Exhibitions

Everything for the Garden! Transfer Drawings by Kevin Duggan

On view September 8 – December 16

Closing Reception & Talk, Sunday, December 15, 2:00-3:30

In the 19th-century, seed merchants produced lavishly illustrated catalogs that were mailed in the hundreds of thousands to middle class Americans, especially women. It was a pioneering form of direct marketing that helped define what gardens looked like and which flowers grew in them.

Drawing on colorful, chromolithographed images and inspirational texts from these Victorian-era seed catalogs and ephemera, Everything for the Garden! by artist Kevin Duggan explores how these vivid portrayals of flowers and gardens fired customers’ imaginations and promoted flower gardening as a source of spiritual uplift, civic virtue, and personal reward.

Kevin Duggan is an artist based in New York City whose work draws on natural science and botanical art of the past informed by contemporary art practices.

Online exhibition:

Finding the Family: A Look into the Lives and Times of the Voelker-Orth Family

Finding the Family explores the lives of the Voelker Orth family through the local and historical happenings they experienced. The online exhibition highlights moments in the lives of Conrad, Theresa, and Elisabetha as we follow three generations of the family through the early 20th century.

The exhibition is organized by Carine Norvez, a tour guide at the Museum. She developed the exhibition while she was a CUNY Culture Corps intern studying items in our archive last year. Ms. Norvez has located period news articles and materials from a variety of sources to create a context for the papers and images left to the Museum. An audio text version accompanies the print.

Click here to see Finding the Family