Everything for the Garden! -- new work by kevin duggan

September 8 - December 15, 2024

Everything for the Garden!, a solo exhibit of new work by Kevin Duggan, is being presented by the Voelker Orth Museum and Victorian Garden in Flushing, Queens in New York City. The exhibition features nine new works on paper, created using image transfer and drawing, that are inspired by 19th-century seed catalogs and chromolithographs. In the 19th-century, seed merchants produced lavishly illustrated catalogs using new color printing techniques that were mailed in the hundreds of thousands to middle class Americans, especially women. It was a pioneering form of direct marketing that helped define what gardens looked like and which flowers grew in them. Drawing on colorful, chromolithographed images and inspirational texts from these Victorian-era seed catalogs and ephemera, Everything for the Garden! explores how these vivid portrayals of flowers and gardens fired customers’ imaginations and promoted flower gardening as a source of spiritual uplift, civic virtue, and personal reward. This new work is a departure from Duggan's previous watercolors rooted in botanical art traditions, instead using image transfer techniques from laser prints, and then adding drawn and painted elements. The Museum is a German immigrant family home from the 1890’s that now preserves the cultural and horticultural heritage of Flushing. Kevin Duggan is an artist based in New York City whose work draws on natural science and botanical art of the past informed by contemporary art practices

For more information: Voelker Orth Museum 149-19 38th Avenue Flushing, Queens, NY 718-359-6227 http://www.vomuseum.org/ www.kevinduggan.com