2025 Spring Bulb Show Student Installation

This project aims to foster collaboration among and between students and the botanic garden, and for the students to meet the dynamic challenges and rewards of designing, fabricating and installing site-specific, commissioned work. This year’s installations were created by two student artists: Jamie Marigold Biagiarelli AC ’26J and Congyue (Ella) Wang ’28.

The prompt to which students were asked to respond in their proposals was inspired by the concurrently running exhibit Younes Rahmoun: Here, Now. Rahmoun is one of Morocco’s leading contemporary artists and his year-long, campus-wide exhibit is exemplary of his 25 year career in that it invests in and responds to multiple locations. As explained in the overview of the exhibit, “for Rahmoun, creating art provides a way to be present with himself and with the world around him.” This process articulates the approach to seeing, thinking and designing that we sought to find in the winning student’s applications.

In conceiving of their proposals, applicants were asked to consider the material, historic and aesthetic qualities of the bulb show itself, in addition to accounting for the physical infrastructure of the greenhouse space. Ultimately, the students’ work is in dialogue with Rahmoun’s, and also engaged in a conversation about a particular history, place, and time.

Congyue (Ella) Wang ‘28

Congyue is a multi-disciplinary artist who loves to explore the process and theme of  creation in any possible material. Her interests span digital art, painting, watercolor, film production, photography, calligraphy, and magazine design, among many others. Born in Shanxi, China, Congyue took her first art class in kindergarten where she was introduced to a limited set of standardized themes to explore in colored pencils. She continued her artistic journey in this small Chinese city, following a path similar to that of millions of other Chinese children. After this early childhood experience, Congyue attended eight different schools, in four different cities in two different countries, which exposed her to numerous new worlds, liberating and expanding her artistic growth beyond this traditional Chinese art education.

In Congyue’s installation, titled Echo, the artist hopes to explore the relationship between the past, present, and future in response to the prompt: what is the legacy of here, now? Inspired by Bergson's Philosophy of Time, she was intrigued by the idea that memory is part of the stream of consciousness; it allows the past to continuously influence the present, rather than simply storing static information. Echo investigates the countless steps and choices made in one's life, asking: what brought us here, and where does this here, now lead us in the future? Using strings and various arrangements of beads, Congyue hopes to demonstrate that the legacy of the past, represented by the beads, is here, now at the gathering point on the ground; and that conversely, the legacy of here, now, will be the future, reflected by the scene in the mirror. In other words, the sum of the steps of the past has brought us here, now.

Jamie Marigold Biagiarelli AC '25J

Jamie Marigold Biagiarelli is an Ada Comstock Scholar in her senior year at Smith College. Having grown up in the area, Jamie has countless memories of visiting Lyman Conservatory throughout the years with her family. Because of this she is especially dazzled to have the opportunity to contribute to this year’s bulb show. 

As Jamie refined her design for her work on view in Cold Storage House, Gathering, she was informed by the rectangular panels of glass that make up Lyman’s houses as well as memories of exultantly colorful Spring Bulb Shows of year’s past. As she worked, Jamie took inspiration from many art historical sources including: the magical, “heavenly” quality of light as it passes through a Gothic cathedral’s stained glass window, to Barnett Newman’s “zips” and Rothko’s color fields, to the Renaissance mastery over handling the translucency of oil paints which make the jewel-like quality of paintings to which our modern eyes are accustomed to possible.

Taught from a young age to respect plants’ ingenuity, beauty, and healing properties, Jamie wanted her design to be informed by her love of plants. The arrangement of color throughout the composition of Gathering is Jamie’s abstract interpretation of the way that plants use a sort of vision of their own to read a variety of information around themselves by way of photoreceptors. Some photoreceptors specifically read what variety remains in the light waves that they absorb: “When light passes through the green flesh of plants, the plant absorbs some of the red light in the spectrum for photosynthesis, so the remaining light that passes through the plant will contain less red light once it gets to the other side. That means the light that has passed through a plant will have a different ratio of colors; specifically, the range of red to far-red light wavelengths is reduced,” writes Zoe Schlanger in The Light Eaters. In 2020, researchers found that even non-photosynthetic plants read these ratio changes in order to know what is going on around them at any given time.

Mary Gabriel writes: “Art serves a social function not unlike religion. For those who are open to it, it speaks directly to that aspect of man that is not beast-like, and stirs the part of modern man that is nearly calcified from neglect, his soul.” As Jamie considered the prompt—what is the legacy of here, now?—she thought of the bulb show as a sort of pilgrimage destination for winter-weary people. Regardless of how many times you have visited the bulb show before, it is Jamie’s hope that Gathering serves a purpose similar to Younes Rahmoun’s work Wahid (One): that it may invite you to arrive in the here and now again and again as the light shifts and changes, and to see each moment among these plants as unique and new. 

Sources

• Finlay, Victoria. Color: A Natural History of the Palette. Random House Trade paperback edition. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

• Gabriel, Mary. Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art. First Back Bay paperback edition. New York Boston London: Back Bay Books, Little, Brown and Company, 2019.

• Schlanger, Zoë. The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. New York, NY: Harper, 2024.

• “Smarthistory – Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres.” Accessed January 27, 2025. https://smarthistory.org/cathedral-of-notre-dame-de-chartres-part-1-of-….

• “Smarthistory – A-Level: Oil Paint.” Accessed January 23, 2025. https://smarthistory.org/oil-paint-2/.

• “Younes Rahmoun: Here, Now | Smith College Museum of Art,” October 30, 2023. https://scma.smith.edu/art/exhibitions/younes-rahmoun-here-now.

THANK YOU to Lynne Yamamoto for her support and mentorship and to Sarah Loomis, Kathy Guo, Julie Thomson and Jimmy Grogan for serving on the selection committee. Thank you to all members of the botanic garden staff, and especially to our student employees including Allie Wornell, Sophia Holmes and Kris Cheaye for their hard work and for all the ways in which they contributed to the installation of the show. Thank you to the family and friends of the artists who supported them in their creative processes. 

A very special thanks to the artists themselves for so boldly taking on this project with enthusiasm and commitment, and for lending their incredible talents and imagination to make these installations come to life!