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.

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.

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

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.

‘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.

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?”

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.

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: 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.