On Thursday, Sept. 10, Poughkeepsie-based artist Julia Whitney Barnes visited Vassar College to discuss her recent projects. Whitney Barnes is a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council fellowship, among other accolades. She designed and painted a mural, “The Botanist’s Mural,” for the Vassar Institute for the Liberal Arts in 2024 and currently has an exhibit, “The Botanist at Vassar,” at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center until Oct. 4.
Whitney Barnes is from Newbury, Vermont, and she spent two decades in Brooklyn, New York, before settling in the Hudson Valley in 2015. She earned her B.A. from Parsons School of Design and a MFA from Hunter College. Whitney Barnes’ work has been exhibited across the northeastern United States, in Connecticut, Maine, New York and Massachusetts.The majority of her pieces incorporate multiple mediums, including cyanotypes, water colors, oil painting and ceramics.
In her most recent projects, “The Botanist’s Mural” and “Planting Utopia,” Whitney Barnes utilized Vassar’s herbarium to gain insight into the local Hudson Valley plants Vassar has been storing since 1865. “There’s nothing exciting here,” Whitney Barnes joked about the herbarium. “You’re like, ‘Okay, I see old filing cabinets and a bunch of vanilla folders.’ But then, what is inside is the exciting part.” After looking through the herbarium’s offerings, she eventually settled on 63 different specimens for “The Botanist’s Mural.” Whitney Barnes explained, “I tried to choose plants that I feel like I’ve seen around, so things that were part of our everyday lives, and then other plants that you would have felt a little more out of the ordinary.”
In 2024, Whitney Barnes’ completed mural was unveiled to the public. “The mural wraps around the entire room [in the Vassar Institute of the Liberal Arts], so every little bit you have to move some curtains in some cases to see all the full wrap-around shapes. And I painted them with the drop shadows to give them a feeling like the plants are in there with you. So, as you sit in the space you are really in, you feel like you are getting to walk into the herbarium,” Whitney Barnes said.
The mural’s name comes from one of Whitney Barnes’ favorite paintings, “The Botanist” by Alfred Ronner, a permanent piece in the Loeb’s collection. “Every time I would go to the Loeb I would come and see that painting,” Whitney Barnes said. “So this is from 1875, and I loved learning that this painting has been in the collection of the Loeb since 1880. Meaning, this was cutting edge contemporary art when this was collected by the Loeb.” Whitney Barnes even presented a recreation of the painting in front of her own mural, which she collaborated on with her husband, photographer Sean Hammerle.
In 2022, Whitney Barnes finished her work on “Planting Utopia,” a mixed-media series that utilizes techniques such as cyanotyping, watercolor and gouache. Whitney Barnes said of her process creating the piece, “From 2021 to 2022, I spent two years collecting 150 medicinal plants that are growing in the Shaker Society Garden, which is in Watervliet, otherwise Albany, New York.”
For this collection, Whitney Barnes drew influence from the historic Shaker communities’ seed production by spending time in their gardens and examining historic seed packaging. She shared some of the packaging at her talk. “These are the actual seed pack labels from the 1800s,” she said, “so you can see that they’re faded, but also very colorful. So I think that we’re gonna keep that in mind when we think about color.”
For her exhibition at the Loeb, Whitney Barnes selected only a few pieces from her larger portfolio to display alongside actual specimens she used from the herbarium.
Following the talk, Professor Emeritus of Biology and Vassar Herbarium Curator Emeritus Mark Schlessman shared his thoughts on the impact of art and what it means for plant science as a whole. “When her art is shown and there’s a reference to what herbarium is, that just makes people aware of herbaria in a way that you normally won’t get,” he said. Schlessman has since continued working on digitizing the herbarium in retirement.
Luca Pereira Frears ’27, who recently completed a short documentary about Whitney Barnes, described her as a passionate artist. “I think Julia is really great because she puts her full self into her art, she gets really into all these very specific topics whether it’s botany or shaker history,” Frears said. “So I think it’s really nice for an artist to fully embody their work.”