Carly Glovinski | Into the Garden
Opening Reception | Thursday, April 23, 6-8 pm
After a decade of steadily drawing nearer, Carly Glovinski’s third solo exhibition with Morgan Lehman Gallery finds the artist at a precise intersection of studio practice and gardening. Into the Garden gathers a variety of new, painting-focused works that grow from Glovinski’s sustained engagement with gardening, where cycles of planting, tending, collecting, and cataloging have become central to the way she thinks about making. The exhibition also marks her return to canvas after nearly two decades, bringing her relationship to traditional painting into focus within a practice that has long moved fluidly between materials and processes.
Glovinski’s recent work emerges from three gardens that have shaped her practice in recent years. The first is Wild Knoll Foundation Garden, a site-specific living work and community garden created by Glovinski on the grounds of the former home of writer May Sarton in southern Maine, now part of the Surf Point artist residency. The second is poet and writer Celia Thaxter’s garden on Appledore Island, five miles off the Maine coast. Best known through Thaxter’s book An Island Garden (1894), the historic flower garden has long stood as a sanctuary for creative life. During the summer of 2025, Glovinski spent time in residence on the island, working directly from the reconstructed beds, making plein air studies while also participating in the daily care required to sustain the garden. The third is her personal garden, established following her recent relocation to southern Maine.
Across these sites, gardening became a powerful mode of attention, a deeply felt act of care, and a continuation of a shared history. Long interested in the behavior of everyday materials and systems of ordering, from weaving and patterning to indexing and accumulation, Glovinski has made the cultivation and study of gardens the foundational discipline of her practice.
Central to the exhibition are acrylic paintings on canvas that interpret the gardens while also functioning as intimate portraits of the artist’s connection to cultivating these spaces. The works depict moments of nurturing seedlings, gathering flowers, watering, and catching her own shadow among the plants. Through washy, gestural brushwork, each painting evokes both the physical environment and the embodied experience of fleeting golden moments spent inside the garden.
Several large-scale, shaped, wall-based works extend a long-standing series in which magnified representations of pressed flowers move between representational painting and sculptural form. From a distance, the works read as botanical specimens rendered with precision; up close, surfaces loosen into washes and gestures of paint. A related group of framed paintings presents pressed flowers at true scale on herbarium paper, the archival material traditionally used to mount botanical specimens. Together, these works form a speculative herbarium that merges scientific classification with painterly interpretation.
In the Field Folio series, Glovinski combines paint and cut paper to create small meadow-like compositions that burst with tangled blades of grass outward from a textless page. Without a fixed horizon, these works hold a specific point of view, looking down, the way we look at a small plant in the ground, or a book, or a phone: immersed.
Before these works could exist, the gardens themselves had to be built and tended. By absorbing their cycles of cultivation, Glovinski has shaped a reciprocal practice where attention, care, and painting converge, allowing this luminous exhibition to emerge.
Carly Glovinski (b. 1981, Dover, New Hampshire) makes work rooted in observations of her surrounding environment, and a curiosity about natural and human-made systems. The elements of time and place are often embedded in work that embraces a slip in perception and employs a wide range of materials. Glovinski lives and works in Maine, where she tends to an ongoing living work, Wild Knoll Foundation Garden. Her installation, Almanac, is on view at Mass MoCA through 2026. Her three-story mosaic, Opelske, is on permanent view in the Boston Seaport. She has been awarded residencies at Shoals Marine Lab in 2025, Kenyon College in 2024, Surf Point Foundation in 2021, and the Canterbury Shaker Village in 2020, and grants from the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and the Blanche Colman Trust. Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions both nationally and internationally and has been published or reviewed in publications including, The Boston Globe, Two Coats of Paint, Colossal, New American Paintings, ArtMaze Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and is held in the collections of Farnsworth Art Museum, Colby Museum of Art, Fidelity Corporation, and Cleveland Clinic, among others. She received her BFA from Boston University in 2003.
