Marie Selby Botanical Gardens will serve as a Warhol-inspired floral playground beginning February 2018, illuminating the artist’s passion for the natural world.

Warhol: Flowers in the Factory, will be shown Feb. 11 - June 2018, at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, Sarasota, Florida.

Andy Warhol, well-known as a groundbreaking Pop Artist and innovator, maintained a surprising interest in exploring and celebrating nature and often depicted landscapes and plants in his work. This focused exhibition, situated against the stunning backdrop of Selby Gardens on Sarasota Bay, provides a matchless context for examining Warhol’s fascination with nature. Visitors will view works by Warhol while enjoying dynamic horticultural interpretations of his art, capturing his energy in a tropical setting and encouraging a mutually enriched experience of art and the natural world.

To highlight the artist’s natural sensibilities, four iconic Warhol silkscreens of hibiscus will be on view. The works, on loan from Williams College, are from the original series of 10 flower silkscreens produced in the mid-1960s. Additionally, two Warhol poinsettia prints, originally created by the artist as holiday gifts for friends, will be on loan from a private collector for this inspired exhibition. Living displays throughout the grounds and in the glass house conservatory will emphasize the repetition, modular designs and juxtaposition of Warhol’s work.

At Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, this is the second exhibition in the Jean and Alfred Goldstein Exhibition Series, which combines nature and fine arts. The series offers a direct connection to one of the original purposes of the Christy Payne Mansion, which houses the Museum of Botany & the Arts at Selby Gardens. With its founding in 1979, the mansion displays major fine arts exhibitions and relates them to nature and the botanical collections in the gardens. Warhol: Flowers in the Factory follows the first exhibition in the series, Marc Chagall, Flowers and the French Riviera: The Color of Dreams, which is currently on view and concludes July 31, 2017.

Curator: Dr. Carol Ockman, curator at large for Selby Gardens and the Robert Sterling Clark professor of Art History at Williams College

About Selby Gardens: Marie Selby Botanical Gardens provides an oasis of inspiration and tranquility, while connecting visitors with nature and furthering the understanding and appreciation of plants and conservation. It is the only botanical garden in the world dedicated to the display and study of epiphytes such as orchids, bromeliads and gesneriads and other tropical plants with a focus on botany, horticulture and environmental education.