Wallflowers is a dialogue across time centered on one of art history’s most underestimated genres: the floral still life. Bringing together eleven paintings from the Frye’s collection with newly commissioned wallpaper designs from eleven contemporary artists, the exhibition explores how artists from the nineteenth century to the present have turned to floral imagery as fertile ground for experimentation and reinvention.

The floral still life genre has proven remarkably durable, capable of holding centuries’ worth of ideas about beauty, impermanence, social class, and the shifting relationship between art and craft. Today, contemporary artists continue to redeploy the floral as both image and symbol: an unassuming bouquet is actually neither quaint nor static, but full of cultural memory, and a site for subversive social critique.

Structured to mimic the delights of navigating a cultivated garden, Wallflowers oscillates between discrete paintings and immersive patterns, between contemplation and exuberance. The selected works tell a broader story of industrialization, design, and modernism’s ongoing flirtation with the decorative, and celebrate the ability of artists to invest familiar forms with fresh meaning.