Dornith Doherty
(b. 1957) Doherty is a photographer from Houston who received her B.A. from Rice University and her MFA from Yale University. She currently resides in Southlake and is a Distinguished Research Professor of Art at the University of North Texas. In 2012 she received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship to expand and complete a project called Archiving Eden. From 2008 - 18, Doherty travelled to international seed banks in Colorado, England, Brazil, Italy, Russia, Australia and Norway, near the North Pole. These highly secured vaults, set deep underground, are doomsday facilities to store plant life in the event a catastrophic event wipes out the flora on our planet. She collaborated with renowned biologists to photograph the tiny seeds and tissue samples through an electron microscope. She then manipulated the images to create digital collages in a large format that appear at first glance to be works of abstract art.
Doherty’s work has been exhibited at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum of Art, the Tuscson Museum of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Centro de Fotografia Isla de Tenerife, Spain and the Encuentros Abiertos Photography Biennial in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work is in the collections of the MFA Houston; the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Ft. Worth, Texas; the Museum of Fine Arts in Milwaukee; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minnesota; and the Art Museum of Southeast Texas, Beaumont, Texas.
Art on Campus
Husk Corn
Year: 2009Medium: Digital Chromogenic Lenticular Photograph
Editon: 2/3
Location: Science & Technology Building
Sunflowers
Year: 2009Medium: Digital Chromogenic Lenticular Photograph
Edition: 3/3
Location: Science & Technology Building
Seed Viability X-Rays
Year: 2009Medium: Digital Chromogenic Lenticular Photograph
Edition: 2/3
Location: Science & Technology Building
Doherty became interested in photographing the Svalbard Seed Vault in Norway after reading about it in the New Yorker. “I was inspired by the hopeful/pessimistic nature of the seed banks. On one hand, the volunteers, scientists and institutions from around the world were collaborating to create a global botanical backup system, but on the other, had this bleak gravity of climate change and political instability which created the need for an in accessible arc located near the north pole.” She worked for years acquiring the credentials and knowledge needed to gain the trust of the scientists who ran the seed vaults in remote facilities such as the one in Russia.
She created these photographs as lenticular prints that change colors as the viewer moves past them. “This tension between stillness of the print and the changing of the color reflects my focus on the elusive goal of stopping time in living materials as well as the drying process central to the methodology of saving seeds.