The exhibition “Art to Landscape/Landscape to Art” features paintings and drawings by W. Gary Smith.

It opens on November 5, 2010, running through January 30, 2011, in the Church Exhibition Gallery, Lyman Plant House, the Botanic Garden, Smith College, College Lane, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Weaving together drawings, paintings, and sculptural installations with landscape design, W. Gary Smith creates artistic connections with the landscape. The use of color in his paintings and drawings is extraordinary and visitors will be transported into another world.

Smith (pictured, at right) will give a lecture, titled “From Art to Landscape: Unleashing Creativity in Garden Design”, at 7:30 p.m. November 5, 2010, in the Carroll Room, Campus Center, at Smith. A reception and booksigning follows at Lyman Plant House, with the Chrysanthemum Show illuminated and his exhibit on view.

Smith, one of North America’s leading landscape designers, specializes in botanical gardens and arboreta, as well as public art installations and private gardens, often weaving together local ecological and cultural themes. In his new book, From Art to Landscape, he explores the means that artists use — drawing, painting, sculpture, meditation, poetry, and dance — to create personal connections with the landscape that in turn enrich and inform garden design.

Advocating greater interest among landscape architects for public spaces that focus on plants and horticulture, Smith serves on the American Society of Landscape Architects Education Advisory Committee. He was formerly an Associate Professor of Landscape Design at the University of Delaware and was an adjunct faculty member at the Universities of Pennsylvania and Texas.

Smith has won awards for his designs of the Tropical Mosaic Garden at the Naples Botanical Garden in Florida, Peirce’s Woods at Longwood Gardens, Enchanted Woods at the Winterthur Museum and Country Estate and the Meadow Maze at the Tyler Arboretum. Recent work includes the new Santa Fe Botanical Garden, Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Master Plan and Children’s Garden, the Discovery Garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Therapeutic Garden at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens in Alabama.