Portrait Garden

In conjunction with the exhibition Prison Nation, the Library Gallery presents Portrait Garden, a display of works by Lynn Cazabon, professor of visual arts and director of the Center for Innovation, Research and Creativity (CIRCA), in the Library Rotunda.

Portrait Garden is a metaphorical garden of ‘portraits’ of eleven women incarcerated at Maryland Correctional Institution for Women, a multilevel security prison. Portrait Garden used environmental stewardship as a tool for self-reflection through the selection of plants to represent each woman and resulted in the co-creation of three perennial gardens on the prison grounds. The display of the project consists of a collection of photographs of the cultivated plants paired with recorded statements by each woman and was first displayed as a series of interactive posters in Baltimore Light Rail trains.

A book about the project, Portrait Garden: Self-Renewal through Environmental Stewardship, was published in 2017. Portrait Garden was initially funded by a Rubys Media Arts Grant through the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation.

Admission is free. The Library is generally open Monday through Thursday from 8 a.m. to 12 midnight, on Friday from 8 a.m. to 5 p..m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday from 12 p.m. until midnight. Please visit here to check hours on any particular day.

Image: Lynn Cazabon, Portrait Garden (Wendi, Hemerocallis ‘Pardon Me’), poster for Baltimore Light Rail.