The Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT) at the Fort Worth Botanic Garden Presents Dornith Doherty: Illuminations - Past, Present, and Future of Fern Research with a panel discussion on February 17th at 7pm and a reception from 7 - 9 pm. 

Dornith Doherty: Illuminations - Past, Present, and Future of Fern Research is a tripartite environmental art exhibition emerging from a research-based creative collaboration with Dr. Alejandra Vasco, Research Botanist, Ana Niño, Librarian, and Tiana Rehman, Herbarium Director at the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (BRIT). As an artist affiliated with BRIT since July 2021, Doherty investigated the crucial physical artifacts of botanical biodiversity research – from a collection of diaphanized plants made in the 1950s to a contemporary Andean biodiversity project focused on diverse ferns threatened by climate change and ecosystem disruption...

Denver, Colorado –Entanglements explores our connections to the natural world. Through a variety of lenses, artists in this exhibition negotiate and engage with the environment, illustrating the complex relationships humans have to nature and its resources. These artists employ diverse approaches and intentions, bringing awareness to the current state of our environment to inspire action, giving discarded remains new life, or exploring regenerative capabilities of ecosystems...

The Sad Truths Behind These Unsettling Works of Art: A new exhibition reflects on the haunting aesthetics of human impact on the planet.

Talk about unsettled. Just as a new exhibition titled “Unsettled Nature” that combined art and science—and the expertise of two Smithsonian museums—was about to open at the National Museum of Natural History in March of 2020, all the museums and much of the country shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic...

One night this spring, on an undisclosed date, in an undisclosed patch of earth near MSU’s Beal Botanical Gardens, a group of excited plant biologists will follow a map to a treasure that is unique in the world.

They’ll dig about two feet down to unearth the 16th of 20 glass bottles, each containing 1,050 seeds, buried in 1879 by visionary MSU botanist William Beal. They will bring the 141-year-old seeds to a lab, plant them and see what germinates...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to present Dornith Doherty: Atlas of the Invisible. For her sixth solo exhibition at the gallery, Doherty presents new large-scale black and white photographs alongside a video projection. The exhibition opens November 21 with an open house from 12:00 to 4:00 p.m.

For over twenty years Doherty’s work has been concerned with our stewardship of the natural environment. This new project continues to explore that subject amid the effects of air pollution on migratory birds....

The artwork, in the words of the writer Julio Cortázar, “is like the seed in which the giant tree lies sleeping.” From sunflower to rosehip, there may be no more metonymic sign for art than the seed, an embryonic kernel whose formation is part of vegetal reproduction that generates sustenance for life. Plants, the fruition of the seed, share with photography a light-driven process of development corresponding to photosynthesis. Imperiled by environmental circumstances, a photographic exhibition,“Seedscapes: Future-Proofing Nature” currently on display at the Impressions Gallery in Bradford, England, examines the response of artists to global conditions that threaten seed viability and the survival of ecosystems that allow all forms of life to prosper....

In my hand I’m holding a random assortment of seeds I collected from a recent walk in a prairie. If I hadn’t collected them myself, I might think they were tiny specks of dry, broken grass or leaves. I might not even see them at all, they appear so insignificant, like dust or lint from the inner reaches of a pocket. 

In a new exhibit at the Dayton Art Institute called “Archiving Eden”, photographer Dornith Doherty turns her lens to the critical issue of seed saving, and global efforts to conserve the world’s food sources. Her compositions use Xrays of seeds and plants along with documentary images from facilities around the world working to sustain the planet’s biodiversity...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition Back & Forth: Celebrating Women on July 21, 2020. Back & Forth commemorates the fifteenth anniversary of the gallery and celebrates the centennial of the 19th amendment. The exhibition will continue through September 26.

Presenting sculpture, installation, paintings, drawings, and photographs, this exhibition highlights the varied creative practices and compelling artworks created by the distinguished women represented by the gallery and invites visitors to consider the centennial milestone in the context of a woman-owned business...

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...

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) proudly presents New Territory: Landscape Photography Today, a survey of contemporary landscape photography from around the world. The exhibition of more than 100 photographs will gauge how living artists stretch the boundaries of traditional landscape photography to reflect the environmental attitudes, perceptions and values of our time. The works in New Territory will depict landscapes in unexpected ways, challenging visitors to see photography differently. Organized by the DAM and curated by Eric Paddock, curator of photography, New Territory will be on view June 24, 2018 to Sept. 16, 2018....

Opening Tuesday at the Spencer Museum of Art, the exhibition “Big Botany: Conversations with the Plant World” examines the integral relationships between humans and plants through works by more than 50 historical and contemporary artists from the museum’s collection, loans and site-specific installations by four artists-in-residence.

Kicking off the exhibition is the Big Botany research symposium, beginning with the keynote lecture, “What a Plant Knows,” by Daniel Chamovitz of Tel Aviv University, at 5:30 p.m. March 27 in the museum’s auditorium. Art historian Giovanni Aloi of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and philosopher Timothy Morton of Rice University will give lectures April 11 and May 2, respectively. All lectures will be live-streamed through the museum’s YouTube channel...

Dornith Doherty’s photographic project Archiving Eden is a multi faceted approach to addressing the worlds concern of decreasing biodiversity and the extinction of natural species in the face of climate change.

For the past ten years she has collaborated with scientists at international seed banks around the world including banks in North America, England, Brazil, Italy, The Netherlands, Russia, and Australia.

Doherty’s photographs include detailed images of highly secured isolated vaults set deep within the earth; doomsday facilities that act as human kinds final chance if the worst should happen and the flora of the planet was suddenly lost. Additionally, the project includes expansive landscapes, greenhouses, incubation chambers,
various laboratory equipment, as well as highly enigmatic collages made from x-ray images recording seeds at various stages of germination....

A black circle fills the frame; a dark void within which small white flecks float. These white specks are plant seeds captured with an X-ray, their ghostly white shells and tails caught in a black petri dish. The piece, by the artist Dornith Doherty, is titled Finite and is part of an ongoing series from her project Archiving Eden; the eponymous show is on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art until Jan. 14, 2018....

Acclaimed North Texas artist Dornith Doherty has been photographing seed banks around the world since 2008, and the capstone exhibition, Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden, has just opened at the Amon Carter. The show is a spellbindingly beautiful collection of 15 large-scale images, both of the seed banks themselves and digital collages from x-ray images Doherty took in the labs. Patron spoke with Doherty at the Museum the day before the August 12 opening.

PATRON: Your “Archiving Eden” project has consumed you for nearly 10 years—does the origin of this exploration date back to when you learned of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, the so-called “doomsday vault”?.....

Photographer Dornith Doherty spent nine years documenting remote seed vaults around the world — and the seeds inside them. She even got inside the so-called doomsday vault, in Norway, near the North Pole, designed to help preserve samples of botanical life in case of worldwide catastrophe.

Her large, ghostly images capture life inside seeds as small as a grain of sand.  You can see them in her new book, “Archiving Eden,” and in the show by the same name at Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

For our weekly State of the Arts, I spoke Doherty about how she makes her ethereal work. Here are some excerpts from our conversation...

Dornith Doherty Sees the Future in a Seed - The photographer, whose work is featured in a new exhibition at the Amon Carter, has spent the last decade visiting seed banks around the world....

In 2015, Syrian researchers made the first ever withdrawal from the Svalbard Global Seed Vaultto recover wheat, barley, and grass samples that had been lost when the Aleppo-based seed bank was destroyed in that country's civil war. That is exactly why the Svalbard "Doomsday Vault" exists. To date there are over 1,700 repositories like the one formerly based in Aleppo (which has since moved to Beirut), designed to function as natural safe deposit boxes for food crops and plant diversity in case of natural or man-made disasters....

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents Dornith Doherty: Archiving Eden on view August 12, 2017, through January 14, 2018. The exhibition of photographs by North Texas artist Dornith Doherty intertwines science and art, showcasing the planet’s botanical diversity through 15 images from seed banks across the world. Admission is free.

...Today, we know that the wealth of seeds is our opportunity to provide sufficient food to the growing world population even under severe conditions due to climate change, Environmental destruction and bioterrorism. That is why more than 1400 seed banks around the world keep the seeds of innumerable useful and wild plants, some in cardboard boxes, others in liquid nitrogen...

Nothing seems to exist in the arctic cold of the seed vault on Spitzbergen. And yet - frozen in the eternal ice is the cradle of our vegetable life. Archived for a future in which mankind is dependent on a botanical reboot. The photographer Dornith Doherty gives us a look into the archives of nature with her poetic photos "Archiving Eden"...

Spurred by the impending completion of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Archiving Eden explores the role of seed banks and their preservation efforts in the face of climate change, the extinction of natural species, and decreased agricultural diversity. Serving as a global botanical backup system, these privately and publicly funded institutions assure the opportunity for the reintroduction of species should a catastrophic event or civil strife affect a key ecosystem somewhere in the world...

A 2012 Guggenheim Fellow, Dornith Dohertyreceived a MFA in Photography from Yale University. She currently resides in Southlake, Texas and is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Texas. In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, she has also received grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, and the United States Department of the Interior. The Texas Legislature named her 2016 Texas State Artist 2D...

In the Arctic Circle, about 800 miles from the North Pole, on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, lies the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. A repository for the earth's seeds, Svalbard acts as a fail-safe freezer built within the permafrost to withstand time as well as natural and manmade disasters. It also serves as a backup for the hundreds of other more vulnerable gene banks around the world. The threat of climate change, decreasing agricultural diversity, extinctions, or a single catastrophic event has given rise to the need for such a safeguard, should reintroduction of species become necessary in the future...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of IT'S OFFICIAL, an exhibition honoring the recent appointments of four contemporary artists, as "Texas State Artists for 2015 & 2016"...

Photographer Dornith Doherty’s art has long been concerned with nature, with a focus on its intersection with human intervention. Since 2008 she’s been at work on Archiving Eden, an ambitious series of images documenting seed and tissue samples stored in the world’s seed banks...

Published on the occasion of Dornith Doherty's exhibition, Stow, the fifty page catalogue features an essay by art critic and essayist, John Zotos. The exhibition was held jointly at the University of North Texas' Artspace in downtown Dallas, as well as the Houston Center for Photography in 2016.

Available at the gallery.

Now in her third decade as a working artist, Dornith Doherty has never seemed to slow down or stop probing into...

Moderndallas.net features gallery artists, Dornith Doherty and Kim Cadmus Owens, in their review this month...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce the opening of Exchange, an exhibition of recent photographs by Dornith Doherty...

The apocalypse may be a popular trope in sci-fi film and mass market fiction, but it's not something...

54 page fully illustrated exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of "Dornith Doherty: Oasis" from September 20, 2014 - January 4, 2015 at the Art Museum of Southeast Texas in Beaumont, Texas. Catalogue includes an essay by Angela Kingston, an independent curator and writer based in London, U.K. 

Available at the gallery and on Blurb.

94 page fully illustrated exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of "Dornith Doherty: Seeds, Science, Sustenance, and Snacks" from September 3, 2014 - October 3, 2014 at The University of Texas at San Antonio Art Gallery in San Antonio, Texas. Catalogue includes an essay by Scott A. Sherer and Marissa Del Toro.

Available at the gallery and on Blurb.

In this new body of work, Doherty explores the role of seed banks and their preservation efforts...

Holly Johnson Gallery in Dallas is pleased to announce Archiving Eden II...

To call upon Mother Nature, whether by way of a hike through the woods or in a landscape photograph, is to intervene...

Holly Johnson Gallery is please to present Dornith Doherty: Altered Terrain, an exhibition of new Chromogenic color photographs...