Self-Portrait, 1997, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
plant leaf, photosynthesis, air from floor vent

The ISGM show was highly specific and personal. According to the last will of Isabella Stewart Gardner, the museum's founder, the museum displays were to be preserved exactly as she had created them.The restrictions on any possible change in the displays (applying to sculptures, paintings, the color of the walls, the placement of stone fragments, etc.) are extremely precise and rigid. But restrictions concerning the plants in the museum (and there is quite a remarkable garden there) are less well defined. Very possibly, Isabella Gardner did not think of plants as permanent artifacts.