ALBANY, New York — Tree roots have long served as a useful metaphor for articulating connections between people, places, and ideas. And yet, it’s a limited structure. In the 1980s, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari famously offered the rhizome as an alternative, suggesting instead a vast organic network of connections that can wrap into or shoot outward from themselves at any point, refusing the linear and binary bifurcations that tree-like structures imply.
Exploring the exhibition Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms, currently on view at the New York State Museum and organized by Curator of Mycology Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, I was struck by the rich potential that fungi offer as another metaphor to describe the world and our relations within it: with their far-reaching and many-tendriled hyphae or filaments linking them with other organisms, their closely held interdependence on other species, and their extraordinary variety. They also provide a fertile framework for considering the subtle but determined ways that Mary Banning planted herself in the substrate of a field in which she was largely unacknowledged during her lifetime, but that we can better comprehend today, just as our understanding of mushrooms is beginning to expand.
Banning was born in Maryland in 1822, and lived there for the vast majority of her 80 years. As an adolescent, she lost her father, a military officer who served in the Maryland House of Delegates. Around a decade later, her mother and sister became chronically ill, and she took on their care. Despite her family obligations, Banning pursued a growing interest in mycology (the study of fungi), amassing a personal library and herbarium from which to learn. In the late 1860s, she began to observe, describe, and paint in detailed and idiosyncratic watercolors all the fungi of Maryland for a volume that was never published, save the single manuscript she produced herself.
The manuscript pages, with their watercolors and her hand-penned descriptions of each species, make up the primary material on display in Outcasts. These are not the finely wrought illustrations of famous botanical artists like Pierre-Joseph Redouté or Banning’s contemporary Marianne North. Instead, they are diligent and highly evocative studies by a self-taught scientist and artist who was largely kept out of the field because of her gender and lack of degrees. But make no mistake — Banning was engaged in the real work of a mycologist. Not only was she one of the first women to put a name to an entire group, or taxon, of fungus, but a full 23 of the 175 species she records in the manuscript were unknown in the field at the time, and thanks to her three-decade-long epistolary friendship with the eminent mycologist Charles H. Peck, who served for nearly 50 years as the New York State Botanist, some of her findings were published in his 1871 Annual Report.
Notably, the exhibit also reveals that specimens Banning gathered in her fieldwork are in the museum’s mycological collection. It’s an incredibly important repository, not just because it contains over 90,000 species, but also because it holds many historical specimens from the period when figures like Banning and Peck began their work. In other words, scientists today still make use of her research, holding and examining the very same mushrooms that she located, preserved, and packed away for posterity, and building on the taxon she defined.
For me, rather than the anarchic energy of Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking, there’s something about the mutuality on which fungi rely, and their wildly divergent forms and mating types, that feels more apropos as a metaphor for the world today. And I can’t help but think that Banning’s life and work bear this idea out in telling ways, as she embedded herself in the fabric of the field, whether or not others could fully grasp her presence at the time.
Outcasts: Mary Banning’s World of Mushrooms continues at the New York State Museum (222 Madison Avenue, Albany, New York) through January 4, 2026. The exhibition was curated by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.
