ALBANY, New York — Tree roots have lengthy served as a helpful metaphor for articulating connections between folks, locations, and concepts. And but, it’s a restricted construction. Within the Nineteen Eighties, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously provided the rhizome in its place, suggesting as an alternative an enormous 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 indicate.
Exploring the exhibition Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms, at present 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 carefully held interdependence on different species, and their extraordinary selection. In addition they present a fertile framework for contemplating the delicate however decided ways in which Mary Banning planted herself within the substrate of a discipline during which she was largely unacknowledged throughout her lifetime, however that we are able to higher comprehend immediately, 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 (photograph 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 army officer who served within the Maryland Home of Delegates. Round a decade later, her mom and sister turned chronically ailing, and she or he took on their care. Regardless of her household obligations, Banning pursued a rising curiosity in mycology (the research of fungi), amassing a private library and herbarium from which to study. 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 one 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 will not be the finely wrought illustrations of well-known botanical artists like Pierre-Joseph Redouté or Banning’s modern Marianne North. As a substitute, they’re diligent and extremely evocative research by a self-taught scientist and artist who was largely saved out of the sector 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 have 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 practically 50 years because the New York State Botanist, a few of her findings have been revealed in his 1871 Annual Report.
Kind specimens on view in Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms on the New York State Museum, Albany (photograph 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 in addition 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 immediately 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, fairly than the anarchic power of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic pondering, there’s one thing concerning the mutuality on which fungi rely, and their wildly divergent types and mating varieties, that feels extra apropos as a metaphor for the world immediately. And I can’t assist however assume that Banning’s life and work bear this concept out in telling methods, as she embedded herself within the material of the sector, whether or not or not others may totally grasp her presence on the time.
“Interpendencies” function 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 (photograph Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Fossil specimen of the traditional Devonian fungi “Prototaxities,” displayed on the foot of a mural illustrating what it could have appeared 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 (photograph 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) (photograph 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 (photograph Alexis Clements/Hyperallergic)
Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues on the New York State Museum (222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York) by means of January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.
