What began in 2006 with a preliminary call for entries to the membership of the American Society of Botanical Artists is culminating in the final showing of Losing Paradise? Endangered Plants Here and Around the World, a botanical art exhibition in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew in England. The exhibition opened this past weekend and is one of the integral elements of a larger exhibition, Plants in Peril.
The exhibition is comprised of a collection of 44 works of original art depicting threatened and endangered plants from North & South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.
Botanical artists, some of whom had depicted only garden varieties of familiar flowers, set out to increase public awareness about plants threatened with extinction. They learned of the various organizations that assess the conservation status of endangered plant species such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s oldest and largest global environmental network which produces the Red List of Threatened Species, NatureServe which produces conservation status assessments in the U.S. and Canada, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service which administers the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Artists formed collaborations with local scientists, conservation organizations, and botanical gardens that could provide guidance in locating and studying the plants whether they be in public collections or in the wild.
A catalog of the exhibition including images of the artwork, background information about each plant and the artists depicting them, as well as essays by leading plant scientists and conservationists, is available for sale at ArtPlantae Books.
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