ALBANY, New York — Tree roots have lengthy served as a helpful metaphor for articulating connections between individuals, locations, and concepts. And but, it’s a restricted construction. Within the Eighties, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously supplied the rhizome instead, suggesting as a substitute an unlimited natural community of connections that may wrap into or shoot outward from themselves at any level, refusing the linear and binary bifurcations that tree-like buildings suggest.
Exploring the exhibition Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms, presently on view on the New York State Museum and arranged by Curator of Mycology Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, I used to be struck by the wealthy potential that fungi provide as one other metaphor to explain the world and our relationships inside it: with their far-reaching and many-tendriled hyphae or filaments linking them with different organisms, their intently held interdependence on different species, and their extraordinary selection. In addition they present a fertile framework for contemplating the refined however decided ways in which Mary Banning planted herself within the substrate of a discipline by which she was largely unacknowledged throughout her lifetime, however that we will higher comprehend at present, simply as our understanding of mushrooms is starting to develop.
Set up view of Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany, displaying three botanical illustrations by Banning (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Banning was born in Maryland in 1822, and lived there for the overwhelming majority of her 80 years. As an adolescent, she misplaced her father, a navy officer who served within the Maryland Home of Delegates. Round a decade later, her mom and sister grew to become chronically unwell, and he or she took on their care. Regardless of her household obligations, Banning pursued a rising curiosity in mycology (the examine of fungi), amassing a private library and herbarium from which to be taught. Within the late 1860s, she started to look at, describe, and paint in detailed and idiosyncratic watercolors all of the fungi of Maryland for a quantity that was by no means revealed, save the only manuscript she produced herself.
The manuscript pages, with their watercolors and her hand-penned descriptions of every species, make up the first materials on show in Outcasts. These usually are not the finely wrought illustrations of well-known botanical artists like Pierre-Joseph Redouté or Banning’s modern Marianne North. As an alternative, they’re diligent and extremely evocative research by a self-taught scientist and artist who was largely stored out of the sphere due to her gender and lack of levels. However make no mistake — Banning was engaged in the true work of a mycologist. Not solely was she one of many first ladies to place a reputation to a whole group, or taxon, of fungus, however a full 23 of the 175 species she information within the manuscript had been unknown within the discipline on the time, and due to her three-decade-long epistolary friendship with the eminent mycologist Charles H. Peck, who served for almost 50 years because the New York State Botanist, a few of her findings had been revealed in his 1871 Annual Report.
Sort specimens on view in Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Notably, the exhibit additionally reveals that specimens Banning gathered in her fieldwork are within the museum’s mycological assortment. It’s an extremely essential repository, not simply because it incorporates over 90,000 species, but additionally as a result of it holds many historic specimens from the interval when figures like Banning and Peck started their work. In different phrases, scientists at present nonetheless make use of her analysis, holding and inspecting the exact same mushrooms that she positioned, preserved, and packed away for posterity, and constructing on the taxon she outlined.
For me, slightly than the anarchic vitality of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic considering, there’s one thing in regards to the mutuality on which fungi rely, and their wildly divergent types and mating varieties, that feels extra apropos as a metaphor for the world at present. And I can’t assist however suppose that Banning’s life and work bear this concept out in telling methods, as she embedded herself within the cloth of the sphere, whether or not or not others might absolutely grasp her presence on the time.
“Interpendencies” characteristic wall in Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany (courtesy New York State Museum, Albany, NY)
Wax mannequin in Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Fossil specimen of the traditional Devonian fungi “Prototaxities,” displayed on the foot of a mural illustrating what it could have seemed like rising in a late Silurian to late Devonian interval (420–370 million years in the past) terrestrial setting (courtesy New York State Museum, Albany, NY)
Mary Banning, “Polyporus beattiei” (late 1800s), watercolor on paper (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany. Foreground, “Cantharellus floccosu” (1877) (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany, displaying NYSM’s wax mannequin assortment (picture Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues on the New York State Museum (222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York) via January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.
