Inside the Growing Trend of Plants in Contemporary Art

At the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), life-size sculptures of jet-black vultures by artist Ebony G. Patterson sparkle subtly in the sunlight as viewers meander their terrain. These birds huddle around pools of blood-red plants—begonias, caladium, hypoestes, and impatiens—that appear like bruises on an otherwise pastel-colored landscape surrounding the 1902 Haupt Conservatory. Inside the historic greenhouse, more vultures have ventured, joining a molting, all-white peacock, while a zigzagging pathway is lined with frosted cast-glass sculptures of extinct plants the artist found in the garden’s archive.

Known for her collage-like works and intricate tapestries, Patterson, who is based in Chicago and Kingston, Jamaica, has been using realistic depictions of plants in her art practice for over a decade. And yet this show, “…things come to thrive…in the shedding…in the molting…,” marks the first time that she has worked with living material in her work. “Ebony’s work is seeded with images of plants, images that we can recognize. But it’s also really about that tension between our desire to control things and our inability to control things,” said curator Joanna Groarke, vice president for exhibitions and programming at the NYBG. The show is a new venture for its host institution as well: Patterson is its first artist resident to work directly with its plant collections for an installation.

While artists have historically sought inspiration from nature for still lifes, vanitas, and landscapes, contemporary creatives are working directly with this source material to harness its new connotations. When the pandemic began, the popularity of houseplants took a parametric upswing. So, too, did artists’ figurations of flowers. Meanwhile, the effects of climate change materialized in the form of wildfires and more frequent natural disasters. Environmental artists staged elemental installations urging change and offering visions for alternative energy solutions; activists threw red paint at museum masterworks. As living beings, plants can be interpreted as extensions of our environment or of ourselves. In an uncertain environment, living material—or its likeness—has proven a useful medium with powerful resonances.

At Halsey McKay Gallery’s booth at NADA New York this past spring, Brooklyn-based artist David Kennedy Cutler presented a recent evolution in his practice: layered canvases bursting with popular houseplants that aren’t real, but certainly look it. In 2013, Cutler began using such depictions of plants alongside his and his wife’s bodies, their clothes, food, and studio or home tools as “surrogate humanity” in works that “talk about introversion and proximity of digital culture and what it was doing to us,” he explained.

Cutler’s newest pieces focus particularly on the potted plant, a metaphor for the way we try to contain nature and present only the best version of it, and ourselves. “The stuff that’s around us every day can really describe how we live,” he said. “The first vegetable I started using was kale because I thought it was really symbolic of something that was happening in culture.” It’s the duality of plants that appeals to the artist, whose greens are actually photographs of the real thing printed on acetate.

Rashid Johnson’s recent mixed-media installation series also draws on houseplants’ connection to domesticity. In Antoine’s Organ (2016), currently on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s group show “Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art,” a black steel grid is brimming with 285 container plants that hide a piano at its center. Curators Pieranna Cavalchini and Charles Waldheim chose to stage the eight-artist exhibition that opened this month in Boston, because of the sheer breadth of contemporary artists using ephemeral, living material.

“Plants are loaded, but also deeply personal,” explained Waldheim, who is also a professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. “Unlike other media of cultural production, we absorb them into our bodies, and that allows them different frequencies of meaning for us.”

Other artists in the show use nature to address the climate crisis. On the museum’s façade, Australian engineer and activist Natalie Jeremijenko has installed the site-specific The Declaration of Interdependence (2023), a living sculpture of flowering nasturtiums over text that recasts organisms’ fight for survival as instead a mutually beneficial effort that helps many more species. Embracing this scientific revelation, the work argues, will allow real progress in the environmental and sociopolitical threats we face today.

Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson also explores the the impact of humans on our environment with the 2021 wall-based work A Painting of a Tree (Ailanthus altissima), for which he inserted leafy cuttings of tree of heaven, a native Chinese plant that is considered invasive in Massachusetts, in plastic bottles attached to canvas. The poetic piece urges viewers to question what the term “invasive” really means—whether nature, or litter, is the greater problem.

The rise in plants as artworks has opened greater opportunity for these conversations, with the medium as a familiar equalizer. Outside of art spaces, landscapes offer even more public reach to explore the same social issues. “Historically, gardens have been defined by their boundaries,” said Viviane Stappmanns, co-curator of the current Vitra Design Museum exhibition in Germany, “Garden Futures: Designing with Nature,” featuring works by artists including Derek Jarman and Zheng Guogu that investigate gardens as testing grounds for issues of sustainability, social justice, and equity. “For many gardeners, activists, and social entrepreneurs, the future—and in some cases, the present—lies in creating interconnected human and natural environments organized in ecosocial networks.”

Patterson’s work, too, evokes the idea of an interconnected human and natural environment, drawing on the political and historical resonances in plants, especially as an analog to enslaved Black bodies. “So many of these plants that we love in our houses came on the same ships that bodies came over on in the great age of discovery,” said the artist.

In the stately library on the NYBG’s 250-acre campus, Patterson’s 2023 work …fester… displays this sentiment around exploitation clearly. One side of the installation is an embellished tapestry of floral wallpapers and gold-leaf skeletal parts; the other is a slump of more than 1,000 red lace–gloved hands, embedded with black cast-glass thistles. Underneath the beauty of cultivated gardens is a more nuanced conversation about origins and labor. “So much of the language used in conversations around the way we think about gardens in terms of the socioeconomic hierarchies we’ve inherited could be equated to the way we think about people,” she continued.

Plants, after all, are inherently political. Like the root systems that feed them, there is always something more underneath the surface.