This spring, the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation is holding an exhibition called “Looking Back: An International Retrospective, Part 2.” You might find yourself flipping to the cover of pillbox to check that you’re reading the right university’s newspaper — I bet you didn’t know that we have a botanical documentation center right on campus! In fact, the Hunt Library was originally built at the request of Roy Hunt and his wife Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt in order to store Mrs. Hunt’s massive botanical documents collection. Her collection, in addition to other botanical books and art collected since the Institute’s opening in 1961, is still living on the fifth floor of Hunt. It is preserved and maintained by a small staff of researchers, librarians, and curators, who facilitate the use of these rare and special documents for botanical research inside and outside of Carnegie Mellon. And to think, we barely have a single plant science class on campus!
I first visited the Institute (as anyone can, just by taking the elevator to the fifth floor) to see the first part of “Looking Back: An International Retrospective.” I knew that botanical illustrations were not a dying art, but I was very surprised to see how alive they were in the space. The Institute itself is a beautiful relic of the period in which it was built, complete with wood-paneled walls and a huge living room-like library. The art included in the exhibit was even more beautiful, ranging from wildly photorealistic watercolor depictions of plants to charcoal drawings of trees to painfully detailed pen-and-ink etchings of leaves.
Part two of the exhibition was no less stunning. My favorite pieces included a watercolor painting of a tomato from various angles and an image of a skunk cabbage made from only carbon dust. Curator Carrie Roy explained that pieces in both parts of the “Looking Back” exhibitions are selections from the current collection and past International exhibitions. The Institute selects new works from artists for their “International Exhibition of Botanical Art & Illustration.”
This year’s International will be displayed in the fall semester, and it will be the 60th year the Institute has carried on this tradition. The retrospective exhibitions include art from Internationals between 1998 and 2019, the last International before the pandemic.
“This half of this retrospective in particular is really special because it includes artists who we still have really active relationships with; they’re still working and they come for conferences or for exhibitions,” Roy explained. “It’s really exciting to be able to still interact with the artists and their work at the same time.” The exhibit was also opened by a reception on March 14 that included artists who had their work on display.
I highly recommend taking a few minutes to go visit “Looking Back: An International Retrospective, Part 2” while it’s up for the rest of the semester. If you like art, you’ll probably find this to be a type of art that you’ve not seen a lot of before, and you’ll definitely feel like you’re in a space distant from the hustle and bustle of the university. When the International is on display in the fall, go visit again! “We got over 300 submissions from all over the world, and we chose 42 artists and artworks of a whole bunch of different media and styles and techniques,” Roy said. I definitely want to see them.
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