This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.
SARASOTA, Fla. — They’ve turned a big gazebo into a huge Tiffany lamp that you can walk through, created Tiffany-style patterns on the ground out of crushed tinted glass, and hung colorful plexiglass-like windows and cutouts of Tiffany flowers among the tropical and subtropical plants.
This is not your grandfather’s artist in the garden, not the usual sculptures and paintings simply set among the plants. At the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens here on Florida’s Gulf Coast, you see a selection of an artist’s work and then, throughout the gardens, you see botanical interpretations of that work, made by intertwining plants and trees and other materials, often in whimsical ways. The garden’s designers call their work horticultural theater, and they go at it as if they were staging a play.
“We take one art form and turn it into another,” said David Berry, the garden’s vice president for visitor engagement and the chief curator for the garden’s museum.
The Tiffany exhibition, “Tiffany: The Pursuit of Beauty in Nature,” runs through June 25. Forty-two works by Louis Comfort Tiffany serve as the reference point for the botanical interpretations, which are sprinkled throughout Selby Gardens, a 15-acre oasis on a peninsula jutting into Sarasota Bay.
A team of five horticulturalists and art history experts develops these botanical art projects. Nathan Burnaman is the lead designer. “I want people to see the ideas of the artist, the flavor of the artist,” he said in a conversation one afternoon. “We do it in the language of plants and landscape design. We mix all kinds of media to evoke the artist, but we do it in a way that doesn’t just feel like placing the art in the garden, and doesn’t feel like we’re trying to copy the art.”
The idea for the Tiffany exhibition came from two members of Selby Gardens who, over decades, have built a fine collection of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the prince of American stained glass and a son of the famed jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany.
The couple had seen how the garden handled exhibitions of Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol and Paul Gauguin. They knew that Selby Gardens would soon be spotlighting Salvador Dalí, later pairing the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein with the French Impressionist Claude Monet and then combining the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe and the music and poetry of the singer-songwriter Patti Smith. And they wondered aloud: Why not our guy?
The chief executive of Selby Gardens, Jennifer Rominiecki, loved the idea. She and the design team soon started working on the Tiffany show. “The planning and design takes a year,” she said. The five designers worked to find the spirit of Tiffany, and imagine how he would work in the context of Selby Gardens, with the botanical colors and shapes and sunlight shifting through the day. Then, the team set to work on their own creations.
Since the exhibition opened in February, Selby Gardens has been packed with teenagers and college students, young families and grandparents. In the first seven weeks, 57,429 people saw the Tiffany exhibition, said Greg Luberecki, the garden’s spokesman. That was a record, he said, an increase over the previous high of 45,065, set by last year’s exhibition on Mr. Mapplethorpe and Ms. Smith.
“The way the garden installations mimic and amplify the beautiful Tiffany artifacts and draw out the natural beauty of the plants just made me want to scream — in a good way,” said Becky Marshall, as she was wrapping up an afternoon at the gardens before heading back to work at an art gallery in Tallahassee, Fla.
The atmosphere throughout the grounds was buoyant. Children scrambled around the base of a banyan tree and bounced on the wire suspension bridge in the garden’s rainforest section, and no one shushed them. Scott Joplin’s ragtime piano tinkled softly in the cafe, the greenhouse, and in a 1930s house that has been turned into the garden’s Museum of Botany & the Arts.
Friends snapped selfies.
“They smell the fragrance of the plants,” Ms. Rominiecki said. “There’s a participatory sense. You’re not just passively looking at works of art.”
The real Tiffany lamps, windows and vases that inspired the show are sheltered in the museum. A portrait of Tiffany with crossed arms in a three-piece suit and tie, a swooping gray mustache and matching goatee, and a table lamp of tiny, intricately arranged slivers of green and yellow Tiffany glass welcome visitors. Two standing lamps frame a tall, green, sectioned Tiffany window with a fringe of lavender flowers. Around the corner are more lamps and, in the next room, shelves of Tiffany vases, a window panel and a 1903 ad for Tiffany products that ran in Town & Country magazine. You might imagine the poet T.S. Eliot reporting on the scene: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” Some of the works, Ms. Rominiecki said, are worth more than $1 million.
When Ms. Rominiecki moved south eight years ago — after nearly 15 years in upper management at the New York Botanical Garden — Selby Gardens was limping. “We were surviving, but not thriving,” said Angel Lara, who oversees the greenhouses.
The gardens had been established in 1973 with a gift of the land and buildings from Marie Selby. She and her husband, William G. Selby, who made a fortune in the oil and gas business, had lived in the house that is now the gardens’ cafe.
Ms. Rominiecki’s job was to shake up the gardens, give members a reason to visit more often, and to attract all kinds of new people. She came up with the idea of creating horticultural interpretations.
Selby Gardens is loaded with palms from around the world, live oaks, sea grapes, orchids and hardy, colorful bromeliads, tropical and subtropical trees, shrubs and ferns. It sends out expeditions to Central and South America, where researchers work with local botanists to identify and study plants. Over the years, Selby Gardens’ botanists have helped to discover or describe some 2,000 species of plants.
To get into the spirit of Tiffany, Selby’s designers read up on the Art Nouveau artist, watched videos and several times drove nearly three hours to study the thousands of pieces of Tiffany’s work at the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art in Winter Park, on the edge of Orlando.
“They wanted to know what Tiffany was thinking and trying to convey,” said Jennifer Perry Thalheimer, the Morse’s director and chief curator.
A decades-old fig tree with gnarled, wandering roots, raised like the leading in a Tiffany lamp, shows how the Selby horticultural artists have interwoven Tiffany with nature. Mike McLaughlin, the senior vice president for horticulture, said he and his colleagues recognized the connection with Tiffany right away. In between the leading-like roots, the garden’s designers planted wedges of bromeliads in vermilion, bright red, yellow and orange. The swatches of color looked just like the small pieces of glass in Tiffany’s work.
Across a winding cement path from a tangle of mangroves and sea grapes, the Selby Gardens’ designers show their sense of humor with a sight gag. They created three, large Tiffany-inspired windows with some skinny palm tree trunks as vertical focal points. The bushy tops of the skinny trees are missing.
To complete the scene, the jokesters placed the Tiffany-style windows at eye-level in front of and very close to live palm trees with lush arrays of palm fronds. They matched up the trunks of the trees in the Tiffany-like windows with the trunks of the real trees to make it look like the real trees were growing out of the art.
“It isn’t like, this is the artwork and this is the flowers,” said Laurie Ladewski, a former first-grade teacher from Naperville, Ill., as she walked toward the Tiffany lamp gazebo. “It’s all integrated.”
Rachel Came, a massage therapist from Atlanta, was standing in the gazebo with her mother, Helen, who lives in Sarasota. Bright sunlight streamed through the orange and yellow, violet and pink cutouts of Tiffany flowers and imprinted them on the white gravel path. A low hedge of real flowers traced the inner perimeter of the gazebo, echoing the colors above. “You feel like you’re inside a beautiful Tiffany lamp,” Ms. Came said.
In the greenhouse, Diana Kanners, a retired hospital nutritionist from Chicago, was watching cutouts of Tiffany flowers rotate on a pair of overlapping wheels and create new colors. All around her were combinations of Tiffany-style windows and flowers, and the plants and flowers that inspired him.
“The moment I walked through the door I was transported,” Ms. Kanners said. “It was like a little vacation.”
