News

 
 

CURRENT & UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS

Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand, Bloom — is Result, 2023, Archival pigment print | Selected from This Earthen Door Chromotaxys

Herbarium & Chromotaxia
Selections from This Earthen Door

April 10 - June 27, 2025

Opening Reception, Wednesday, April 9, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

526 West 26th St. Suite 417, New York, NY

For This Earthen Door, Amanda Marchand and I developed a project rooted in Dickinson’s botanical studies. Using anthotype, a plant-and light-based photographic process invented during Dickinson’s era, the exhibition presents a highly pigmented monochromatic re-imagining of the 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium, which contains over 400 different species. Housed in the Houghton Library’'s Emily Dickinson Collection at Harvard University, we used photographs of the pages as a basis for our work. Complementing the anthotypes, is a series of chromotaxys, or color classifications, composed of grids of pigment from the juices of 66 flowers, symbolizing their shared properties and poetic associations. These works form our own 21st century herbarium.

This Earthen Door encompasses more than three years of work from 2020 - 2023, beginning during the pandemic, when Amanda and I were sequestered as was Dickinson at her writing desk. Our collaboration research and efforts were assisted with scholarship provided by scientists Dr. Kyra Krakos in Missouri and Peter Grima in Massachusetts. As Amanda writes, “Like the time machine that is any herbarium, with its pressed specimens offering a slice of the past, This Earthen Door gives a glimpse into the nature-inspired world of the enigmatic beloved poet nearly two centuries later - and asks, with today’s ‘plant invisibility’ and climate chaos, where may she point us?”

 

This Earthen Door
On view at: The Photography Show

April 23 - 27, 2025

Artist Talk — Saturday, April 26, 12:30 pm

Presented by Rick Wester Fine Art
Booth A18

Join me, Amanda Marchand, and Rick Wester Fine Art, as we showcase selected works from This Earthen Door, alongside the Association of International Photography Dealers. The Photography Show returns to Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory for their annual presentation of work from established photographers, historical and contemporary, alongside emerging artists. We will also be at the Datz table at AIPAD, representing This Earthen Door in the company of the 2025 Datz releases.

 

Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand, The Color of the Grave is Green, 2023, Archival pigment print | Selected from This Earthen Door Chromotaxys

This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material

May 24 - September 7, 2025

VIP Opening Wednesday, May 21, 5:00 - 7:00 pm

Member Preview Thursday, May 22, 1:30 - 4:30 pm

& Friday for Brandywine members and guests

This Earthen Door is the culmination of a cross disciplinary inquiry exploring renowned poet Emily Dickinson’s deep connection to the natural world. Created by artists Leah Sobsey (based in Chapel Hill, NC) and Amanda Marchand (based in Brooklyn, NY), "This Earthen Door" examines pure color found in nature, the changing environment, and the symbolism of flowers in art and literature. The work pays homage to Dickinson’s significant botanical contributions through her very first book, made as teenager – a book of flowers.

This Earthen Door: Nature as Muse and Material, our solo exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art includes two new site-specific installations commissioned by the Museum in alignment with their conservancy efforts in Chadds Ford, PA.

VIP Opening Wednesday, May 21, 5:00 - 7:00 pm. Member Preview Thursday, May 22, 1:30 - 4:30 pm, and Friday for Brandywine members and guests.

 

Sun-Fused Imagery: Anthotype Workshop & PhotoAlliance Lecture
with Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey

Sunday, May 4, 2025

10:00 am - 2:00 pm PDT at SF Camerawork, San Francisco, CA

Join Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey for a one-day Anthotype Workshop this May, inspired by the poetic legacy of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium. This immersive, hands-on experience invites participants to connect with nature while exploring one of photography's earliest processes, using plant-based emulsions and sunlight to create unique, organic prints.

A ticket to attend the May 4th PhotoAlliance lecture at Fort Mason with us and Ala Ebtekar is included with registration to this workshop.

Sun-Fused Imagery Workshop is presented in partnership with SF Camerawork.

 

Leah Sobsey, Emily Dickinson, chlorophyll prints on Hosta leaves, 11 x 14” each, 2024.

Plant-Based Photographic Processes
Workshop with Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey

Summer 2025 Session 1: May 24 - 30, 2025

Registration closes on: Friday, May 9, 2025, 12:00 pm

This workshop is about making art from garden plants using nontoxic, eco-friendly practices. We will cover several plant-based photographic processes, including anthotype, ancho-lumen, and chlorophyll printing, along with tataki zomé, a type of Japanese flower printmaking. After learning these simple and adaptable processes, students will be able to continue making plant-based art at home. We will cover the short but rich history of plant-based photographic processes, different ways to make pigment inks, methods for coating paper with plant colors, making digital negatives, and the best ways to preserve fugitive images (images that may fade over time). The workshop will include nature walks to collect plants around the Penland grounds.

 

Dickinson and Ecologies
2025 EDIS + Wenshan

June 19 - 22, 2025

National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

We’re excited to be headed to Taipei this Summer for the 2025 Emily Dickinson International Society and Wenshan International Conference to lead a workshop and do a talk with our esteemed panel members, and exhibit our work from This Earthen Door.

‘Tis Nature’s buoyant juices: The Ecologies of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium — Workshop, exhibition, and artist talk with Marta McDowell & Peter Grima

Flowers Like Asia: Emily Dickinson and Flora Asiatica — Marta McDowell

This Earthen Door, Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Eco-feminism, and the Climate Crisis — Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey

The Forehead of a Hill: Emily Dickinson’s Botanical Exploration of the Mount Holyoke Range — Peter Grima

 

Install for UnBound12!. Photo by Terry Brown.

UNBOUND14!

Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey featuring This Earthen Door

The Annual Juried + Invitational Photography Exhibition

OPENING RECEPTION
Friday, June 27th, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm


ANNUAL FUNDRAISING GALA
Saturday, August 2nd, 7:00 pm - 11:00 pm


UNBOUND 14! FINAL DAY
Saturday, August 9th, 11:00 am - 5:00 pm

 

I'm thrilled to be the first artist in residence at the NC Plant Sciences Initiative at NC State University during my Fall 2025 sabbatical. There, I will partner with researchers to create new site-specific artworks to debut in the Fall of 2025.

 

More to Come

More to Come —

 

In September 2025, In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers will head to the Gregg Museum of Art at NC State after debuting at the Harvard Museum of Natural History in 2022. In addition to the original exhibition, I’m excited to add new site-specific cyanotype commissions that utilize NC State’s extensive scientific collections and the Gregg pollinator garden for source material.

 

More to Come

More to Come —

 

PAST HIGHLIGHTS

This Earthen Door, Photofairs NYC 2023 Installation

This Earthen Door had its launch at the inaugural Photofairs at the Javits Center with Rick Wester Fine Art, September, 2023.

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey: Art + Science Competition First Place Winners

By Linda Alterwitz | December 16, 2024

“This Earthen Door” premiered at Photofairs NYC 2023. A solo show was exhibited at the Stephen and Peter Sachs Museum, and a forthcoming exhibition at the Brandywine Museum opens spring, 2025, as well as at Rick Wester Fine Art. “This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium,” was published by Datz Press, 2024, and was featured at Paris Photo 2025 by “The Eyes” artist talks. The work has been reviewed in “Lenscratch,” “ARTnews,” “The Marginalian,” “Lensculture,” “The Emily Dickinson Journal,” among others.

This multi-faceted work offers the viewer a unique opportunity to know Dickenson not through words alone, but through the beautiful and colorful environment she created.
— Linda Alterwitz
 

This Earthen Door was presented at The International Emily Dickinson Society Meeting in July 2023 with Peter Grima and Marta McDowell.

Emily Dickinson International Society
Annual Meeting

July 21 - 23, 2023

The conference theme, “Clasp Hemispheres, and Homes,” comes from Dickinson’s poem “The Sunrise runs for Both – ” (M 355, Fr765, J710). In congruence with Dickinson’s “Both” 16 panels with nearly 50 presentations will delve into the relation between Dickinson’s mental and material interiors and her expansive embrace of wider, external spheres.

 

Leah Sobsey, from "The Fall of the Leaf."

 
There’s a seeming imbalance between ambition articulated and space occupied with “In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss.”
— Mark Feeney

‘In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers’ examines the famous author as citizen scientist

The exhibition at the Harvard Museum of Natural History brings together art and literature to bear on climate change

by Mark Feeney

Beauty and art factor in through the work of two artists, Leah Sobsey and Robin Vuchnich, inspired by the Thoreau specimens. Sobsey’s very handsome “The Dispersion of Seeds” is a gridded wallpaper, each rectangle 5 inches by 8 inches, showing a different one of the digitized specimens. Sobsey recorded the images as cyanotypes. Cyanotype is the same photographic process that produces blueprints. Sobsey chose the process in honor of the photographer most associated with it, the 19th-century botanist Anna Atkins. The size of a substantial mural, “Dispersion” has the look of a very large quilt hanging on the wall. It has a homespun appearance that harkens back to Thoreau’s (and Atkins’s) era.

Sobsey’s “The Fall of the Leaf” also nods to the 19th century. It employs cyanotype and gold leaf in several large-scale oval portraits, substituting a plant specimen for a person. To properly look at the image, viewers have to get close, which means their reflection is part of what they see. It’s a nice way to underscore the role of personal engagement in the issues the show raises.

Leah Sobsey, from "The Dispersion of Seeds."

 

An artistic interpretation of Thoreau’s preserved plants can be seen at the Harvard Museum of Natural History through November 2023.

Photos by Rose Lincoln/Harvard Staff Photographer

Thoreau’s flowers shine light on climate change

‘In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss’ exhibition marries art and science at Harvard Museum of Natural History

Bethany Carland-Adams | HMSC Communications

May 24, 2022

Leah Sobsey, artist, curator, associate professor of photography, and director of the Gatewood Gallery at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, created a luminous series of large-scale plant portraits using cyanotype on glass backed with 23k gold, a 19th-century photographic process that relies on UV light to create a distinctive Prussian blue tone. Additionally, Sobsey utilized all 648 digitized Thoreau samples, creating a stunning wallpaper consisting of original cyanotypes and digital imagery that tells a story of the survival and decline of plant specimens.

The exhibition is an immersive multidisciplinary experience that marries art and science through a modern artistic interpretation of Thoreau’s preserved plants. It invites visitors to ask, “What do Thoreau’s findings tell us about what plants are winning, and what plants are losing, in the face of climate change today?”
— Bethany Carland-Adams
 

Artwork by Leah Sobsey for “In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss” exhibition, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Cyanotype on glass with 23K gold

A close reflection on Henry David Thoreau’s legacy brings into sharper focus his deep commitment to environmental conservation and civil disobedience, as well as his trove of treasured poems and essays.
— Bethany Carland-Adams

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss

Presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History

On view until May 20, 2024

Panel Discussion
Thursday, November 17, 6:00 - 8:00 pm

In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss is an immersive multidisciplinary experience that marries art and science through a modern artistic interpretation of Henry David Thoreau’s preserved plants. Thoreau was prolific in his practice of collecting botanical samples and plants are important indicators of how our world is responding to climate change.  Long preserved in the Harvard University Herbaria, 648 specimens serve as the foundation of this new exhibition. The digitization of the specimens, and others in the Herbaria collection, are now allowing broader access to scholars and citizen scientists, in turn welcoming new domains of scholarship. 

The exhibition invites visitors to experience emotionally resonant connections to the profound loss of natural diversity caused by human-induced climate change. The exhibition urges us to ask, “What do Thoreau’s findings tell us about what plants are winning, and what plants are losing, in the face of climate change today?”

 

Artwork by Leah Sobsey for “In Search of Thoreau’s Flowers: An Exploration of Change and Loss” exhibition, Harvard Museum of Natural History, Digitized cyanotype

 

“Collections”

Duke
Sponsored by the Visiting Artist Series of the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies

Artist Talk
Tuesday, October 25, 2022, 5:00 pm
A2666, Bay 10, Smith Warehouse

Leah Sobsey's multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of science, design, installation, and textile. Her photo-based work explores the natural world through archives and taxonomies with an experimental and materials-based approach to the medium of photography.

Often partnering with scientists, she uses a historical, scientific, and artistic lens, to understand the connection to plant and animal loss as one indication of the larger climatological perils we face as a species. She is interested in creating dialog between art and science and has spent the last decade-plus photographing specimens from National Park and university museum collections across the country to understand climate change and species loss. Sobsey works in 19th-century photographic processes combined with digital technology with a specialty in plant-based printing techniques.

 

Lumen was featured at the Umstead Hotel & Spa Gallery in Cary Summer 2021 and part of the series was on view at the Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro.

Artist Leah Sobsey Finds Inspiration and Documents Natural History in the Forest

Duke Forest

September 13, 2021

A project called “Lumen” (examples below) which stemmed from her walks in Duke Forest in 2020 combined lumen photography and anthotypephotography—the former, exposing dark room paper to UV light, and the latter, using plant material itself to create an image. She calls these explorations of plants “cameraless” images, and she sees them more as documentary than art because they not only depict plants but they are made from them. In the process, Sobsey crushed and shredded parts of the plants to make certain colors and then used whole specimens of leaves or fiddlehead ferns, for example, to form the central image by placing them in direct contact with photo sensitive paper.

Lumen showcases Sobsey’s passion for 19th century photographic processes and herbaria—or collections of preserved specimens of plants. She is currently working with the famed poet Emily Dickinson’s pressed plant collection and also with naturalist par excellence Henry David Thoreau’s meticulously indexed and preserved plant pressings for at least one large-scale exhibit next year. By looking into the direct evidence of the past in these herbaria, her photography work aims to awaken viewers to the tangible realities of climate change.

 

© Leah Sobsey

Leah Sobsey: The States Project: North Carolina

By Angela Franks Wells | November 17, 2017

Collections is an umbrella for what I initially thought was 10 small typologies all of which culminate in a book. After speaking with Leah, I realized that Collections is a way of making and creative problem solving for her. The body of work is the result of over 10 years of examining artifacts, animals, remains, and information from multiple collections all over the United States. The evolution of the project is a result of balancing available tools, access to specimens, value to the region where the artifacts are housed/found, and her own personal interests. Leah’s background in cultural anthropology is apparent in her systemic analyzing of form and function with each artifact. She simultaneously examines the singular item and how it connects to a community of objects. The single object is of value, its isolated allowing its shape, form, and detail to be exalted. However it isn’t until it becomes part of the whole that we begin to see its purpose.

My most recent work, Collections (Daylight Books, 2016), is a culmination of a decade of photographing specimens in state and university science collections and national park museum collections. I received grants from the US National Park Service and collaborated with scientists at Duke and North Carolina State to access various science and natural history collections. The book contains images made from collections of birds, herbaria, butterflies, artifacts, bones, and nests. This book explores our constantly evolving and increasingly intertwined relationship to nature and science through my experimentation with historical photographic processes, processes that are interrupted, challenged, or complemented by my use of today’s digital technology.
— Leah Sobsey
 

Praise for This Earthen Door

The Eye of Photography: “Rick Wester Fine Art : Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey : Herbarium & Chromotaxia : Selections from This Earthen Door”

“Art, nature, and the poet Emily Dickinson are intertwined in a new exhibition this spring. Herbarium & Chromotaxia : Selections from This Earthen Door by Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey is on view at Rick Wester Fine Art in Chelsea. The exhibition is an homage to the poet’s botanical devotion, comprised of images made from plant pigments grown in the artists’ own gardens.”

— The Eye of Photography

 

The Marginalian: The Science and Poetry of Anthotypes: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium by Maria Popova

January 9, 2024

Left: page from Dickinson’s herbarium. Right: anthotype from This Earthen Door.

“Painstakingly recreating all 66 pages of Dickinson’s herbarium in large-scale anthotypes made with juices from 66 species of plants the poet grew in her garden, they offer something uncommonly lyrical — part color study and part time travel, harmonizing the ephemeral and the eternal, radiating the quiet consolation of the dialogue between nature and human nature.”

— Maria Popova

 

LensCulture: Book Review, “This Earthen Door — Sublime Anthotypes, Preserved Plants & Poetry,” by Janelle Lynch

Herbarium Plate 64 – Christmas Cactus (left) Herbarium Plate 65 – Orange Jewelweed on right © Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey

“The book is not only a visual delight, but a tactile one as well. It begins and ends with seven distinctly textured endpapers, each the color of a coated anthotype, a pleasing contrast from the heavy smooth paper used throughout the book. Following the title page is Between My Country — and the Others, a poem from 1862, which reflects Dickinson’s characteristic exploration of the boundaries between the self and the external world, suggesting the delicate balance between isolation and connection. Timely and timeless notions.”

— Janelle Lynch

 

ART FAIR THE ARMORY SHOW: This is how history is continued in New York, Frankfurter Allgemeine Newspaper

ArtDaily: “Amanda MARCHAND & Leah SOBSEY: Herbarium & Chromotaxia: Selections from This Earthen Door opens at Rick Wester Fine Art”

April 19, 2025

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, Wild nights – Wild nights!, 2023. Chromotaxy, Edition 5 of 5 + 2 APs. Archival pigment print, 50 x 39 inches (127 x 99.1 cm) Sheet © Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey, courtesy Rick Wester Fine Art.

“In a gesture honoring Dickinson’s effort made more than 180 years ago, and galvanized by the fact that her herbarium is now too delicate for public or private viewing, the artists grew and harvested plants and flowers from their own gardens to remake her sampler. Working in different planting zones in Quebec and North Carolina, the artists were able to bring to life nearly all of Dickinson’s plants in Massachusetts including poppy, daylily, snapdragon, tulip, honeysuckle, dandelion and others.”

— ArtDaily

 

F-Stop Magazine: “Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey @ Rick Wester Fine Art”

March 4, 2025

“Before Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) gained her reputation as a leading American poet of the 19th century, she was known by family and friends for her passion in gardening. Barely published during her lifetime, it was her sister who uncovered her poetry posthumously and proceeded to publish it. Born into a family of gardeners, Dickinson tended to a large garden at her family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, sending fresh bouquets to friends and family (often with poems attached, known as “nosegays”), and studied botany at Amherst Academy and Mount Holyoke. The title of This Earthen Door is derived from Dickinson’s poem “We can but follow to the Sun” (We go no further with the Dust; Than to the Earthen Door—) More than a third of her poems reference flowers and plants.”

— Rick Wester Fine Art

photo-eye: “This Earthen Door: Reviewed,” by Cheryl Van Hooven

October 28, 2024

“Considering This Earthen Door through the lens of ecofeminism (“a view of the world that respects organic processes, holistic connections and the merits of intuition and collaboration”*), one sees the deep connections between Amanda Marchand’s and Leah Sobsey’s three year immersion into the world of Emily Dickinson’s herbarium with the alchemy of plant emulsions, collaborative research and practice.”

— Cheryl Van Hooven

 

White Hot Magazine: “The Best Art in the World,” Photofairs 2023 Triumphantly Debuts in New York by J. Scott Orr

September 9, 2024

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey from This Earthen Door. Photo by Jamie Lubekin

“This Earthen Door is a unique presentation from artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey that honors the green thumb of American poetry doyenne Emily Dickinson. While her poetry was little known during her lifetime, Dickinson’s facility with plants was hardly a secret.”

— J. Scott Orr

Fine Books & Collections: “Photo-Based Work Inspired by Emily Dickinson's Garden on View”

April 9, 2025

Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey,  Herbarium Plate 54 - Pansy, 2023, and Herbarium Plate 64 - Christmas Cactus, 2023. Archival pigment prints.

“Creating herbariums – flower scrapbooks made by pressing dried plants into the pages of a book - was a popular pastime in Dickinson’s time. She created hers at 14, representing the extraordinary number of plants she collected from her garden and on walks. In a letter to a friend at the time, she wrote: “I am going to send you a little geranium leaf in this letter, which you must press for me. Have you made an herbarium yet? I hope you will if you have not, it would be such a treasure to you; most all the girls are making one. If you do, perhaps I can make some additions to it from flowers growing around here.””

— Fine Books & Collections

 

LENSCRATCH: Interview, “Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand: This Earthen Door,” by Aline Smithson

October 21, 2024

© Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand, Herbarium Plate 61 – Purple Verbena (left) Herbarium Plate 63 – Purple Columbine (right)

“Leah Sobsey and Amanda Marchand have created an exquisite book, This Earthen Door: Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, published by Datz Press. This Earthen Door is a cross-disciplinary inquiry exploring renowned poet Emily Dickinson’s deep connection to the natural world. In brilliant, non-synthetic plant color, this book follows the chronology of Emily Dickinson’s original 66-page herbarium—a book of pressed plants made as a teenager.”

— Aline Smithson

 

What Will You Remember?: Inspiration at Photofairs NYC by Elin Spring

Amanda Marchand & Leah Sobsey at an Artist Talk about their Anthotype project & book This Earthen Door: A Reworking of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium sponsored by (at left) Rick Wester Fine Art at PhotoFairsNY. Every Anthotype was created using flora grown or referenced by poet & avid gardener Emily Dickinson. (Photo by Elin Spring)

“Whether in concept, through composition, or materials and methods (and often all of those), the most exquisite work was unique and personal. Each found ways to explore themes as old as identity and memory or as contemporary as climate change and technology.”

— Elin Spring

 

ARTnews: Q&A with Photofairs Founder Scott Gray by Karen K. Ho

September 8, 2024

A pigment print from Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey’s This Earthen Door, on display at Rick Wester Fine Art during Photofairs New York.

“Gray said This Earthen Door was an “unbelievable beautiful” example of the scope of photography on display at the fair. “It’s absolutely mind blowing,” he said. “When you scratch the surface, and you understand how that was made and how it was produced and the thinking behind it, and the context behind it and the concept, these artists are incredible.””

— Karen K. Ho