Boston Flora

Tag: Hostetter Gallery

  • Thursday, June 26, 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm – Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden Opening Reception.

    What is a garden? A wild space? A curated collection of plants? Or a plot of soil in which to seed memory, connection, and creativity? This summer, the Gardner Museum’s Hostetter Gallery springs to life with the large-scale sculptures of Ming Fay (1943 – 2025), whose work reconsiders gardens as sites of creative potential that reflect the lives and desires of those who cultivate them.

    At once playful and contemplative, Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden constructs a space of wonder that calls on visitors to view the world around them with new appreciation. Sculptures of fruits, seeds, shells, as well as hybrid plants borne of his boundless imagination, surprise in their unexpected pairings and sizes. Together, they conjure new meanings through familiar shapes, scents, and symbols. In his papier-mâché, bronze and ceramic gardens, Fay unites personal, collective, and cultural memories, building gardens as fantastical spaces born of curiosity, longing, and his own lived experiences as part of the Chinese diaspora in the United States.

    On view from June 26 – September 21, 2025, Ming Fay: Edge of the Garden invites visitors to escape the city for a brief moment and marvel at the extraordinary, ordinary beauty of a maple tree twirler, a ripe cherry, or a crooked wishbone—and how they can unlock memory and imagination.

    Where We Meet: Imagining Gardens and Futures, a partner exhibition at Pao Arts Center will explore the city of Boston’s Chinatown gardens through the art of Ming Fay, Mel Taing, and Yu-Wen Wu from July 18 – October 10, 2025.

    For details visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/ming-fay-exhibition

  • Thursday, February 27 – Sunday, May 25 – Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Freedom and Spirit

    Multi-disciplinary Fabiola Jean-Louis’s captivating exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum invites visitors on a journey through the ancient and eternal, earthly and divine, personal and political. On view from February 27 – May 25, 2025, Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom by Fabiola Jean-Louis features a large amount of original commissions from the Haitian artist, crafted from the stunningly intricate marriage of paper pulp, mineral stones, shells, metals, glass, and more. Invoking the sanctity of Vodou and its role in Haitian liberation, these works will transform the Museum’s three rotating exhibition spaces, Hostetter Gallery; Fenway Gallery; and the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, into a map of personal histories, a site of communion, and a spiritual portal. Portrait courtesy of the artist. © Fabiola Jean-Louis. For complete information on hours, visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/fabiola-jean-louis-water-of-the-abyss

  • Now Through September 17 – Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art

    The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents a special exhibition through September 17 in all special exhibition galleries.

    Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art features work by contemporary artists who practice with living plant material. These artworks invoke themes associated with the fragility of life, the impossibility of permanence, and the construction of personal meaning through memory. Rather than using nature as a subject for depiction—as occurs in traditional landscape painting—these artists incorporate and manipulate plant species to help us reflect on the meanings and associations that influence our relationship with the natural world.

    For these internationally-recognized artists, plants provide a medium for expressing individual identities, shared narratives, and collective memories. From an image born of growing grass to a cinematic reflection on eco-queer themes, to a suspended vertical garden on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, these thought-provoking and beautiful works mirror the transitory existence of the artists who cultivate them and the audiences that experience them.

    Isabella Stewart Gardner constructed her art museum to center horticulture as a ‘living art,’ placing the blooming Courtyard at the heart of her galleries and cultivating numerous species of plants to establish a living collection that still exists today. This exhibition exemplifies the Gardner’s long tradition of interdisciplinary experience by uniting contemporary artistry with its horticultural and garden arts. This summer, join us to explore the emotional resonance and material expression of plants as art.

    The exhibition highlights established works and site-specific installations from British team Ackroyd & Harvey; Welsh conceptual artist Cerith Wyn Evans; Los Angeles-based conceptual artist Piero Golia; Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson; and Brooklyn-based multi-media artist Rashid Johnson in the Hostetter Gallery. Johnson’s work – Antoine’s Organ (2016) – will be animated on weekdays and Thursday evenings with contemporary jazz piano improvisations. A film by Hong Kong-based video artist Zheng Bo is featured in the Fenway Gallery, and a new artistic commission by Natalie Jeremijenko on the theme of plants is presented on the Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. Please note: The soil and other living materials on view in Presence of Plants in Contemporary Art will be composted at the end of the exhibition. As this phase of life ends, they will transform to support new growth.

    For more information visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/presence-plants-contemporary-art

    Artist; Natalie Jeremilenko

  • Through June 20 – Shen Wei, Painting in Motion

    Dancer, choreographer, painter, and filmmaker Shen Wei moves fluidly between disciplines and cultures to create art that expresses a common spirit animating the world around us. His theory of dance seeks to align the energies inside and outside the body, approaching the body and its environment as fundamentally interconnected. As a painter, Shen Wei uses the monumental scale of the canvas to create immersive visual environments that evoke ancient Chinese landscape paintings while enlisting the drips and gestures of twentieth-century abstraction. The size of the paintings invites the viewer on a journey along the canvas, integrating movement into the experience of static works. His films synthesize choreography, time, place, and light to craft ethereal worlds. Shen Wei’s practice transcends the boundaries between visual and performing arts, seeking spiritual meaning that unites his work across disciplines.

    Painting in Motion, a single exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in three parts, is the first exhibition in the U.S. to present the range of Shen Wei’s artistry. Shen Wei’s recent paintings, including two works he created as an Artist-in-Residence at the Gardner Museum, are on display in the Hostetter Gallery along with notebooks, sketches, and documentation of his choreography that provide insight into his evolution as an artist. Calderwood Hall and the Fenway Gallery of the Palace screen his films, featuring a new commission for the Gardner Museum, Passion Spirit. Shen Wei reimagines an image from Passion Spirit for his piece on the Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade, showing the continuity between time-based and still media in his work.

    For more information on times, and for a gallery guide, visit https://www.gardnermuseum.org/calendar/exhibition/shen-wei