W&L’s Staniar Gallery Presents ‘This Earthen Door’ and ‘The Blue of Distance’ The combined exhibition, featuring the work of artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey, will open April 27, with an artist’s talk by Sobsey slated for May 13.

Staniar Gallery
April 16, 2026

Washington and Lee University’s Staniar Gallery is pleased to present “This Earthen Door” and “The Blue of Distance,” an exhibition combining two bodies of work from artists Amanda Marchand and Leah Sobsey. The exhibit will be on view from April 27 through May 29. Sobsey will also give an artist’s talk at 5:30 p.m. on May 13 in Wilson Concert Hall in the Lenfest Center for the Arts, followed by a reception.

The exhibition and reception events are free and open to the public.

The exhibition brings together “This Earthen Door” and “The Blue of Distance,” with both bodies of work rooted at the intersection of art and science. In “This Earthen Door,” Marchand and Sobsey draw from Emily Dickinson’s herbarium, a book of pressed plants the poet collected from her garden. The artists grew and created sun-prints from Harvard University’s digital archive of Dickinson’s specimens and, using the anthotype process, reanimated Dickinson’s floral archive and explored its symbolic resonance. “This Earthen Door” received the 2024 Lenscratch Art and Science Award.

Sobsey’s “The Blue of Distance” centers on herbaria and natural history collections, bridging art, science and the humanities while addressing loss, climate change and the ecological threats of the Anthropocene epoch. Paying homage to 19th-century botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (the first woman photographer and publisher of the first photographic book in 1843), Sobsey merges historical printing techniques with digital methods to connect past and present.

Marchand is an award-winning Canadian artist and educator living in New York. Her work focuses on the natural world using an experimental approach to photography, and she has exhibited internationally in solo and group shows. Sobsey is an award-winning artist and associate professor of photography at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her multidisciplinary photographic practice reaches into the fields of nature, science and design while experimenting with installations and textiles. Marchan and Sobsey met in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute, where they both studied photography. Their friendship grew due to their mutual interest in ecology and experimental photography.

This exhibition is made possible in part through the support of W&L’s Department of Art and Art History, Department of English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program.

For more information about the 2025-26 exhibition and programming schedule, visit Staniar Gallery’s website.

Staniar Gallery is located on the second floor of Wilson Hall, in Washington and Lee University’s Lenfest Center for the Arts. When the campus is open to the public, gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, please call 540-458-8861.