Luca Molnar

You are invited to join in the creation of this piece by painting-by-numbers using the provided paint and brushes. Please squeeze a small amount of your selected color into a plastic container and fill in any section(s) with the corresponding number. Once finished, leave your brush in the water cup, and throw away your container. 

In 2024, the majority of Floridians (over six million, representing 57.2% of votes) voted yes on Amendment 4 to Limit Government Interference with Abortion. Despite this, the amendment failed, as it did not reach the 60% threshold for constitutional amendments championed by corporations and established in 2006. Florida’s near-total abortion ban remains in place. This piece reimagines the Florida state seal, which sits at the center of Florida’s state flag, for the people of Florida. Progressive politicians like Dr. Anna V. Eskamani, representative of state House District 42 and a 2027 Orlando mayoral candidate, seek to return democratic power in Florida to the people through organizations like Eskamani’s voter registration initiative, People Power for Florida. 

This new seal of Florida gives the Seminole woman featured in the original a collaborator in the form of a 1930s graduate of Florida A&M College’s Midwife Institute. During this time, midwives provided vital services to Seminole, Miccosukee, African-American, and poor white families who could not access hospital birth due to racial segregation and/or cost. The sabal palm in the back of the seal is replaced by a papaya tree, a natural abortifacient commonly grown in Florida and featured in Seed Garden. The scattered flowers are transmuted to peacock flowers, used by enslaved Black Americans in the South and Caribbean to resist forced reproduction (see the New York Botanical Garden’s 2020 exhibition Black Botany: The Nature of Experience). The steamboat is replaced with a Women on Waves ship. Women on Waves is a Dutch NGO founded by Dr. Rebecca Gomperts that provides reproductive services to women in countries that restrict their healthcare access. The ship sails women 12 miles offshore to international waters, where medication abortions can be performed legally.

William Hunter, one of the most prominent anatomists and man-midwives of the late eighteenth-century, published Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis ilustrata (Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus) in 1774. The elephant folio was composed over twenty-four years and included 34 plates that were life-size engravings of dissected pregnant women at various stages of gestation. The value of the book for medical and practical knowledge was its shockingly lifelike images that aimed to represent faithfully otherwise mysterious anatomical structures of female reproductive anatomy. The material conditions of production for the images were painstakingly slow and could only be conducted in the winter months to preserve the cadavers from decay. In a cold dissection theater, Hunter made incisions, exposing tissues to view and directing the artist Jan Van Rymsdyk to sketch the anatomical structures for a given image from real life. Rymsdyk then painted images from these sketches, handing off the paintings to the engraver Robert Strange. The artists rendered for posterity what the cuts of Hunter’s knife revealed; the anatomist, in making available what otherwise could not be seen, became author of a visual field. 

In total, 13 women’s bodies over 24 years became the subjects of this macabre collaboration. While Hunter gives no case history for any of these subjects, he delights in 1764 that “I was so fortunate as to meet with a gravid uterus.” The women, without names or stories, became the subjects of the book only as “gravid uteri” five of whom were full term while the other eight subjects were either incomplete gestations or abortions. At least one scholar speculates that Hunter in no way could have obtained these cadavers by natural means, implying that the surgeon or his assistants murdered these women. This seems to be unlikely. Maternal mortality rates in London for the 24-year period in conservative estimates totaled 3,600. For a well-connected man-midwife, 13 subjects would not be difficult to come by particularly given that conditions such as placenta praevia most often terminated in maternal exsanguination. 

Still, these women’s bodies are cut up and cut off from history – gravid uteruses rendered for posterity. Whether the women were patients who died from complications, women from poor houses or hospitals, or criminals, whose bodies might be repurposed by surgeons for medical knowledge, remains unknown. Some speculate that these women’s bodies might even have been obtained by grave robbers. Such speculations on these women’s stories speaks to the violence of the images themselves which is not only the cut of the surgeon’s knife, but systems of knowledge production that, in the name of medical progress and women’s health, harvest the bodies of those who never get a story, or even a name. The double-bind of reproductive health haunts Hunter’s gravid uteri: in the name of health, we cut up and cut off those bodies that are most disposable.

Aliza Shvart’s series Gravid means pregnant not dead revisits Hunter’s images and the artistic collaboration among anatomist, painter, and engraver. The images, pasted ink side down, are encased by two sheets of paper, recalling in the layering of paper the tissues that once encased the anatomical structures Hunter’s knife ripped open. In an act of reparation that cannot ever fully repair, the sheets veil the brutality of the images, of the surgeon’s cut and painter’s brush the engraver’s dowl, without forgetting the violence at work in these acts of representation that seize reproductive organs in the name of helping women.  

Wall text by Dr. Hannah Markley, Assistant Professor of English, Stetson University

Seed Garden is a collaboration located in the Brown Hall Teaching Garden on Stetson University’s campus in DeLand, Florida. Please take a wayfinding postcard and visit the garden in person. Collaborators include artist Landon Newton, the Hand Art Center (Natália da Silva), Creative Arts Department (Professor Luca Molnar), Sustainable Food Systems (Drs. Sarah Cramer and Wendy Anderson), students enrolled in Art About Reproductive Justice in fall 2024, and participants in the cyanotype and Seed Questions workshop for Values Day 2024. You are invited to add your own “seed question” to the collection in the bound book.

About: In collaboration with students, Seed Garden explores the possibilities inherent in a seed bank - potential pasts and futures. The installation incorporates a planted garden and hand-made signage meditating on our relationship with plants, reproductive healthcare, and time. All soils contain seeds. A soil’s seed bank incorporates seeds recently shed from nearby plants as well as older dormant seeds. The seed bank is a record of past and present plant communities. Although many seeds have a limited germination period of a few years, some can lay dormant for decades. Cyanotype plant labels feature plant identification, habitat details, medicinal properties, and responses to “Seed Questions” from students exploring reproductive healthcare and abortion access in the United States, one week after the November 2024 presidential election. Seed Garden offers both a record of our collective past as well as our possible futures.

Concept and Background: A garden is as much a site of care as it is a site of resistance and provocation. Seed Garden is approached through the lens of the ongoing project, The Abortion Herb Garden, a collaborative research-based installation by the artist, gardener, and independent researcher Landon Newton. Planted exclusively with abortifacient, emmenagogic, and contraceptive herbs, each plant included has historically been used for contraception, birth control, and/or abortion. This project calls attention to the history of plant medicine, herbal abortion, and the ways in which people have been managing their fertility throughout history. All plants within Seed Garden contain abortifacient, emmenagogic, and contraceptive properties as well as many others.

Disclaimer and Intention: By focusing on abortifacient, emmenagogic, and contraceptive plants, this project gestures to history, regeneration, cultivation, and community. These plants represent a history and practice of self-actualized bodily autonomy and stands in allyship with the herbal practitioners who use them. Abortion is an essential healthcare right, so too is the necessity of autonomy over one’s own body. Limiting, outlawing, and criminalizing abortion will not change these two fundamental truths. The abortifacient, emmenagogic, and contraceptive properties referenced in this project are for artistic purposes only and are not intended for medical use.   

Reproductive justice is an intersectional framework, one that links the fight for abortion access in the US to issues as wide-ranging as mass incarceration, paid family leave, and trans rights. Artist and professor Luca Molnar asked students enrolled in her fall 2024 Art About Reproductive Justice course to submit a published book on a topic significant to their own lives and interests that intersects with the reproductive justice framework for inclusion in The Byllye Avery Reproductive Justice Library. The namesake for this project is Byllye Avery, a DeLand native, reproductive justice pioneer, founder of both Florida’s first abortion clinic and the National Black Women’s Health Project, and Stetson University’s 2023 James A. Stewart Lecturer. The student-designed bookplates feature students’ writing about their book selection and can be found on the inside cover of each book in the library.