711 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY

Judi Harvest’s Installation for Earth Day + Night, 2025

Lobby design by Peter Marino
A SHVO Property
EARTH DAY + NIGHT
Judi Harvest – Artist and Beekeeper

Curated by: Ilona Manka, SHVO

Judi Harvest is an artist and a beekeeper. She has spent the past 20 years creating work that exists at the intersection of beauty, science and urgency. Her art is not only about aesthetics — it is a call to awareness and action. The core of her practice is a commitment to making visible the invisible labor of pollinators — honeybees and bats — and to bringing attention to the fragility of life on Earth, day and night.

For the 2022 Venice Biennale, she created an exhibition titled Night and Day: Bats + Bees. This project is rooted in years of research, hands-on work and a deepening reverence for the 24-hour natural cycle of pollination — the intricate collaboration between bees and bats, both endangered, both essential and both often overlooked.

Night and Day: Bats + Bees is a natural evolution of a journey that began in 2006, when she started working with honeybees both as an artist and a beekeeper. That relationship led to her exhibition for the Venice Biennale in 2013 — DENATURED: Honeybees + Murano — a project that connected the fate of honeybees with the ancient glass blowing tradition of Murano.

Since then, her work has continued to grow organically — like the colonies she nurtures. For twelve years, the Honey Garden she created behind a Murano glass factory has thrived. That once-forgotten field has become a vibrant sanctuary, where bees pollinate their favorite flowers and produce more than 100 kilos of honey each year. In their buzzing harmony, they’ve helped to save not only themselves, but also the Murano glass factory where Harvest has worked since 1988, drawing in collectors, artists and awareness.

Honeybees are astonishing creatures. There are over 20,000 species of bees and honeybees alone pollinate more than 350,000 food crops that we depend on. Every third bite of food we eat relies on their labor. Without them, there is no honey, no almonds, no apples, no oranges— and no beauty in abundance.

Her work has long focused on the alarming phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder, which affects not just bees, but all colonies of beauty and craftsmanship.

Through her art, she translates their silent, vital work into a visual language. Harvest’s 2017 exhibition, PROPAGATION: Bees + Seeds, extended this exploration by creating the plants and seeds in the Murano Honey Garden, in handmade Murano glass, all one of a kind sculptures. As she followed the thread of research, she realized there was another half of the story. The day shift had its counterpart: the night shift, the bats.

They are the only flying mammals. They produce just one pup a year and they are the unsung heroes of nocturnal pollination. Bats pollinate over 500 crops that bloom at night — mangos, avocados, bananas, cashews, chocolate, coffee and agave for tequila. Without bats, these foods would disappear.

Bats also serve as natural pest control, consuming mosquitoes and other harmful insects. Their role in agriculture is so significant that preserving bat populations could save billions of dollars in pesticide use — and more importantly, protect our health and ecosystems from toxic chemicals.

And yet, bats are misunderstood, maligned and endangered. Like the honeybee, they’re quietly holding our world together.

Ecology as Collaboration — The 24-Hour Pollinators
From sunup to sundown, the bees work.
From sundown to sunup, the bats take over.

Together, they form a seamless, around-the-clock system of nourishment and renewal — a natural cycle of collaboration that supports life as we know it.

This is not simply biology. It is choreography. It is a symphony. It is collaboration at its highest level — and we must understand and respect the depth of their contribution to our planet.

Judi Harvest believes beauty can change perception and if we are to protect the things we love, we must first see them clearly.

I believe my responsibility as an artist is to bring awareness to these species — to illuminate their value through artworks, videos, writings and exhibitions. Each piece I create is a gesture of care, a message, a reminder.

There are many myths surrounding bees and bats. Her exhibitions seek to correct those misconceptions and offer an invitation — to plant, to learn, to protect and to experience first hand the beauty, quality and magic of art and nature working in harmony.

With every exhibition catalog Harvest includes a packet of seeds — small gifts that when planted, become havens for pollinators. Everything begins with a seed.

She published and illustrated a children’s book, The Mysterious Traveling Honeybees of Venice, which documents the uncanny intelligence of bees as they use the Venetian vaporettos to reach their favorite foraging spots. It’s a true story and a testament to how deeply entwined life and place can be.

She believes art alone cannot save these species — but it can inspire action.

A portion of all her art sales goes to support organizations such as:

Bat Conservation International, The Wild Bird Fund and Bees Without Borders

These groups are doing critical work on the ground, from rehabilitating injured pollinators to educating communities on how to live in harmony with nature.

Sometimes, saving a species can be as simple as installing a bat house. Our priceless pollinators are suffering from loss of habitat. Small thoughtful actions often create big results.

She believes art serves a purpose beyond the aesthetic. Art can reveal what’s hidden. It can elevate the essential. It can be a bridge between science and emotion, between knowledge and empathy.

Her work focuses on the beauty of life — in its smallest, most fragile forms — through which we become more attuned to what’s at stake. Honeybees and bats are more than pollinators; they are partners in our survival.

They are the pulse of the planet, the architects of abundance, the invisible workers, day and night.

Let us not take them for granted!