemporary world. On view from October 19th through January 15th 2012 in the Morelle Lasky Levine '56 Works on Paper Gallery, the exhibition is free and open to the public. The publications on view in this exhibition hint at the links between botany, climate, geography, culture, economy, and history.” Botanical imagery reveals several centuries of change in the world, reflecting a journey through exploration to knowledge, and from isolation to globalization. The natural world has changed considerably due to the acquisitive nature of human beings with an attraction to the exotic. In the process of collecting and recording specimens from distant parts of the globe, botanists contributed to the international dispersal of flora. Transferring or propagating plants in botanical gardens back home naturally led to the spreadof species, while publishing books on a region’s plants provided a means of organizing, simplifying, and containing the life of that place. Naming was another means of claiming, with native plants being labeled for foreign naturalists. Colonial gardens and colonial floras, or botanical books, were powerful symbols of imperialism and control.

Drawn from the Davis collections and Wellesley College Library’s Special Collections, the prints and illustrated books on view also demonstrate the changes from the 16th century to the present in techniques used to depict botanical imagery—from woodcuts, engravings, and mezzotints to lithographs, cyanotypes, and inkjet prints; from the hand-colored to the color printed; and from the compact to the lavishly outsized. They display variations in format and purpose, though with equal attention given to accuracy, from floral still lifes imbued with symbolic meaning to precise depictions of individual plants with their component parts labeled for scientific classification. Featured works in the exhibition include; two engravings from Belgian artist Jacob Hoefnagel’s Archetypa Studiaque (1592), a series of fifty-two prints intended as a source book for artists, which includes a number of plants that were depicted for the first time; the dramatic Rafflesia patma, from Carl Ludwig Blume’s Florae Javae (1835-48), is a yard-wide flower with a smell like rotten meat, and a plant that well met the nineteenth century, or any age’s, hunger for the strange and unusual; exceedingly rare, and unusual in both technique and style, Robert John Thornton's Temple of Flora (1807), is a conglomeration of botanical science, classicizing manner, poetry, homage and national pride.  Employing mezzotint and aquatint techniques, the plates depict specimens in settings suggestive of their native contexts. A live specimen of the plant shown in The Night-Blooming Cereus print is on view in the Wellesley College Margaret C. Ferguson Greenhouses. Also known at the “Queen of the Night,” the Cereus is a unique short-lived bloom visible only at night.

The Davis Museum and Cultural Center traces its origins to the October 23, 1889 dedication of the Farnsworth Art Building on the Wellesley College campus. It housed collections that dated to the founding of the College in 1875, when founder Henry Fowle Durant (1822-81) began a campaign to acquire original paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs, as well as plaster casts of classical sculpture, in service of a liberal arts education for women. Drawing and painting were integral to the first curriculum at the College; when Wellesley introduced the teaching of art history in 1885, it distinguished itself as one of the first American colleges to offer the subject. Alice Van Vechten Brown, appointed in 1897 as museum director and head of the art department, modeled the new institution after the populist South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria & Albert Museum) in London. In keeping with Wellesley’s emphasis on learning and community service, Brown described the museum as “a place for classes and students, but also a place in which the public may linger and enjoy; a place to bring children, and in which teachers may study; a model to every college student of what a museum may do for any town in the land.” Brown is best known for her development of an influential art history curriculum, which focused on original art objects and was later called “The Wellesley Method.” With the opening of the Jewett Arts Center in 1958, the visual arts at Wellesley entered a new era. Studios, classrooms, and offices provided students and faculty with new teaching and work areas. A dedicated gallery space offered a place for the study of Wellesley’s growing permanent collections and an opportunity to see temporary exhibitions.The Museum’s collections expanded significantly through the next decade, particularly with the donation of a number of important modern works in honor of John McAndrew. By 1982, the Museum’s holdings had doubled in size and the institution, previously administered by the Art Department, became an independent entity within the College. The early 1980s also found the gallery in Jewett devoted exclusively to the display of special exhibitions. The need for dedicated, professionally maintained space in which to safeguard and exhibit the Museum’s permanent collections, along with a concomitant desire to maintain Wellesley’s leadership in arts education, prompted a call for enhanced facilities. In 1988, Trustee and alumna Kathryn Wasserman Davis (Class of 1928) and her husband Shelby Cullom Davis gave the cornerstone gift to the campaign specifically to benefit the construction of a new museum. In 1993, the Davis Museum and Cultural Center opened its doors in a new building designed by Pritzker Architecture Prize winner, Rafael Moneo. This facility, Moneo’s first North American commission, immediately distinguished the Davis among its academic museum peers, and among the art museums and cultural institutions of the Greater Boston area. The building also rearticulated and revitalized the longstanding commitment to the central role of the visual arts in undergraduate liberal arts education at Wellesley College. Visit the musuem's website at ... https://www.davismuseum.wellesley.edu/

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