On Dec. 18, “Beyond the Bouquet: Arranging Flowers in American Art” opened at the Hood Museum of Art. Curated by Michael Hartman, an associate curator of American art at the museum, the exhibit explores flowers as a medium of connection through time.
Featuring paintings, sculptures and photographs from the Hood’s permanent collection, the exhibit includes works dating from the 1700s to 2023. The pieces range from the abstract — such as Alana Woodsey Thomas’s “Wind Dancing with Spring Florals,” which depicts flowers from a bird’s-eye perspective — to the more literal, like Lowell Nesbitt’s detailed painting, “Lily and Rose from Les Flutes du Mal.” The pieces vary in technique and material, too — from soft-glazed stoneware and linden wood sculptures to watercolor and ink on handmade Chinese paper.
In all, the diverse works use floral imagery to touch on themes of joy, grief, power, race and identity. Hartman tried to include pieces that are both light and heavy.
“Because I thought, if you're doing a show about flowers, why not try and have a lot of colors, and have it be uplifting and a place where you can dig deep into complicated and entangled issues in some of these artworks, but then also you can just appreciate and enjoy them at the same time,” Hartman said.
Hartman said he was inspired to create an exhibit on flowers in January 2023 when the Hood purchased the still-life painting “Lilacs,” an impressionist rendering of a vase of lilacs, by Charles Ethan Porter.
“I thought, why not do a show around flowers, but not just have an exhibition of ‘still life, still life, still life, still life’ right? Because that gets boring,” Hartman explained. “But [the exhibition] would look at flowers in portraits, or flowers on vases, or flowers in landscapes, or flowers in contemporary and modern and abstract art.”
While curating the exhibit, Hartman wanted to focus on defining relationships between the various artworks, he said. He juxtaposed paintings with sculptures, furniture with clothing and portraits with newsprint to demonstrate the prevalence of flowers across diverse mediums. He said he hopes that viewers will both think critically about the art and appreciate its beauty, highlighting Scherezade García’s “A Splendid Soil I,” a painting intended to draw attention to how people perceive color in America, as an example of a work relating to migration, identity and race.
“I think it’s absolutely beautiful but it also tackles a lot of complicated histories around migration, around the conversion and convergence of cultures both in ways that are kind of forced or chosen,” Hartman said. “You see multiple complicated intersections, and there’s not necessarily one specific answer. And I think that that’s really wonderful.”
Hood Museum educator Katie Coggins said younger students from the Upper Valley have been making personal connections with the exhibition, particularly with pieces like “The Splendid Soil I.” Coggins oversees the multi-visit program, which brings second through sixth graders from Vermont and New Hampshire to visit the museum and attend studio sessions four times a year. Through these personal connections to art, the students have learned to appreciate art and develop their own opinions about what they see.
“They’ll think about either themselves or family members that have immigrated, and we talk about how difficult that must be to leave behind your family and friends, leaving behind culture, going to a new place where you don’t know how you’ll be accepted, you don’t know how you will interact with that culture,” Coggins said.
She added that she hopes students of all ages will walk away from the exhibit having a broader understanding of what flowers can symbolize, even if they do not fully understand the historical background of the art.
“Flowers can be more than pretty — they can share meaning,” Coggins said. “These artists are using flowers in all different ways. That’s kind of the whole point, right? They’re sharing meaning, they’re decorating, they’re bringing attention to something else, they’re encapsulating a memory.”
Hood Museum gallery attendant Catherine Burak said she was struck by the range of artwork related to flowers.
“[I was surprised by] how many types of things could be related to floral — between what the flowers go into, people wearing them, what they represent symbolically,” she said. “… From the earliest [artworks] to the most stylized ones, nature, flowers — they are a constant throughout the centuries, something you can count on to come every year.”
“Beyond the Bouquet” will remain at the Hood until at least December 2025, according to Hartman. The exhibition is on display in the Rush Family and Israel Sack galleries on the museum’s second floor.
