March 17—April 25, 2025
About the exhibition
About the artists
Events
About the exhibition
Held in conjunction with the opening of the new Seed Library at Fenwick, Cross-Pollination explores the relationship between the earth’s natural elements and the creative process, featuring works by four Mason faculty members. This exhibition draws on both the literal and metaphorical meanings of cross-pollination, emphasizing the continuous exchange between the organic world and artistic creation. Like cross-pollination itself—an act of transformation, adaptation, and renewal—these works reflect the earth’s beauty while underscoring the urgency of its preservation.
Through diverse processes and materials, the artists in Cross-Pollination reveal the intricate connections between nature and artistic expression. Jeffrey Kenney’s sunflower prints, created using sunlight and yellow pigment ink, reflect the dependency of sunflowers on the sun. Stephanie Benassi’s exploration of abandoned bee houses and photogram prints captures both the fragility and decay of pollinators. Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz’s botanical drawings, inspired by the flora of Puerto Rico, celebrate the richness of plant life and its deep cultural ties to the land. Elizabeth Hall’s Viriditas series explores the connection between plants and human bodily systems, with each herb visually transferring its healing power into her work.
This exhibition’s connection to the new Seed Library reinforces that both initiatives serve as spaces of exchange, where knowledge, resources, and creative ideas take root and spread. Just as seeds carry the potential for new ecosystems, these artworks carry forward conversations about the environment, our bodies, and the ways human intervention shapes the natural world. Cross-Pollination invites viewers to consider their own role in these cycles, encouraging a deeper awareness of the delicate and dynamic relationships that sustain life.
About the artists
Cross-Pollination features work from four current Mason faculty members.
Stephanie Benassi, stephaniebenassi.com
Stephanie Benassi is a conceptual artist working primarily with photography. She uses photographic images and processes to conceptually engage the contradictions, limitations, and material conditions inherent to the photographic medium. Specific research, travel, and tactile experimentation are developed into gallery installations that incorporate a range of materials and methods including documentary photographs, chemical process-based works, collages, and sculptural elements that together create complex visual and material experiences. Her work draws from a diverse photographic vocabulary and an engagement with the medium’s various historical trajectories in genres such as landscape, forensics, Victorian memento mori, occult, and camera-less photography. Through these diverse refences, materials, and stylistic elements, Benassi investigates the ways in which the material conditions and specialized languages of the photographic medium shape our relations to history, power, and the production of images.
Elizabeth Hall, sporastudios.org
Elizabeth Hall is an artist, herbalist, and educator who lives with her family in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. Elizabeth holds a BA in painting and drawing from Meredith Collage and an MFA in painting from East Carolina University, with studies abroad including printmaking in Florence, classical oil painting in Paris, and multimedia work in Poland, Estonia, Russia, Belize and Guatemala. Elizabeth’s international exhibition record includes venues such as the Betty Rymer Gallery, Art Institute of Chicago; FADO Performance Art Center, Toronto; and the Internationales Waldkunst Zentrum (IWZ), Darmstadt. Elizabeth has worked as a commission artist for over two decades, specializing in portraiture for clients throughout the United States. With two decades of teaching experience, Elizabeth has served as a professor on the faculty of several institutions teaching courses in Art History, Design, Drawing, and Painting. Elizabeth currently teaches drawing in George Mason University’s School of Art.
Elizabeth’s artwork has embraced a diversity of approaches and media over the years, yet a consistent thematic thread in much of her work is the exploration of the duality of injury and healing. Elizabeth’s interest in the art of herbalism began during her graduate studies in Belize where she learned the importance of plant medicines and the urgency of protecting both the plants and the cultures that pass on the knowledge of them. In the old market of Belize City, Elizabeth met revered herbalist Barbara Fernandez, who stressed the relevance of using all of the senses to know and understand plant medicines. This insight and appeal to the senses became an inspiration for Elizabeth to study the art of herbalism and a welcomed opportunity to combine the psychological and spiritual healing power of visual art with an artform for healing the body. Elizabeth’s formal herbalism studies include Foundations of Medicinal Herbalism and Herbal Apothecary with Teresa Boardwine, RH(AHG), and The Forgotten Energetics of Traditional Western Herbalism, the Six Tissue States and Diagnostic Skills with Matthew Wood, RH(AHG).
Jeffrey Kenney, jeffreykenney.art
Jeffrey Kenney is Associate Curator for Mason Exhibitions and the School of Art. Kenney is responsible for coordination of art exhibitions and related programming for the Gillespie Gallery of Art in the Art and Design Building (Fairfax), the Buchanan Atrium Gallery at Buchanan Hall (Fairfax), and the Buchanan Partners Gallery at the Hylton Performing Arts Center (Manassas).
At the center of Kenney’s curatorial philosophy is attention and sensitivity to the art, ideas, and events that are shaping our collective experience in the first decades of the 21st century. He believes that art exhibitions in the academic setting should responsibly explore and contextualize the issues that concern and affect the individual lives of students and their communities, while providing accessible connection points to the diverse art practices, perspectives, and social currents that inform contemporary visual culture.
Kenney’s recent curatorial highlights at Mason include: Wickerham & Lomax: Selection, surveying ten years of the duo’s output including sculptural tableaux and large-scale computer generated paintings that explore the impact of digital technologies on the formation of queer subjectivity and social spaces; Angela Washko: Poking the Hive, focusing on the artist’s virtual performances and feminist interventions in multiplayer online role-playing video games; Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz & Hyun Gi: Signals That Invoke 100 Years of Blue Milk, a two person show of paintings and video installation revolving around the artists’ shared concerns with the generative power of folklore, personal memoir and socio-political histories in their respective Indigenous/Mexican American and Korean/American backgrounds; and Katherine Thompson: Raw Material, showcasing the Mason School of Art alumnus’s recent self-portrait photographs that embrace the visual language of product and fashion advertisements while posing questions about the troublesome connections between consumerism and race in America.
Kenney received an MFA from VCU and a BFA Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. He has been with the School of Art since 2013 and has been coordinating exhibitions for galleries and other venues since 2004. He has also taught studio art courses for Mason and Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU).
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz, raimundiart.com
Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work pulls from 17th and 18th-century European portraiture, comic books, sketch comedy, folkloric dance, and installation to address race, bias, trauma, and healing. Her work has been featured in venues such as The Momentary, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum of Arts and Design, Garage Museum Moscow, Orlando Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; and at the Manifesta and Performa biennials. Numerous media outlets, including Art in America ArtNews, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post have covered her work. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently serves as a board member for the College Art Association where she’s committed to considering art as scholarship.
Events
- Seed Library Opening: Monday, March 31, 11AM-2PM
- SUB I lawn (in front of Student Union Building)
- Interested in growing your own food? Want to get into gardening? Join us for the opening day of the Seed Library at Fenwick Library! The Seed Library is a Patriot Green Fund project meant to encourage gardening and growing your own food at home. Patrons take seeds from the library, grow them, then harvest, dry, and return the seeds.
- Botanical Cyanotypes: Workshop with Liz Johnson
- Thursday, April 10, 1:30-3:30PM
- Fenwick Library Atrium + outside Fenwick library
- Celebrate the beauty of plants and photography! Join us to learn about cyanotypes, a special photographic process that uses sunlight, and make your own prints using botanical pictures, seeds, or plant matter.
- Learn more and register here.
- Seed Papermaking: Workshop with Forrest Lawson
- Wednesday, April 16, 1:30-4:00PM
- School of Art Building, Room 1009
- Come make your own plantable paper! Participants will create their own handmade cotton paper, imbued with wildflower seeds, which can be planted or used for artistic projects.
- Registration required but free: learn more & sign up here.
