Hudson Valley Seed Company got its start as an heirloom seed exchange program organized by Gardiner librarian K Greene that proved enormously popular and quickly became the center of a discourse around local food, community health, culture, and history in 2004. In 2008, Greene and his partner, Doug Muller, took the seed library digital and the response was phenomenal, leading them to found the company in 2009. Hudson Valley Seed Company’s heirloom and open-pollinated seed business continues to flourish.
Around that same time, Muller and Greene invited 14 artists, all friends of theirs, to illustrate 14 seed packs. Every year since, the outfit has released an Art Pack collection following an open call to artists. Twelve artists are normally chosen to create artwork for a dozen seeds each year. “The Art Packs are a way of telling the story of the seed in a less conventional way,” says Jen Kelly, seed art coordinator at Hudson Valley Seed Company. She spoke with me shortly after the February deadline for submissions for the 2022 collection. “This was a record-breaking year for submissions,” says Kelly. “We received over 1,000 from across the country.”
More than a dozen of the Art Pack artists will be represented in the exhibition “Agriculture in the Hudson Valley” at Cornell Creative Arts Center in Kingston, which opens on March 4 and runs through April 29. The show is organized by Shanna Nigro, assistant director for the Cornell Creative Art Center and The Arc Mid-Hudson Foundation, who is a fifth-generation farmer herself. “It’s important to shed light on the historic agriculture business in the Hudson Valley,” says Nigro.
“And this time of year is perfect for an exhibition like this. You spend many months in the winter dreaming of your spring garden and what you hope to have. You spend hours researching crops and thinking about what you’ll plant. This show theme was a natural choice.”
In addition to the Hudson Valley Seed Company artists, including a number of local ones—Paola Bari, Cal Patch, and April Warren among them—Cornell Creative Arts Center posted its own call for agriculture-themed art submissions, and the exhibit will feature 20 other local artists. A number of free workshops will also be offered to the community at the intersection of agriculture and art, like making plantable seed paper from recycled paper and seeds.
There will be an opening reception for “Agriculture in the Hudson Valley” on March 4 from 2-5pm with music and refreshments at the Cornell Creative Arts Center in Kingston.
This article appears in March 2022.
