The plant can be part of the artwork itself
Fred Tomaselli uses cannabis-related material within the surface of his art. His 1996 painting Split Stalk, held by the Whitney Museum of American Art, is catalogued as acrylic, polished resin, ephedra and hemp on plywood. The museum records a work measuring 54 by 72 inches.
Hemp is therefore more than a pictured leaf in this example: it belongs to the object’s physical construction. Resin holds the materials within a polished surface, bringing botanical matter into the same field as painted forms.
Collage joins natural and manufactured imagery
The Brooklyn Museum’s 2010–2011 survey described Tomaselli’s layered combinations of cut-out plants, birds, mouths and hands with paint, prescription pills and hallucinogenic plants. Images from field guides and magazines sit alongside physical objects.
These combinations create a world where scientific illustration, popular imagery and manufactured substances coexist. A botanical fragment can function simultaneously as a recognisable plant, a repeated visual shape and a material with cultural associations. The dense surface is built through arrangement and layering rather than through a single painted scene.
Southern California supplied a particular cultural setting
The Brooklyn Museum connects Tomaselli’s work with his upbringing near the southern Californian desert, the constructed realities of theme parks, and Los Angeles music and drug counterculture in the 1970s and 1980s. It also identifies gardening, kayaking and bird-watching among his interests.
SITE Santa Fe’s account describes hemp leaves, jimson weed and pills arranged into psychedelic patterns under resin. The resulting imagery links botanical collecting with suburban spectacle. Cannabis appears within a larger vocabulary of plants, medicines, nature and altered perception.
Museums place these works within contemporary painting
MoMA lists works including John 5/22/59 from 1994, Bird Blast from 1997 and Passerines Finches from 2003. The Brooklyn survey ran from October 2010 to January 2011, while the Whitney’s collection entry documents Split Stalk as a painting.
These records show several roles for cannabis in contemporary art: literal material, botanical image and reference to counterculture. Tomaselli’s example is distinctive because those roles meet in the same layered objects.
Sources & further reading
General information, not individual legal or medical advice.