WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.- Reynolda House Museum of American Art will host a new exhibition titled “Heroes of Horticulture” July 31 through September 27, 2009 in the museum’s main gallery. The exhibition, organized by George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in collaboration with The Cultural Landscape Foundation of Washington, DC, includes photographs of trees and plantings, some of which are more than 100 years old, that have survived many of this nation’s most significant historic moments and experienced some of the nation’s greatest leaders.

In the summer of 2007, a curatorial team from George Eastman House invited 12 photographers to photograph the sites designated by the Cultural Landscape Foundation as their 2007 Landslide landscapes. Landslide landscapes are horticultural sites that have stood steadfast in the face of development and have consequently born witness to our nation’s heritage. The photographs made for this project record and illustrate the astonishing specimen trees, groves, allées, and plant collections throughout the United States that the Cultural Landscape Foundation deems unique and character-defining to a region. They also represent collaborations with artists that have yielded compelling interpretations of extraordinary places.

Hosting “Heroes of Horticulture” presents a unique opportunity to exhibit archival photographs of the early Reynolda landscape in concert with these national living landmarks. Both photographs and landscape architectural plans will be on view outside the main gallery. They are the work of prominent Philadelphia landscape architect and photographer Thomas Sears, who was engaged by both Katharine Reynolds and her daughter Mary Reynolds Babcock to design the plans for the grounds of the Reynolda estate.

Reynolda House received support for “Heroes in Horticulture” in part from The Ecology Wildlife Foundation.

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is one of the nation’s premier American art museums, with masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its permanent collection. Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features traveling and original exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings and other events. The museum is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the historic 1917 estate of Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband, Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolda House and adjacent Reynolda Gardens and Reynolda Village feature a spectacular public garden, dining, shopping and walking trails. For more information, please visit reynoldahouse.org or call 336.758.5150.