File:Nancy Macko Meadow 2015.jpg

Photograph by Nancy Macko, Meadow (digital output on vinyl, 12' X 36', 2015). The image illustrates a key later-career phase in Nancy Macko's art in the 1990s when she turned from multimedia projects focused on honeybee society to photographic works examining the life cycles of bee-attracting vegetables and flora and the complex reciprocal relationships between plants, bees and humans. As in this billboard-sized work from her "Botanical Portraits" suite (2014–15), these pieces often were punctuated with facets of particularized, magnified moments—e.g., a bee entering the recesses of a flower—revealing the complexity of dynamic organic processes. This work formed part of Macko's traveling exhibition, "The Fragile Bee," which was held at seventeen venues throughout the US between 2015 and 2023. This body of work and individual piece were publicly exhibited in prominent exhibitions and discussed by critics in major art journals and daily press publications.

Artist Nancy Macko. Copyright held by the artist.

Nancy Macko

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key later-career phase in Nancy Macko's art in the 2010s: her photography examining the life cycles of bee-attracting vegetables and flora and their complex reciprocal relationships with each other and humans. This work also confronted human behavior and the ecological threats to bees due to colony collapse disorder. These photographs captured plant life with a handheld macro lens that magnified details and emphasized simultaneously occurring dualities of growth and decay and beauty and fragility. These details were often conveyed within hexagonal facets (echoing key structural component of honeycombs) that were digitally inserted and created perceptual shifts of space, time and attention. These works largely comprised her "Intimate Spaces" series (2005–14) and "Botanical Portraits" suite (2014–15). Because the article is about an artist and her work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this key body of work, which brought Macko ongoing recognition through traveling exhibitions, coverage by major critics and publications and museum acquisitions. Macko's work of this type and this series is discussed in the article and by critics cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Nancy Macko, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.