Robert Schultz’s “Reliquary” is an archival print made of an assemblage of items that includes a chlorophyll print, plant specimens, and a locust. This work was selected for exhibition in the “New Photography II” show at the Academy Art Museum, Easton, MD juried by Philip Brookman, Consulting Curator at the National Gallery of Art. The exhibition runs August 1 – October 7, 2020 and can be viewed online.

The leafprint portrait of Union soldiers was made in a leaf plucked from one of the Falmouth catalpas, a “witness” tree that stands in front of Chatham Manor, which was pressed into service as a field hospital during the Battle of Fredericksburg, December 1862. Poet Walt Whitman famously recorded seeing a heap of amputated limbs thrown from windows and piled beneath the tree. The twigs and other leaves in the assemblage had fallen from the tree (one of two witness catalpas in front of the manor house) and were collected by Schultz.