Art & Science: Mertz Library Building Galleries

Lina Puerta: Accumulated Wisdom

The often overlooked social and cultural impacts of the American food system and humans’ increasingly distant connections to the natural sources of our food are central themes of Lina Puerta: Accumulated Wisdom, a display of artwork by contemporary mixed-media artist Lina Puerta in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library Building Art Gallery.

A painting depicting a man's face partially obscured by large yellow leaves and green palm fronds

Hear from Colombian-American artist Lina Puerta

As she discusses Accumulated Wisdom, her gallery exhibit during Around the Table.

Recipe Roundtable

Add your own touch to the exhibition with recipe cards that we’ll display throughout the Library Rotunda. Prompts include drawing your favorite veggies, sharing your best “no recipe” recipes, and reflecting on the plants and ingredients that are culturally important to you and yours.
Sowing Resilience: Origins and Change in Agriculture

From plant specimens and products to agricultural tools and more, explore displays that demonstrate how humans have domesticated wild plants over millennia to create the food crops we rely on today. Then see how NYBG scientists and their colleagues around the world are working to understand the history—and future—of agriculture.
Steam, Sear, Sauté: 150 Years of American Vegetarian Cookbooks

Take a look into the 19th- and 20th-century landscapes of American cooking—and the place of vegetarian foods within it. Sentimental, aspirational, instructive, and even exclusionary, cookbooks are layered with meaning and give insight into the history of eating and cooking in a way few other sources can.

Bronx Foodways Oral Histories

“…la tierra es nuestro alimento / the land is our nourishment”

NYBG’s Bronx Foodways Oral Histories Project launched in 2021 to record and preserve first-hand food narratives from urban farmers and gardeners across the borough.

What began in the 1980s as a movement to reclaim abandoned city lots with the first NYBG Bronx Green-Up community gardens has since provided places of refuge and community, and most recently, essential food hubs during the pandemic. Yet, well before the pandemic, community gardeners were addressing food insecurity.

This oral history collection houses intimate first-hand portraits of these growers, volunteers, and activists—keeping their personal journeys alive for future generations, and underscoring the importance of neighborhood gardens as centers of food, heritage, community, and social justice.

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Lina Puerta: Accumulated Wisdom

Hear from Colombian-American artist Lina Puerta

Recipe Roundtable

Sowing Resilience: Origins and Change in Agriculture

Steam, Sear, Sauté: 150 Years of American Vegetarian Cookbooks

Bronx Foodways Oral Histories