Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination: Bruce Museum
November 7 @ 10:00 am - 5:00 pm
Free – $20
October 3, 2024–January 5, 2025
Tuesday through Sunday 10am – 5pm
Inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination explores the artist’s lifelong admiration of the influential naturalist and his own sustained engagement with the natural world. Between his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summers spent in coastal Maine, Wyeth was exposed to two distinct climatic zones—one lush and temperate, the other rocky and cool—and he found in each a trove of imaginative potential. More visionary than scientific, Wyeth’s resulting “plant portraits” are, at times, vaguely anthropomorphic. They also revel in nature’s organic abstraction and embrace pure pattern and surface, brilliantly capturing the essence of regional flora and the larger environmental networks to which they belong. Examining Wyeth’s rootedness in the landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine through an ecocritical lens, Every Leaf & Twig brings together these twin ecosystems and considers the artistic response each inspired.
