PLANTS ON PAPER: ARTISTS' ENGAGEMENT WITH THE GREEN WORLD

On View May 19 – November 2, 2025 | Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library

Plants have been a significant focus of humans’ creative endeavors for millennia. From the earliest pigments and papers, to the later Victorian craze for botanical collecting, to recent considerations of plants’ fraught histories as objects of control or conquest, the plant kingdom has provided both the means of creating art and the impetus to do so. Plants on Paper reveals artists' varied relationships with this more-than-human world. Included are historic works of nature printing and botanical illustration as well as artists’ books looking closely at office plants, beneficial weeds, tenacious lichens, commercial agriculture, medicinal plants, and more. Together these works ask questions—about wildness and order, individualism and community, slowness and speed—and invite us to reflect on our place in plants’ green world.   

All materials on view are part of the Haas Family Arts Library’s collections. 

Curated by Adrienne Pruitt, Archivist, Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections, and Jessica Pigza, Associate Director, Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections 

Materials on exhibit include:

Ferns 1868, album of nature prints. Unidentified creator, 1868.

Inge Meijer. The Plant Collection. Amsterdam: Roma Publications, 2019.  

Emile Belet. La Végétation Sous-Marine. Paris: A. Guérinet, 1900.