Staniar Gallery Exhibit Lecture & Reception: LEAH SOBSEY & AMANDA MARCHAND

Event Description

Staniar Gallery Exhibit: LEAH SOBSEY & AMANDA MARCHAND
"This Earthen Door" and "The Blue of Distance"

Artist Talk & Reception: 5:30 pm on Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Wilson Concert Hall/ Lykes Atrium/Lenfest Center.
No tickets are required.

Art Exhibit: Monday, April 27-Friday, May 29, 2026
Staniar Gallery/ Wilson Hall/Lenfest Center
Regular Hours: M-F, 9am-5pm

This exhibition brings together "This Earthen Door" and "The Blue of Distance," two bodies of work rooted at the intersection of art and science. In "This Earthen Door," Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey draw from Emily Dickinson's herbarium, a book of pressed plants she collected from her garden; the artists grew and made sunprints from Harvard University's digital archive of Dickinson's specimens. Using the anthotype process, the artists reanimated Dickinson's floral archive and explored its symbolism. 

Sobsey's "The Blue of Distance" centers on herbaria and natural history collections, bridging art, science, and the humanities while addressing loss, climate change, and the ecological threats of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to 19th-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins—the first woman photographer and the publisher of the first photographic book (1843)–Sobsey merges historical printing techniques with digital methods to connect past and present.

Amanda Marchand is an award-winning Canadian artist and educator based in New York whose internationally exhibited work explores the natural world using an experimental approach to photography. Leah Sobsey is an award-winning artist and Associate Professor of Photography at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, whose multidisciplinary photographic practice explores nature, science, and design and experiments with installation and textiles.

Please visit the gallery website for date changes and updates: http://go.wlu.edu/staniar

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