Several of the artists featured in Nature as Artifice travelled to Rochester to help us install the  exhibition.  We had a great time hosting our Dutch guests and hope to work with them again. We have some ideas for future projects but in the meantime we asked Cary Markerink & Theo Baart to write something about their project for the blog. They sent a great description of the project and images of their Snelweg series installed in different venues. Enjoy!

Snelweg: Highways in the Netherlands                                 by Cary Markerink & Theo Baart

The Netherlands is a small country with a population of 16 million people. It would easily fit four times into New York State. Space is scarce. Since the 1970s the country has been transformed into a big suburbia, interconnected by a grid of highways and railroad-tracks.  We were looking for a metaphor for this transformation of the Dutch landscape (and in a broader perspective Dutch culture) and we decided the highway could showcase the changed country in it’s frantic rush towards economic progress.

Kunsthal, Rotterdam 1996

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I gasped this morning when I saw the vibrant blue of these awesome Delphiniums! I promised myself that if Barbara (museum photographer + garden lover) photographed them I would share them on the blog. When I got to my office I looked on her Flickr page and sure enough: Delphiniums.

After I settled into work I was reminded of OTHER Delphiniums at George Eastman House. Edward Steichen, famous for curating the landmark exhibition Family of Man, as well as for making his own  photography, was a  passionate  Delphinium enthusiast. How nice that we have such a lovely display of Delphiniums blooming in the garden, and their ancestors (maybe), immortalized by Edward Steichen, living in boxes in the photo archive. Steichen won many prizes for his cross-breeding of Delphiniums and at one time planted 5 acres of his  Connecticut  home with the flowers. Here  are a couple of his photographs of  these magnificent blue flowers.