Boston Flora

Tag: Vaughn Sills

  • Through Sunday, June 25 – Still Lives: Plants of the Arnold Arboretum, Close Up and Far Away

    Photographer Vaughn Sills brings her exquisite still lives of Arnold Arboretum plants—whether in flower or fruit, burnished fall foliage or shimmery bud—to this exhibition. Each stem is a wonder of composition and color—prominent, yet sublimely connected to a background of a distant and ethereal landscape. The images are Still Lives, from inside Sills’ studio, and include the outside—her images of nature and wide expanses of land and water. Combined, these seemingly disparate elements convey the importance of two ways of looking, close up and far away.

    Sills was able to obtain live plant material for this project with staff permission and accompaniment: each stem was carefully collected with Arnold Arboretum Visitor Engagement staff. With a few specimens at a time, Sills returned to her studio and posed branches for portraits against her previously photographed vistas—landscapes from Prince Edward Island, her place of origin. As an immigrant herself, the international collections of the Arnold spoke eloquently to her. It’s a place where plants from different countries can live in an environment that brings spiritual enjoyment to visitors, as part of the Boston Park System. At the same time, the Arboretum is also a place of conservation, education, and research as part of Harvard University. Again, the dual objective of pleasure and science, like Close up and Far Away, or inside and outside. This exhibition brings together the artist and her art—the aesthetic of the medium of photography—with the Arnold Arboretum’s collections as subject, and the broader and distant landscape and nature as complements.

    Vaughn Sills website: http://www.vaughnsills.com/

    All rights of the images reside with the artist. To view the images, visit https://arboretum.harvard.edu/art_shows/still-lives-plants-of-the-arnold-arboretum-close-up-and-far-away/ Below: Rudoulf Flowering Crabapple, 2022, photograph copyright Vaughn Sills

  • Tuesday, October 4, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm – Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens

    Gardens and Spirit: The Power of Landscapes to Transform, is a series offered by the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and Trinity Church in the City of Boston.  The first of this year’s lectures will take place Tuesday, October 4, from 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm at Trinity Church in Copley Square.  Vaughn Sills, Associate Professor of Photography, Simmons College, and Lowry Pei, Professor of English at Simmons College, will speak on their new book,  Places for the Spirit: Traditional African American Gardens. Places for the Spirit is a stunning collection of over 80 documentary photographs of African American folk gardens — and their creators — in the Deep South (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina). These landscapes have a unique historical significance due to the design elements and spiritual meanings that have been traced to the yards and gardens of American slaves and further back to their prior African heritage. These deceptively casual or whimsical foliage arrangements are subtle and symbolic reminders of the divine in everyday life, the cycles of nature, and implied right and wrong ways to live. In the spirit of “outsider” art traditions, blues musical roots, and other such folk manifestations, these gardens have a unique aesthetic and cultural significance. Over 20 years in the making, this is the first collection of fine art photography to document this subject and, as such, it adds greatly to our understanding and appreciation of this disappearing element of African American culture. Fee is $15 for Arboretum members, $20 for non-members.  Register on-line at http://my.arboretum.harvard.edu/.