This summer, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens presents an indoor and outdoor exhibition featuring the work of American photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, who is renowned for both her celebrity portraits and fine art images. Lynn Goldsmith : Shared Light at the Downtown Sarasota campus combines stunning images of flowers with intimate portraits of Selby Gardens’ artist in residence – Patti Smith. The exhibition will be on view June 20 through September 13, 2026.
Over the past 50 years, Goldsmith’s photography has appeared on or between the covers of magazines including Life, Newsweek, Time, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, and many others. Her work is held in numerous private art collections and museums, including the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Seventeen books have been produced of Goldsmith’s images, including Flower by Rizzoli in 2000 and Patti Smith: Before Easter After, published as a Deluxe Limited Edition by Taschen in 2019 and as a trade edition by Rizzoli in 2024.
Lynn Goldsmith remarked, “At Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, my photographs of flowers linger in that brief territory between bloom and surrender, where beauty is never separate from fragility. In the Museum, the portraits and moments beside them suggest that our rela[onships unfold much the same way as flowers do — reaching toward light, opening in trust, bruised by [me, yet carrying an elegance that survives even in fading.”
Selby Gardens’ President & CEO, Jennifer Rominiecki, commented, “We are thrilled to welcome Lynn Goldsmith’s extraordinary work to Selby Gardens this summer. This exhibition beautifully bridges the worlds of fine art, music, and nature through Goldsmith’s evocative floral imagery and her personal portraits of Patti Smith, our artist in residence. Together, these works create a powerful dialogue about creativity, connection, and inspiration that we believe will resonate with our visitors in the immersive setting of our Downtown Sarasota campus.”
Lynn wrote the following poem which she introduces with these few words : “This poem I wrote gives the gist of pairing Patti with the flowers. This image informs how friendship and flowers share the same, if not similar, requirements for growth this is what it says”.
Flowers and friendship—
they ask the same thing of us: time,
and a kind of faith that feels like waiting
but isn’t.
You cannot pry them open.
No hand, no hunger,
can force the bloom
without wounding what was meant to become.
They rise on their own pulse—
slow, stubborn, reaching—
leaning toward whatever light they can find,
even if it’s only a crack in the day.
Kindness is their sun.
They turn toward it instinctively,
like something ancient remembering
how to live.
And yes, they suffer—
petals marked by weather,
stems bent by the long absence of touch.
There are seasons when nothing seems to grow,
when silence settles like dust.
Still—
give them water,
a little attention,
a name spoken softly in the dark—
and they return.
Not as they were,
but as they are now—
wilder, perhaps,
more honest in their color.
A true friend does not ask
for symmetry or perfection.
Just this:
that you come back.
That you kneel in the dirt of things,
hands open, unafraid
of what it takes to keep something alive.
And when it happens—
when the ordinary breaks open
and spills into color—
you feel it in your chest
like a small revolution:
that the most sacred things
are not discovered,
but tended—
grown in the quiet,
in the in-between,
in the fragile, defiant act
of staying.
– Lynn Goldsmith
About Marie Selby Botanical Gardens
Marie Selby Botanical Gardens provides 45 acres of bayfront sanctuaries connecting people with air plants of the world, native nature, and our regional history. Established by forward- thinking women of their time, Selby Gardens is composed of the 15-acre Downtown Sarasota campus and the 30-acre Historic Spanish Point campus in the Osprey area of Sarasota County, Florida. The Downtown Sarasota campus on Sarasota Bay is the only botanical garden in the world dedicated to the display and study of epiphytic orchids, bromeliads, gesneriads and ferns, and other tropical plants. There is a significant focus on botany, horticulture, education, historical preservation, and the environment. Selby Gardens’ Downtown Sarasota campus features the world’s first net positive energy botanical garden complex, generating more energy than it consumes. The Historic Spanish Point campus is located less than 10 miles south along Little Sarasota Bay. One of the largest preserves showcasing native Florida plants and active archaeology that is interpreted for and open to the public, it celebrates an archaeological record that encompasses approximately 5,000 years of Florida history. Marie Selby Botanical Gardens is a Smithsonian Affiliate and is also accredited by the American Alliance of Museums. Selby Gardens was selected for Time magazine’s annual list of the “World’s Greatest Places 2024.” For more information visit selby.org.
Shared Light: Lynn Goldsmith
On view June 20 through September 13, 2026
Downtown Sarasota campus
1534 Mound Street
Sarasota, FL 34236
www.selby.org
Event
Wednesday, June 17
5:30 to 7:30 p.m.
Enjoy an exclusive preview of Shared Light: Lynn Goldsmith. Join us to see this indoor and outdoor exhibition featuring the work of legendary American photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, who is renowned for both her celebrity portraits and fine art images. Goldsmith’s exhibition at the Downtown Sarasota campus will combine stunning images of flowers with intimate portraits of Selby Gardens’ Artist in Residence Patti Smith.
Lynn Goldsmith will be signing copies of her books, Flower and Before Easter After, which will also be available for purchase at the event.
