Hudson Valley Seed Library

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Our friends, Ken Greene and Doug Muller, founders of the Hudson Valley Seed Library were just featured in a wonderful article in The New York Times on October 6. The Seed Library has been operating for the past 2 years to help maintain and distribute locally grown seed.

Ken was quoted in the NY Times article....'The mission of the library, Mr. Greene said, is “to collect New York heirlooms and the cultural stories that came with them.” As with other seed libraries, his also aims to encourage biodiversity, to offer an alternative to the genetically modified seeds produced by large corporations and to make money.'



The Hudson Valley Seed Library currently offers over fifty varieties of locally grown seeds, and 100 varieties of northeast adapted seeds. The uniquely shaped Art Packs are designed by different artists from the greater New York region. Each pack celebrates the diversity and beauty of heirloom gardening. The Library Packs contain seeds grown on the Hudson Valley farm, by member farmers, and dedicated home gardeners. The seeds are hand-crafted, using traditional techniques for collecting, winnowing, threshing, and cleaning. The Garden Packs contain seeds that were obtained from responsible seed houses.

Art Pack of cherry tomatoes

This December, The Horticultural Society will host an exhibition of original works from the Hudson Valley Seed Library Art Pack Collection, featuring the 16 new designs from this upcoming season. Look for more info on our website at http://www.hsny.org.

To view the article: http://nyti.ms/a46hFh

Visit the Hudson Valley Seed Library at http://www.seedlibrary.org

Staging Ground

Staging Ground, a group show opened last Friday night, with a crowd of over 150 people. The exhibition will be on view through June 4th. The exhibition features five emerging local artists: Chris Gentile, Denise Kupferschmidt, Christina Leung, Christian Maychack and Jeffrey Tranchell. Each artist’s work documents an intervention or manipulation with plants and landscapes.

Installed on either side of the same wall, Gentile and Maychack represent two different ways of exhibiting plant-based sculptural works. In End Times/Amend Times #1, Gentile chooses to display a photograph of his sculptural creation, a scaffolding structure that has molded a plant into the shape of a reclining figure. Maychack prefers to directly present the product of his experiment in Double Host, a living sculpture that uses magic sculpt, a self-drying epoxy clay, to alter and influence the growth of a Euphorbia tirucalli ( pencil cactus).


Despite photography being their shared medium, neither Kupferschmidt or Leung consider themselves as photographers – it is the sculpture or action within their work that is important. In Windows, Kupferschmidt photographs her sculpture of interconnected wooden triangles at various different locales in Miami. In this way, the sculpture becomes a filter through which we see the landscape. Leung’s works are sculptural actions and interventions with plants and landscapes in suburban Ohio. For Honeysuckle, she cut square holes into the leaves of a Lonicera japonica ( honeysuckle bush), monitoring it over the course of four months (the hardy and invasive plant was mostly unaffected).

The one artist in the show whose work is removed from the natural environment is Tranchell, who has become known for his magazine collages with grocery labels and stickers. Here, he plays with how the landscape is represented and perceived through fashion advertisements, literally putting a price on these idyllic views.


Even though the environment is not the main concern in their works, each artist in Staging Ground challenges and experiments with the natural world, refusing to accept it at face value.

Staging Ground is on view through June 4, 2010.

The Gallery at The Horticultural Society is free and open to the public Monday through Friday, from 12 to 6pm, and by appointment.

Article by Chris Murtha, Curator

For more information http://www.hsny.org/programs_exhibitions.html

Carol Bove "Plants & Mammals" at the HSNY

Artnet Magazine review:

BOVACIOUS by Charlie Finch

Carol Bove proves once again that the sexiest part of the body is the mind (especially hers) in her brilliant installation, "Plants & Mammals," on view Apr. 15-Sept. 10, 2009, at the New York Horticultural Society.

The society is an oasis on the 13th floor of a modest building on West 37th Street. It consists of a reading room bathed in morning light and a series of valuable books on plants, which Bove expertly uses as the matrix of her show. Like Borges, Bove is all about knowledge best expressed intuitively. Here she creates a sanctuary out of objects that appear to be found, but are in fact rigorously assembled and arranged.

Bove's altar consists of a piece of driftwood hanging like a rifle from a chain, a delicate netting made of silver, a metal vulvation which pulsates in the imagination like a feminine John Chamberlain and two peacock feathers arranged like a pair of spectacles. She has also produced an accordion book of 20th-century daffodil varieties chronicled by the horticulturist Janine Lariviere, some of whose live plants grace the rear of the show.



Finally, as a way of introducing the animal part of her meditation, Carol has produced a print memorial tribute to Marilyn Monroe, which reads in part, "Marilyn today has passed the dark barrier. . . . Farewell, perfect mammal." Bove's show presents her preoccupations as a throwback to the Byronic conceit that the world is alien from the pathetic fallacy of our romantic perceptions, and she has doubts about the safe harbor of the intellect as well.

What we find and cherish is arbitrary and is also art. She has suspended her doubts long enough to produce this wonderful little show, which you can visit after throwing your body into the new pedestrian spaces millimeters from the trucks and taxis in Times Square, another tendentious installation, but that is a separate story.

"Carol Bove with Janine Lariviere, Plants & Mammals, Apr. 15-Sept. 10, 2009, at the Horticultural Society of New York, 148 West 37th Street, New York, N.Y. 10018.


CHARLIE FINCH is co-author of Most Art Sucks: Five Years of Coagula (Smart Art Press).

Photos by Chris Murtha

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http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/carol-bove7-7-09.asp