Begun in 2015, this immersive exhibition series led by Carol Ockman, Ph.D., curator-at-large for Selby Gardens, examines master artists and their relationships to nature in the context of a botanical garden. Seeing master works of art—often on loan from major art institutions around the world—in a garden setting awakens new comparisons in viewers’ minds. The 2020 exhibition in the series, Salvador Dalí: Gardens of the Mind, transformed the Downtown Sarasota campus into a surrealist wonderland.
Roy Lichtenstein: Monet’s Garden Goes Pop!
February 14 to June 27, 2021, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
This exhibition showcases the legendary Pop artist’s screen prints based on Monet’s world-famous paintings of waterlilies and haystacks. Lichtenstein’s rarely seen Water Lilies and Haystacks provide an unexpected homage to a staple of the public imagination — Monet’s paintings of his garden and home at Giverny that inspired them.
The display of Lichtenstein’s art in the midst of a horticultural evocation of Giverny creates a unique experience for more than 100,000 garden visitors. Selby Gardens, transformed into Monet’s famed gardens at Giverny through the Pop Art lens of Roy Lichtenstein, includes iconic elements of Monet’s garden such as the green Japanese bridge, trellises, and benches. This conjuring of Lichtenstein’s world also serves as the dynamic backdrop to the lush plantings and mixed borders for which Monet’s paintings were renowned. An avid gardener, Monet once said, “My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece.” Marie Selby Botanical Gardens evokes this crowning achievement with a surprising Pop Art twist.
Read the press release here.
