Julia Whitney Barnes

Creating Cyanotypes from Plants

Celestial Garden, © Julia Whitney Barnes

Julia Whitney Barnes will be speaking about her “Planting Utopia” series. She photographed and collected specimens from over 150 plants in the herb garden at Shaker Heritage Society, in Albany, NY. The Society is located at the site of the Shakers’ first settlement in the United States, known as Watervliet. Its herb garden pays homage to the significance of the Shakers’ herb and seed cultivation, as well as their medicinal herb industries. Whitney Barnes developed a series of works on paper and canvas with plants collected from the Shaker herb garden. Their compositions were based upon nineteenth-century Shaker Gift Drawings that were complex, divinely inspired revelations of spiritual perfection, often symmetrical and incorporating botanical elements. Julia often works with the cyanotype process, an early cameraless photographic process that was invented in 1842, the same time period when the gift drawings were being created. Through the use of the cyanotype medium, Whitney Barnes manipulates pressed plants from the herb garden along with intricately cut photographic negatives. For her works on paper, the unique blue and white prints are just the beginning and then she paints in many layers of watercolor, gouache and ink. Her Planting Utopia artist book was published in 2023.

About Julia Whitney Barnes

Julia Whitney Barnes
image © Sean Hemmerle Photography

Julia Whitney Barnes was born in Newbury, VT. She spent two decades in Brooklyn, NY before moving to the Hudson Valley in 2015.  She received a BFA from Parsons School of Design and a MFA from Hunter College. Whitney Barnes works in a variety of media including cyanotypes, watercolor, combined media works on paper, oil paintings, glass, ceramic sculptures, murals, site-specific installations and limited edition prints. She has exhibited widely in the United States and Internationally and is the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, the Winterthur Museum, the Gowanus Public Arts Initiative among others. In 2025 she created a wraparound exterior mural in Cambridge, MA based on local floral and inspired by the famous 19th century glass flowers in the collection of the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Julia’s book, Planting Utopia was published in 2023.