On view in The Hyde’s Rotunda Gallery is a monumental photograph by Tanya Marcuse (American, b. 1964) from her series Woven. In Woven Nº 16, Marcuse integrates organic material collected from the land around her Hudson Valley studio with pomegranates—a fruit rich in symbolism, associated with both the Garden of Eden and the myth of Persephone, evoking themes of temptation, knowledge, death, and rebirth. Her photographs are filled with intricately assembled, jewel-like details of leaves, flowers, fruits, and berries, recalling the millefleur (“a thousand flowers”) decorations of medieval and Renaissance tapestries such as those in The Hyde’s Music Room. These natural elements become part of a pictorial and symbolic composition that Marcuse meticulously constructs over weeks—even months—on a specially designed wooden frame. Once complete, she photographs the tableau from a scaffold in her outdoor studio. The results are lush and painterly abstract compositions, covered end to end in immersive detail; but close inspection of these expressionistic photographs reveals the painstaking nature of Marcuse’s sculptural process as she builds tiny still lives and vignettes into her compositions. Bringing us into close conversation with the organic minutiae of the natural world, Marcuse’s poignant work addresses cycles of life and death, beauty and ruin, apocalypse, and climate disaster.

Marcuse earned her MFA from Yale University, where she was awarded the George Sakier Memorial Prize for Excellence in Photography. Her work is in public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman Museum, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her photography has been exhibited internationally at venues including the George Eastman Museum, the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, the Yale Art Gallery, Belfast Exposed Photography (Northern Ireland), the International Center of Photography, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. Her solo exhibition Tanya Marcuse: Laws of Nature at the Denver Botanic Garden Art Gallery (2023–2024) received critical attention in Hyperallergic.

Marcuse is the recipient a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Peter S. Reed Grant, an American Scandinavian Fellowship, two MacDowell Fellowships, and other awards. Her published books include Undergarments and Armor (Nazraeli Press, 2005), Wax Bodies (Nazraeli Press, 2012), Fruitless | Fallen | Woven (Radius Press, 2019), Ink (Fall Line Press, 2021), and Portent (Nazraeli Press, 2024).

Marcuse’s project Book of Miracles will be on view as a solo presentation at The Hyde Collection in 2027. She is based in New York’s Hudson Valley and teaches photography at Bard College.