Dornith Doherty

NATURE PHOTOGRAPHERS OFTEN ZIP ON warm coats before lugging their cameras into the wintry outdoors. Dornith Doherty, an artist and professor at the University of North Texas, bundles up to photograph nature indoors—and sometimes in suspended animation. Doherty documents the vaults and research hubs that store seeds for any number of uncertain futures...

Naomi Rosenblum's classic history of photography traces the evolution of this young art form chronologically and thematically. Exploring the diverse roles that photography has played in the communication of ideas, Rosenblum devotes special attention to topics such as portraiture, documentation, advertising, and photojournalism, and to the camera as a means of personal artistic expression. Her text is illustrated with nearly nine hundred images by photographers both celebrated and little known, arranged in stimulating juxtapositions that illuminate their visual power...

Pondering its stark exterior, observers might guess that the modernist Norwegian citadel photographed by Dornith Doherty is some sort of prison. Not exactly. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is designed to preserve humanity by maintaining its ability to grow food. The Arctic structure is the most futuristic place the artist chronicled for “Archiving Eden,” on display at the National Academy of Sciences...

Dornith Doherty’s Vault: Exchange presents 5,000 x-ray images of seeds - the total number needed to preserve a species. Housed within a transparent vault-like structure installed in the Great Hall of the Ontario Science Centre, Vault Exchange promps active participation during three seed exchange events, where visitors are invited to help build a living seed bank onsite....

Dornith Doherty’s Mesmerizing Photos Capture the Contradictions of Seed Banking. “Archiving Eden,” now at the National Academy of Sciences, shows how guarding against an ecological catastrophe is both optimistic and pessimistic.

Dornith Doherty’s photographs of seedlings and the facilities where they’re conserved are full of plant life, and yet they were inspired by a seemingly inhospitable place: a below-zero, highly secure vault in a remote Norwegian archipelago...

Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden exhibition will be on display at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. from February 15, 2019 - July 15, 2019.

Since 2008, Texas-based photographer Dornith Doherty has traveled around the world to photograph the spaces and contents of seed banks. By focusing on the pleasing aesthetics of seeds and the buildings constructed to conserve biodiversity, she has constructed a visual meditation on the planet’s botanical diversity...

Dornith Doherty is an artist whose work stimulates conversations around the world’s ever-changing ecology. A native of Houston, she obtained her BFA from Rice University and her MFA in Photography from Yale. She currently resides in Southlake, Texas and is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas, where she has been on the faculty since 1996. Dornith is a 2012 Guggenheim Fellow and has received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, and the United States Department of the Interior, among many others. In addition, she was recognized by the Texas State Legislature as the 2016 Texas State Artist for 2D work. Doherty’s work has been exhibited extensively domestically and abroad and can be found in the permanent collections of prominent institutions such as the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Her project entitled “Archiving Eden” looked at the infrastructure around the preservation of the world’s plant life through the utilization of seed banks, as well as looking at the inner beauty of the seeds themselves. That work drew the attention of major media outlets and resulted in a host of artist talks around the world, including TEDx Monterey.

I recently sat down with Dornith at her current show at Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas where we discussed....

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of DELUGE, an exhibition of new photographs and hydrographs by Dornith Doherty. A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition and includes an essay by Irene Klaver, PhD (available mid-September). An opening reception for the artist will be held September 8th, from 5:00 to 8:00 pm. The exhibition continues through Saturday, November 10, 2018...

The Whatcom Museum presents Endangered Species: Artists on the Front Line of Biodiversity, an interdisciplinary exhibition featuring 80 works of art, from rare books to cutting edge video, that span the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It opens September 8, 2018 in the Museum’s Lightcatcher building and closes January 6, 2019.

Offering a unique perspective of the critical work that artists are contributing toward natural science and environmental issues, this exhibition represents an international group of 60 artists who celebrate biodiversity's beauty, interpret natural and human-caused extinctions of plants and animals, and focus on species from diverse ecosystems under stress...

The little-known-to-the-public Svalbard Global Seed Vault boasts the world's greatest repository of seeds. It was unvelied a decade ago - in the northernmost inhabited spot on Earth with an airport - and stores in its vaults an astounding 850,000 see varieteis culled from 5,000 core agricultural crop species. That's just 18 percent of the vault's capacity...