Cary Art Installation

John James Audubon (born Jean-Jacques Rabin, April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was a French-American self-trained artist, naturalist, and ornithologist. His combined interests in art and ornithology turned into a plan to make a complete pictorial record of all the bird species of North America. He was notable for his extensive studies documenting all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations, which depicted the birds in their natural habitats. His major work, a color-plate book titled The Birds of America(1827–1839), is considered one of the finest ornithological works ever completed. Audubon is also known for identifying 25 new species. He is the eponym of the National Audubon Society, and his name adorns a large number of towns, neighborhoods, and streets across the United States. Dozens of scientific names first published by Audubon are still in use by the scientific community.

Science often looks at how individual climate-change factors will affect our soils, but what happens when a soil experiences multiple stressors all at once? At the Cary Institute, soil ecologist Dr. Jane Lucas is studying what happens to soils when 4 stressors (drought, heat, fungicide, and antibiotics) co-occur in a large-scale, fully factorial field experiment. The health of the soil is measured through a variety of characteristics, including through assessments of soil biodiversity and the carbon dioxide emitted from microbial life in the soil. Artist and educator Bird Harris created this work using paint pigments created from stressed topsoils from Jane’s study as well as rocks from the Wappinger Creek. 

www.birdharris.com
 

Lisa Borre is a senior research specialist and foundation and corporate relations manager for Cary Institute. She provides research support for Dr. Kathleen C. Weathers, and is coordinator of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON), which “conducts innovative science by sharing and interpreting high-resolution sensor data to understand, predict, and communicate the role and response of lakes in a changing global environment.”

Jeffrey Burchfield is an atmospheric physicist and a research associate at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. This photo of a lightning strike in Panama was part of documenting his work with Dr. Evan Gora on the significant consequences of lightning in tropical forests. By disproportionately killing the largest trees, lightning has an outsized influence on carbon storage and biodiversity. And with lightning on the rise due to climate change, understanding its effects will be critical to managing and regrowing tropical forests in a way that maximizes carbon storage and forest health.  

An oil and pastel painter living in New York and Connecticut, Mary Close Oppenheimer is known primarily for her figure and portrait subjects as well as uncluttered still lifes of recognizable objects.  
 
In recent years she has focused on human relationships with objects that have special symbolism to the subject, expressed through body language in tightly cropped images like the Baby Maple drawing.

Paintings by Leonard Cole, the father of Cary Institute’s own Dr. Jonathan Cole. Dr. Cole was among the first cohort of scientists at Cary, and an influential and respected limnologist who was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. His father was a prolific amateur painter. The abstract painting evokes plankton and water–topics that Jon studied closely. Upon Jon’s retirement, he passed the painting to Dr. Emma Rosi until she retired, when she passed it on to Dr. Chris Solomon. So this painting has passed through the hands (and across the walls) of multiple “generations” of aquatic scientists at Cary.

Maria Coryell-Martin believes in art as a tool for exploration, observation, and scientific inquiry. This series of vignettes was inspired by her field sketches and conversations with scientific staff during her artist-in-residency at Cary Institute.

Coryell-Martin works in the tradition of traveling artists as naturalists and educators and, since 2005, has focused on painting polar and glaciated regions collaborating with scientific teams. In the field, Maria sketches with ink and watercolor, and collects multimedia recordings to build her palette of place – a record of experience, climate, and color. She develops her work into studio paintings for exhibit as well as presentations and workshops for audiences of all ages to cultivate observation, scientific inquiry, and environmental awareness.

Dornith Doherty is an American artist working primarily with photography, video, animations, works on paper, and scientific imaging. Her work reflects upon questions about life and time through artworks created at the intersection of art and science. Among her chief concerns are the philosophical, cultural, and ecological questions that are often left invisible when considering human entanglement in our rapidly changing environment. This confluence of interests has led to her ongoing collaborations with scientists, archives, botanical centers, and research institutes focused on the preservation of biodiversity and enhancing environmental resilience since 2008.

In the spring of 2018 she was part of the Cary Institute’s Cannoo Hills Creative Arts Residency.

Columbian Exchange III is part of a series focused on climate change and declining biodiversity called Archiving Eden - an ongoing collaboration since 2008 with renowned biologists at the most comprehensive international seed banks in the world: the United States Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service’s National Center for Genetic Resources Preservation in Colorado, the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in England; and PlantBank, Threatened Flora Centre, and Kings Park Botanic Gardens in Australia.  

Utilizing the archives’ on-site x-ray equipment that is routinely used for viability assessments of accessioned seeds, Dornith documents and subsequently collages the seeds and tissue samples stored in these crucial collections. The amazing visual power of magnified x-ray images, which springs from the technology’s ability to record what is invisible to the human eye, illuminates her considerations not only of the complex issues surrounding the role of science and human agency in relation to gene banking, but also of the poetic questions about life and time on a macro and micro scale.
  
Dornith holds a MFA in Photography from Yale University and a BA from Rice University.A 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the United States Department of the Interior.

Her work has been featured widely in exhibitions and permanent collections throughout the US and abroad including: the Denver Art Museum; the Crystal Bridges Museum; the Tucson Museum of Art; the New Mexico Museum of Art; the Museum of Photography - Rafaela, Argentina; the Museum Belvédère - the Netherlands; the Bluecoat - Liverpool, England; the Centro de Fotografía - Isla de Tenerife, Spain; and the Encuentros Abiertos Photography Biennial - Buenos Aires, Argentina and the National Academy of Sciences. 

In print, Doherty’s work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Wired magazine, The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, and American Way magazine – among others. 

Doherty is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas College of Visual Arts and Design where she teaches classes in contemporary fine art photography.

www.dornithdoherty.com
TEDx Monterey (2013).

Midge Eliassen was educated as a librarian but has worked primarily as a writer, editor, photojournalist, and architectural photographer. She is a longtime citizen scientist and environmental photographer, primarily at Lake Sunapee, NH. Midge has volunteered with the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests, and the Lake Sunapee Protective Association where she worked with Dr. Kathleen Weathers and colleagues researching surprising blooms of the cyanobacterium gloeotrichia echinulata in low-nutrient lakes across New England. Understanding the causes and consequences of these "gloeo" blooms for lake water quality and health (i.e. plankton communities and ecosystem functioning)–and applying what is being learned–is part of the team's long-term studies. 

Erin Espelie is a writer, editor and filmmaker with degrees in molecular and cellular biology from Cornell Universtiy and the experiemental and documentary arts from Duke University.  Her films have shown around the world at film festivals in New York, London, Rotterdam and Copehangen.

The images in the Cynobacteria Triptych are part of an art-science collaboration that looked at the microscopic ways cyanobacteria move, on an individual level and in colonies. It became an exhibit at the Denver Art Museum called REFRESH from March 2022 – Fall 2022 and comprised a series of films, canvases, and a dynamic living wall exposing the multifaceted worlds of cyanobacteria. REFRESH reveals microscopic landscapes that allow us to ponder how these prehistoric organisms shaped our world, and how they influence a variety of ecosystems today.

This collaboration at the intersection of biochemistry and the arts, created by faculty at the University of Colorado Boulder, REFRESH provides an extraordinary view of the shape, structure, and interaction of cyanobacteria, diving into the diversity and scope of form, function, and scientific potential of these essential and complex organisms. Viewers were invited to explore four different species of cyanobacteria (Synechococcus sp. PCC 7002, Anabaena sp. ATCC 33047, Fremyella diplosiphon, Oscillatoria prolifera) across the living wall exhibit and immerse themselves in the microscopic landscapes portrayed in the films. 

The exhibition was sparked by the meeting of filmmakers Erin Espelie, Associate Professor in Arts & Sciences and the College of Media, Information and Communication, and Co-Director of the Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts, and Jeff Cameron, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and a Fellow of the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute (RASEI; a joint institute between CU Boulder and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)). •

Espelie currently holds an assistant professorship in Cinema Studies and the Moving Image Arts and Critical Media Practices at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she co-founded Nature, Environment, Science & Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts. Nest is a network of faculty, students, centers and campus units that combine artistic practice and scientific research to explore common and disparate ways of observing, recording, experimenting and knowing. A series of cross-campus initiatives allow students to directly engage with faculty mentors and inspire alternate modes of communicating with the public.

•Made with the collaborative efforts of filmmaker Erin Espelie and the Jeffrey Cameron Laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder, which created a customized microscope system specifically tailored for long-term growth and quantitative imaging of cyanobacterial cells; with special thanks to microbiologist and cinematographer Evan Johnson and artists Nima Bahrehmand, Travis Austin, Will Alstetter, as well as NEST Studio for the Arts.

We are indebted to the following colleagues for providing cyanobacteria strains: We thank Dr. Beronda Montgomery for Fremyella, and Dr. Himadri Pakrasi and Dr. Ruanbao Zhou for Anabaena. Isolation of Geitlerinema was performed in collaboration with Dr. Lizzy Trower. 

Mary Flad began weaving around 1970 and was drawn to tapestry a few years later, after meeting the Swedish artist Margareta Grandin-Nettles. Her inspiration is drawn from her natural surroundings in the Hudson Valley. Working at the loom, Mary has created flat-weave rugs, tapestries, and wall hangings, including commissioned works like this one for the Cary Institute through Founding Director and President Emeritus Gene Likens. In addition to her weaving, Mary’s published work includes articles and essays concerning immigrants and refugees, displacement, and the search for home and community. 

Stephen works in the studio using natural materials to make compositions and tableaux for the camera.  These photographs are made with minerals, water, vapor and light, as elemental symbols of earth, air, water and fire.  Whole worlds seem possible within just these four elements.

He explains that the collection of  Orb images that include“Onyx Marble”emerges from our present era. We find ourselves immersed in a time marked by climate anxiety and societal upheaval. Simultaneously, we are experiencing an era of astonishing revelations concerning the cosmos and our connection to it. These images are guided by a fusion of the thought, sensation and anticipation that defines our current sensibility.
A native of the eastern states, Stephen Galloway has spent most of his adult life in California. Now rooted in the Bay Area, Galloway’s time outside of art is spent exploring, staying involved with education, and raising a family.

His photographs and installations have been widely exhibited, with works collected and commissioned by the Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, Capp Street Project, and the US State Department’s Art in Embassies collection. His installations and public art have been commissioned by civic public art commissioning agencies, hospitals, transportation systems, hotels, and corporations.

 “I turned to making art about landscape to deeply explore my adopted California. Sometimes the art has followed experiences with nature; sometimes it has led to those experiences. I can no longer tell the difference, as the contact and the art are inextricable. What I do know is that the deeper I go with nature, the more I am able to live with peace, awe, change, paradox, and inspiration. My only hope is that some of these aftereffects reach others through my artworks.”

The photographs shown here come from a yearlong residency as the Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) artist-in-residence for 2014-15. The BES is part of a network of 28 long-term ecological research (LTER) sites funded by the National Science Foundation, and one of only two LTER sites to focus on urban ecology. The main focus of long-term data collection is the Gwynns Falls watershed, which extends from rural woodlands into the heavily urbanized west side of Baltimore City, where it eventually empties into the harbor. In order to find these places and understand their significance within the concerns of ecologists, Helen hiked along urban streams with hydrologists, visited the site of a major landslide due to storm water runoff, and walked the back alleys of impoverished neighborhoods with the Baltimore Mosquito Study. These places are seldom noticed or visited by most Baltimoreans, despite being in the midst of a heavily populated region. She was often startled by what she saw and part of her goal was to serve as an intermediary between the scientists and the public, to communicate what I learned to a general audience.

Listen to a radio interview on the Baltimore Ecosystem Study that I participated in, originally broadcast March 2016 on the Marc Steiner Show, WEAA-FM, a Baltimore NPR station.

Helen Glazer’s work in photography and photogrammetry-based sculpture is informed by scientific insights into interacting forces affecting ecosystems and shaping landscapes, including the impact of human activity and decisions. She has spent her entire career since her early 20s as a working artist. Over time, her focus shifted from drawing, painting and painted sculpture, to a current emphasis on photography and photo-based sculpture as a way to investigate and understand complex, ephemeral forms in nature, and capture the quirky incidents and surprising and evocative moments of transformation. Helen’s year-long Baltimore Ecosystem Study artist-in-residence and as a National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program grantee in 2015 have shaped her most recent projects.

Helen graduated cum laude from Yale University with a B.A. in art and earned an M.F.A. from the Mount Royal School of the Maryland Institute, College of Art, also studying at the renowned Skowhegan School of Art. Her works are in private and public collections, including the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. She has also published articles about art-making and artists, in magazines and journals such as Artes, Artpapers and Feminist Studies,as well as over 30 catalog essays about artists for the Rosenberg Gallery, Goucher College, where she was exhibitions director from 1986 to 1998 and shepherded the exhibitions program to regional prominence. 
 

John Hritz is a musician, computer hacker, philosopher, and former large-animal vet. His work depicts an invasive forest pest that is wreaking havoc on native ecosystems and was part of the research being done by the late Dr. Gary Lovett of Cary Institute.

Margaret Jacobs’s works are meant to center plants and botanicals as kin; as plant relatives. The botanicals she has chosen to create are used medicinally, culturally, and/or nutritionally and are important to her Akwesasne Mohawk ancestral culture. Broadleaf plantain, also called "white man's footprints" due to its sudden appearance after the arrival of European settlers, is not native to the region but has been adapted by Haudenosaunee peoples to use culturally and medicinally. In the piece, she is discussing the adaptation and survival of her community amongst changing relationships of and to the land. Blueberry and raspberry are vital to health and used in many dishes. She sees these as the sisters to strawberry, which is an indicator of spring and the first berry of the season.

www.margaretjacobs.com

Grace Katz did a high school senior thesis project with Dr. Shannon LaDeau. The publication that resulted from this research shows that wings from mosquitoes trapped in less affluent Baltimore neighborhoods were longer than same-species individuals trapped on wealthier blocks. Bigger mosquitoes have been associated with higher fitness and potential disease transmission. This work suggests that residents in less affluent neighborhoods may be at a greater risk of mosquito-borne disease.

Contemporary painter David Klamen superimposes geometric lines over realist landscapes, combining abstract and figurative approaches in works that pose epistemological questions about art, humans’ self-understanding, and the systems that guide their experience of the world. Klamen is deeply interested in literature, theology, and philosophy, and his practice is based on investigative strategies reflecting those concerns. 
 
Given this intellectual approach, Klamen does not tether himself to one way of working. Instead he adopts various styles based on their compatibility with his inquiries. This painting is part of a body of work that uses landscapes to present a cross-section into his ongoing exploration of how we interpret things and how we come to understand images. He further invites viewers on a journey of associations, memories and perhaps even a discovery of how we come to know what we know and to slow down the process of understanding what is depicted.

Klamen earned his Bachelor's of Fine Arts at the University of Illinois, Champaign/Urbana in 1983 and his Master's of Fine Arts in Painting at the School of the Art Institute in 1985. He is currently is a Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University Northwest. Klamen is represented in the following public collections (to name but a few): Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York;  Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign, Illinois; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, Korea; The Searle Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago; University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; Elmhurst Art Museum; and the Berkeley Art Museum.

Dr. Shannon La Deau’s research focuses on understanding heterogeneity in urban mosquito abundance and transmission risk. Neighborhood disinvestment results in infrastructure decay that supports mosquito population growth. This work is advancing the science needed for effective management of vector-borne disease risk in cities, and emphasizes the important role that legacies of disinvestment have on urban well-being and the ecology of mosquito-borne diseases.

Honey and Ice: Fragile Elements Pair is part of a collection comprised of vibrant, monumental photographs taken by Lautenberg while flying in a plane over mountainous Israel, and while traveling in a boat around the shores of Antarctica. In this collision of two extremes, the beauty of endangered ecosystems offers a compelling statement of ecological concern.
 
As an esteemed photographer, writer, philanthropist, and businesswoman, Lautenberg’s photographs are included in both private and museum collections and include records of her travels as well as series about political stars, pop rock and celebrities.

Dr. Sylvia Lee worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at Cary Institute from 2014-2016. She worked closely with Dr. Emma Rosi studying the effects of pharmaceuticals, drugs, road salt, and nutrients on stream communities and stream ecosystem function. Dr. Lee is a scientist with the US EPA and continues to advance our understanding of stream algae. 

Brooklyn-based artist Robert Longo made drawings of massive, thundering waves using just charcoal (on mounted paper). Called Monsters, the drawings almost look like black and white photos of that crescendo moment before an epic wave breaks and are what Longo considers “absolutes”, embodiments of the collective unconscious. 
 
Metro Picture Gallery said about them: “Devoid of people, location and color, the looming crests of exploding power are notably singular portraits of emotional and physical forces. The near abstraction of the waves is strikingly dissimilar to the more familiar representations of the sea as poetic and romantic, or in terms of man against nature.”

Longo is quoted as saying, "I started to understand that with the waves, the shape of a wave is not necessarily dictated by how strong the wind is. It’s dictated by what’s deep underneath it. It’s like psychoanalysis. Ironically, before the wave drawings, I was working on the Freud Cycle drawings." 
Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York,[4] and raised in Long Island. He had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to influence his art.
Longo began college at the University of North Texas, in the town of Denton, but left before getting a degree. He later studied sculpture under Leonda Finke, who encouraged him to pursue a career in the visual arts. In 1972, Longo received a grant to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy.[5] Upon his return to New York, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he received a BFA in 1975. While at Buffalo State, he studied under, and was likely influenced by art professor Joseph Piccillo. At this time he was associated with artist Cindy Sherman, who was also studying art at Buffalo State.

While in college, Longo and his friends established an avant garde art gallery in their co-op building, the Essex Art Center, which was originally a converted ice factory; the gallery became Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. Through his gallery efforts, Longo met many local and New York City artists and eventually moved to New York City to participate in the art scene of the late-1970s.

Widely collected and exhibited, Longo’s work drew from semiotics and poststructuralist theory to investigate the way meaning is made and circulated in modern society. His work often critiqued the anesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media. Themes of war, alienation, and consumption have remained central to Longo’s practice throughout his career. 
 
Longo continues to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, achieving images that, while drawn from recent history, would be otherwise impossible to see with the human eye. Longo’s latest body of work, A History of the Present, which he began in 2020, is informed by the Coronavirus Pandemic, the nation’s political upheaval, our tenuous ecological future, fueled by the artist’s personal experiences. Through this group of large-scale charcoal drawings, Longo seeks to focus on the power of the viewer and the individual’s capacity to create change, a celebration of freedom of expression

Nature and the environment are a central focus in Jessica Maffia’s work. As a visual artist born and raised in New York City, she works across a wide variety of media to celebrate the familiar and honor the natural world of the city, through repetitive, meditative processes. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and is featured on the covers of Fabio Gironi's philosophy book Naturalizing Badiou: Mathematical Ontology and Structural Realism and poet Firas Sulaiman’s book As if My Name is a Mistaken Sign. Her installations include a permanent mural installation for the Audubon Mural Project. 

www.jessicamaffia.com
 

Blue Monsoon is simultaneously a monsoon of rain reflecting a blue sky and a multitude of tear drops cascading. This piece is a response to our warming planet and the fires that ravage it. Every year, smoke obscures the bright blue Western sky, which added a particularly apocalyptic air to an already intense 2020, when “Blue Monsoon” was created. Made of clay and hope, this is a devotional piece to Mother Nature—a prayer for rain – each hand-painted ceramic drop, embossed with lace patterns, an offering. Lace is complex, intricate and intimate, like our thoughts and our most personal appeals to that which is greater than ourselves, be it nature or deity, when the world feels like it is burning and a global pandemic is raging. The bright blue sky, a symbol of optimism, offers tranquility, reflecting  hope and healing for the planet.

A Colorado native and Boulder based artist, Julie Maren, originally began her career as a painter and stone carver. She is driven by materials and experimentation, color and pattern, microscopic and macroscopic perspectives and creating depth, both dimensional and illusionary. Loose narratives are often woven throughout her works, expressed through her unique vocabulary of color, imagery and symbolism.

Maren received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her artwork is exhibited in the U.S. and abroad, and is part of worldwide private and corporate collections.

Robin Moore is a photographer, filmmaker, author, and passionate conservationist whose images and stories have been graced the pages of National Geographic, The Economist, Esquire, The Telegraph, Photo District News, American Photo, Outdoor Photographer, Wanderlust, Terre Sauvage, Conservation, and TIME for Kids, among others. His work has been exhibited in galleries around the world, from the UK to the US to New Zealand. This image came as a result of Robin accompanying Dr. Rick Ostfeld in the field to document his research on the ecology of infectious diseases.

www.robindmoore.com
 

The original  Homogecene Repeat vignette as a wallpaper in 2009. It was installed at the Katonah Museum of Art on a 144”H x 240”W gallery wall.

Before starting the painting of the wallpaper vignette, Moritsugu met with researchers at the Cary Institute to learn more about the endemic and invasive plants in the Hudson Valley, including:

• Shannon L. LaDeau, Disease Ecologist
• Any Schuler, Director of Information Services & Library
• Dave L. Strayer, Freshwater Ecologist

Artist statement about the work

“Homogecene” is a term used to describe the current era of global biological “flatness.” With the introduction and establishment of tough generalist species, biological borders fade and once distinct habitats grow increasingly similar. Homogecene Repeat depicts a lush, natural habitat filled with species endemic to the Northeast. Hidden within the negative spaces, like a premonition or warning, are the silhouettes of introduced species which threaten to transform the Hudson River Valley into a homogenous environment.

Specific species found in Homogecene Repeat

FOREST ENVIRONMENT
Endemic species include: 

Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis)
Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum)
American Beech (Fagus grandifolia)

Introduced species include:
Hemlock wooly adelgid (Adelges tsugae)
The HWA is an aphid-like insect that attacks North American hemlocks, forming small cotton-like, wooly masses on the underside of branches. They have a small proboscis-like appendage for feeding which they insert into the base of the hemlock needle.

Asian longhorned beetle (Anoplophora glabripennis)
The ALB was feeds on hardwoods like maple, birch, elm and ash. Infestations were found in Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Islip and Long Island. As of 2022, the Manhattan, eastern Queens, Staten Island and Islip infestations have been eradicated. 

Beech bark disease
BBD results when the beech scale insect, Cryptococcus fagisuga, attacks the bark, creating a wound. Two different fungi (Neonectria faginata and N. ditissima) can then invade the tree through the wound, causing bark lesions to form. These eventually disrupt the tree’s nutrient transport system leading to the tree’s deterioration.

TIDAL SWAMP COMMUNITY
Endemic species include: 

Southern Arrowwood (Viburnum dentatum var. lucidum)
Common Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis)
Pickerel Weed (Pontederia cordata)
Smooth Alder (Alnus serrulata)

Introduced species include:

Viburnum leaf beetle (Pyrrhalta viburni)
This beetle has been found in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley. It is a voracious eater and can cause severe defoliation to viburnum and southern arrowwood shrubs.

Japanese stilt grass (Microstegium vimineum)
Japanese stilt grass resembles a small bamboo that grows to a height of 3.5 ft. and forms dense stands. It grows in a variety of habitats where it crowds out endemic species. 

Mile-a-minute weed (Persicaria perfoliata)
This barbed vine with triangular shaped leaves smothers other plants, shrubs and trees by creating dense thickets that shade out sunlight. It grows up to 6 inches a day, and its seeds can survive in soil up to 7 years.

AQUATIC COMMUNITY
Endemic species include: 

Clasping-leaved pondweed (Potamogeton perfoliatus)
Wild celery (Vallisneria americana)

Introduced species include:

Water chestnut (Trapa natans)
This annual aquatic plant crowds out other endemic plants by blocking sunlight with its blanket of floating leaves. The water chestnut produces hard, nut-like seeds which have four barbed spines. The seeds propogate the parent colony or are spread by floating to other areas. 

Note: The endemic species are depicted in the vignette. The introduced species are hidden in the negative spaces

Zebra mussel (Dreissena polymorpha)
Zebra mussels are small and have elongated shells usually marked by alternating light and dark bands. They filter vast amounts of water to feed on plankton altering food availability for other species. They attach to rocks, piers and solid structures with byssal threads, tufts of fibers located at the hinge of their shells.

The following are hidden in the vignette:

43 insects
13 water chestnut seeds
3 water chestnut plants
10 zebra mussels
3 mile-a-minute vines
1 Japanese stilt grass palnt
Beech bark disease on 4 beech trees

Mary Flagler Cary was the daughter of Harry Harness Flagler and granddaughter of Henry Morrison Flagler, one of the founders of Standard Oil. Dividing her time between New York City and Millbrook, she built a collection of trees on her large Millbrook estate. Upon her death in 1967, Mary left the estate’s 2,000 acres to a charitable organization engaged in the conservation, maintenance, and preservation of natural resources. In 1971, the Mary Flagler Charitable Trust accepted a proposal from the New York Botanical Garden to establish an arboretum. That arboretum is now part of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.
 

A graduate student at Cary Institute recording aerial photography using a 35mm camera attached to a helium balloon in 1998. 

Learn more about the research: https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/cies/id/685/re…

Ann Olsson is a photographer, researcher, and USGS Physical Scientist focused on biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology, soil science, and biogeography. Her images in the Cary collection depict postfire landscapes in Yellowstone National Park related to the work of her husband, Cary Scientist Dr. Winslow Hansen.

Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America.

Prosek is the author of over a dozen books and has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine. In 2003 he won a Peabody Award for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings (Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $4 million to over 200 fish conservation groups). In 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

World Trout, an on-going conservation effort to preserve native trout species worldwide, was founded by artist and naturalist James Prosek and Yvon Chouinard, avid fly fisherman, climber, and founder of Patagonia, Inc., the outdoor apparel company. Each year, World Trout highlights the efforts of various grassroots environmental organizations working to protect native trout populations and their habitats. A portion of the sales of Patagonia’s World Trout t-shirts featuring James Prosek’s artwork is designated for these organizations. Patagonia is encouraging other companies to join the World Trout campaign as well as 1% For the Planet, a non-profit consortium of businesses donating one percent of sales to environmental non-profits. Participating companies can pledge one percent of sales to World Trout beneficiary groups or other local, regional, or national environmental non-profits.

Prosek spent eight years (1996-2003) documenting the physical diversity of the trout of Europe, Asia and North Africa through watercolor representations. His extensive research is recorded in Trout of the World, an illustrated history of the native trout he encountered during his travels abroad (updated in 2013). As an individual, he has worked to generate awareness of the threats to native trout species, such as dams, development, wars, pollution, overfishing, and irrigation.

“The existence of wild trout means clean water, arguably our most precious resource,” said Prosek. “Their disappearance would not only be a physical loss, but also a loss to the human imagination.”

Prosek's work has been shown at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, The Yale Center for British Art, The Asia Society Hong Kong Center, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, The North Carolina Museum of Art, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC and the Yale University Art Gallery, among other institutions. 

He has been an artist-in-residence the Yale University Art Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.
 

Brandon Radcliffe earned his master’s degree in forestry from Yale School of the Environment in 2024. He took this photograph during an internship working with Dr. Sarah Batterman at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in October 2021.

Dr. Emma Rosi is a leader in the field of freshwater science. Her research has advanced our understanding of how land use, urbanization, and climate change shape freshwater ecosystems, with projects exploring environmental contaminants such as pharmaceutical and personal care products, aging wastewater infrastructure, environmental implications of agricultural GMOs, and the effects of dams. She is a Fellow of the Society for Freshwater Science and served on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board. Emma is now an emeritus scientist at Cary Institute,  is pursuing art full time. 

Her artwork can be viewed at emmarosi.com. 
 

This image was taken on Tenderfoot Creek near the Michigan/Wisconsin border, at a field station where Cary scientists including Dr. Chris Solomon have conducted research for over 30 years. This research has focused on connections between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, trophic cascades, the role of lakes in the carbon cycle, social-ecological dynamics in recreational fisheries and their implications for sustainability, and other topics. Dr. Alex Ross took the picture while working on these projects as a Cary researcher.
 

The entire series of sketches, of which four are installed, represents one of the founding missions of Cary Institute by depicting a classic, successional sequence from disturbance (fire) through impact, through recovery. The artist, Howard Simon, was a painter, printmaker, illustrator, and author born in 1902. After studying in Paris, he established a career as an artist with a focus on social realism and landscapes, later focusing on woodcuts and illustrations, and etchings and paintings. After serving on the faculty of New York University for more than 20 years, Howard settled in Dutchess County, NY. He is the author and illustrator of 500 Years of Art in Illustration. 
 

Linda uses diverse media – collage, installation, painting, photography, sculpture – to investigate concepts of time, memory and our interaction with nature. Of particular interest to her are every day, often meaningless or overlooked objects and fleeting moments of experience, and the ways in which they are collected, preserved, and remembered. 

Through her art she explains: “I’m quietly, yet earnestly, showing that we should marvel at the natural world and our material culture and not take it for granted. Things change, grow, die and disappear.  By noticing and documenting nature and our everyday life and by turning observations into art, we can hope to hold on to our memories of the world around us.”

Land Acknowledgment

"It is with gratitude and humility that I acknowledge that I live on the ancestral homelands of the Mohican people who are the indigenous peoples of this land. Despite tremendous hardship in being forced from here, today their community resides in Wisconsin and is known as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community. I pay honor and respect to their ancestors past and present."

As a local resident of Columbia County NY, the country and her gardens provide her with inspiration and raw materials for her art. Found objects and the detritus of everyday life also fuel her work.

Stillman has been awarded fellowships and residencies at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts (VA & France), the New York Foundation for the Arts Mark program, the Wave Hill Winter Workspace and The Studios at Mass MoCA. Her work has been featured in many solo and group exhibitions in galleries and museums around the country including the Brooklyn Museum, the Dorsky Museum, Hunter College Art Galleries, the Arts Club of Chicago, and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey. Stillman’s art work has been reviewed in numerous publications including the New York Times and Hyperallergic. Her art is included in many private and public collections such as the Dorsky Museum and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 
 
She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (BA), the School of Visual Arts and Vermont College of FineArts (MFA). 

A serious nature photographer since 1969, Hardie Truesdale is interested in capturing nature in dramatic yet subtle circumstances (rain, sleet, snow, or mist) or when the mood and quality of light is intensified. He works with large- and medium-format cameras because of their clarity and the ability to capture texture and detail. This photograph was taken in early spring from the Pinnacle Path along the Sky Top ridge at the Mohonk resort, bordering on the Mohonk Preserve property. 

www.hardietruesdalephotography.com
 

Craig Upson’s artistic interest is steeped in the unconventional and expresses itself largely through portraiture in a diverse array of mediums. This diptych is an assembly of 80 portraits that serve as an homage to researchers associated with the Cary Institute. Each piece is meticulously crafted, transitioning from a photographic snapshot into a painted narrative on wood relief. The subjects, captured in moments of deep engagement with their work in the field or laboratory, are elevated through an artistic process that intertwines technology with traditional artistry. 

craigupson.com
 

Kirsten Westphal is a sculptor and artist based in New York City and Dutchess County, NY. Her creative practice spans various scales, from expansive room-sized installations of wooden constructions to diminutive, more ephemeral suspended pieces assembled from paper and metal. In this work, the spaces within the Cary Institute are an invitation for the outdoors to dialogue with the interior, providing an opportunity to play with the passing light of day. She wanted to create an open, expansive form that suggests volume, casts shadows, and has motion. The pale distinctive pattern of the paper birch is instantly recognizable and clads the exterior of the cloud. The vermillion on the reverse is a reference to the equally recognizable red-bellied woodpecker, which are both native to this region.
 

Hara Woltz is an artist and scientist who addresses the destruction and conservation of ecological systems through a variety of visual media. Field research is integral to the creation of her work, and her solo and collaborative projects investigate the relationships between humans, the environment, and other living organisms.  Her art work resides in a number of private and corporate collections, and she has exhibited in spaces ranging from Sotheby’s to Storm King Art Center.

Woltz  is a former artist in residence at the Cary Institute,Cannoo Hills Creative Arts Residency. She also teaches as part of the Cary Institute’s yearly summer Art and Science Camp.  

She has developed and taught a variety of classes and workshops on the art of observation and the field journal as it relates to scientific research and artistic practice. Built on the history of scientists and artists who have used field journals to note their observations of the natural world and develop their ideas her classes focus on teaching observational skills through creative field notations as fundamental building blocks in the development of resonant artistic and scientific work.  

Woltz has worked on a number of global ecological and habitat design projects, including habitat restoration for native species in New Zealand, giant tortoise and Waved Albatross habitat  assessment and restoration in Galapagos, Ecuador, and biological and resilience programs in Solomon Islands, Melanesia.

Her work has appeared in various publications, including ORION, Biological Conservation, Popular Science, New York Magazine and Landscape Architecture Magazine and she has created illustrated field guides for private clients and institutions including Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, N.Y..

As an undergraduate Woltz studied studio art and biology at Duke University and has an MA in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia, and an MA in conservation biology from Columbia University.

Her past awards include an American Museum of Natural History fellowship, an ASLA award of honor and  a Columbia departmental research award.  She consults as a visiting artist and scientist at the American Museum of Natural History and has a studio in New York City.