While we have previously hosted indoor art exhibitions at the Hunnewell Building, we are not able to offer indoor shows at this time. The Lecture Hall serves as a vital hub for classes, public programs, meetings, and event preparation. Because of its multipurpose use, exhibits cannot be made reliably accessible to visitors. Additionally, our current staffing levels limit our ability to support and manage indoor exhibitions.
We occasionally host outdoor art installations on a selective basis. Artists interested in proposing an outdoor exhibit may send a proposal to publicprograms@arnarb.harvard.edu. Please note that all exhibits must be fully self-funded.
Past Shows
Ghost Trees: An Augmented Reality Exhibit
Sep 21, 2024 – Mar 01, 2025
Ghost Trees was an augmented reality art show celebrating the lives of five iconic Arboretum trees. Artist Sonia Ralston skillfully recreated these beloved trees as 3-D digital models: visitors scanned QR codes at five signs around the Arboretum and saw the trees superimposed on the landscape behind them, experiencing these iconic specimens as they once stood.
Intimate Vistas: Images of Tree Bark
A series by Marc Goldring
Nov 03, 2024 – Feb 26, 2025
Photographer Marc Goldring’s work has always centered on finding the mysterious in the commonplace and bringing attention to objects and features which we otherwise might not have noticed at all. In this show, Marc attended to the bark of trees. He brought the camera in close to look at the details of the extraordinary variety of textures, colors and shapes of the bark of trees. Familiar or relatively exotic, the tree’s bark tells a story about the life of the tree, both of the species and of the particular individual. In this way we can better connect to, and understand on a visceral level, these common yet alien beings.
Ramble
A series by Esther Garcia Eder
Nov 09, 2024 – Feb 03, 2025
Ramble was a painted representation of tree and nature scenes from around the world: San Diego, France, Maine, and the Arnold Arboretum itself. The show embodied the awe and excitement that each encounter with nature inspired in the artist, and in countless other visitors to those same spots.
Resilient Spirits
A series by Freda Shapiro
Jun 14 – Oct 06, 2024
As an artist, Shapiro seeks out visuals that resonate with her concerns around troubling environmental, political, or societal issues. She portrays some of these intersections through themes of nature’s resilience and decay, centering her artwork around the forgotten detritus found on her frequent explorations, and the endurance and survival instincts that the natural world shows even through hard times. Resilient Spirits highlighted such resilience, reminding us of a time when the Arboretum lays cold and dormant, even as we saw new growth and blooms in the heat of summer.
The Many Moods of the Arboretum
A series by Fran Gardino
Feb 23 – Jun 09, 2024
The Many Moods of the Arboretum was a series of digital photographs taken across the Arboretum over the last 10 years. These images were captured in a sequence of still images and then stitched together into panoramas, showing the full breadth of the landscape better than a single square image ever could. This exhibition captured the beauty and uniqueness of Arboretum trees and landscapes through the cycling of days and seasons, further underlined by the “Little Planet” square-format images in which panoramas are curved back on themselves to create circular images that reflect the cycles of the earth itself.
Pursuing Reality: Possibilities
A series by Jo-Anne Green
Oct 20, 2023 – Feb 18, 2024
Pursuing Reality: Possibilities, was a series of photocollages and digital prints about patterns and networks in nature, including trees, mycelia, rivers and streams, and the human brain. It utilized images found on the world wide web, social networks, Katie Holten’s Irish Tree Alphabet, and Jo-Anne’s own photographs, mostly taken at The Arnold Arboretum. It was an interconnected series produced by an interconnected community.
Marsh Kaleidoscope
A painting series by Pamela Tarbell
Jun 25 – Oct 08, 2023
Marshes and wetlands are key to our entire ecosystem. They clean and filter water while providing habitat for numerous birds, amphibians, and insects. They are also visually exciting to walk through: their multiple layers of growth create patterns of reflecting leaves or bushes in every spot of water. Pamela Tarbell’s “Marsh Kaleidoscope” painting series brings these kaleidoscopic wonders to the Arboretum in the form of colorful abstract paintings that highlight the beauty and value of these life-protecting, carbon-storing champions.
Intersections
Pairings of Botanical Art and Herbarium Vouchers from the Collections of the Arnold Arboretum
Mar 10 – Sep 10, 2023
The living collections of the Arnold Arboretum are complemented by supplementary collections that reside in the Hunnewell Building. Among these, the Horticultural Library collections include an exquisite collection of botanical prints, and the Herbarium of Cultivated Plants consists of approximately 132,000 “vouchers”—plant specimens that have been dried, pressed, and mounted on paper. This exhibition pairs botanical art by Mark Catesby and other botanical artists with herbarium vouchers of both native and non-native plants in the Arnold Arboretum living collection, resulting in an insider’s look at how these various collections intersect.
Still Lives: Plants of the Arnold Arboretum, Close Up and Far Away
Photographs by Vaughn Sills
Winter 2023 – Summer 2023
Photographer Vaughn Sills brought her exquisite still lives of Arboretum plants—whether in flower or fruit, burnished fall foliage or shimmery bud—to our exhibition. Each stem is a wonder of composition and color—prominent, yet sublimely connected to a background of a distant and ethereal landscape. The images are Still Lives, from inside Sills’ studio, and include the outside—her images of nature and wide expanses of earth. Combined, these seemingly disparate elements convey the importance of two ways of looking, close up and far away.
Artists Redux/Seen Again: Artists from the Arnold Arboretum’s Website Exhibitions, 2020-2022
Winter 2023
Eleven artists, representing seven exhibitions, bring their work back in person to the Arnold Arboretum. After 24 months of virtual shows during the pandemic, they share their vision of nature and the Arboretum for all our visitors.