Midday at the Museum - An afternoon with Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum
- Aubrey
- Feb 4
- 6 min read
Deep within the concrete walls of a maximum security prison, mycology is taught to inmates who are eager to learn. Just two hours north of New York City, tucked away in the Catskill Mountains, Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian (Patty) and other members of the Bard Prison Initiative offer full college credits to those behind bars. This is just one way that Patty, the Curator of Mycology for New York State, shares her love and expertise of mushrooms with the world while trying to make it a brighter place along the way.
Early Life
Patty grew up in Putnam County, NY and had plenty of unstructured free time in the woods as a child. There she established a deep connection with nature, but her love for mushrooms was not yet realized. She was first infatuated with the swamp and the creatures that inhabit this mysterious ecological niche. She was drawn to organisms that were unsavory or less than in the eyes of some.
It wasn’t until she took a master naturalist class with George Hudler, author of Magical Mushrooms, Mysterious Molds, when Patty fell in love with fungi. Her focus narrowed further while she was at the La Selva research station in Costa Rica as a biology student at Wheaton College. The library there had books on all sorts of the organisms you’d find in the jungle, but no books on fungi. She was struck by that and realized how modern science was still grasping the basic understanding of fungi. This moved her to be a taxonomist and continue to give order to the unknown.
She went on to get her Ph.D in Forest Pathology & Mycology at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry (ESF). From ESF, she went out to Indiana to do post-doc work at Purdue where she studied rusts with Dr. Kathy Aime. Just a few years ago, she came back east and served as a visiting professor at Bard College just north of Poughkeepsie, NY. That’s where she became involved with the Bard Prison Initiative.
Mycology Behind Bars
Now to address the lede that I buried. The Bard Prison Initiative (BPI) is around 25 years old and is regarded as one of the exemplary programs for educational initiatives in prisons. Most prisons have a wing that’s a dedicated educational space, but to be able to get a college degree (and in some cases, multiple) is a rare opportunity. Inmates have to apply to get into the program, and like regular admissions to Bard, it’s fairly competitive. These are legitimate degrees, there’s no asterisk because they’re in prison. The courses are as rigorous as they would be on the main campus.
In addition to mycology, Patty has taught classes on ecology, evolution, and diversity of life. BPI also offers humanities courses and has a debate team that competes against (and beats) schools such as Harvard, Cambridge, Brown and West Point — toting an all-time record of 14-4 (Reference 1).
The caveat is that it can be difficult to administer some of the biology classes since the classroom consists of a chalkboard, desks, and concrete walls. Certainly no Bunsen burners and Erlenmeyer flasks. Any digital media needs to be submitted and screened a month in advance. Once the class gets rolling, though, Patty says there’s not much of a different dynamic than teaching at Bard’s main campus. You’ve got your star students and those that are less enthused.
What does a mycology class behind bars look like? Well, Patty presents the class with hundreds of mushroom pictures (pre-screened by the state, of course) and gives them all Tim Baroni’s Mushrooms of the Northeastern United States and Eastern Canada for them to practice their identification skills. Each week students were tasked with identifying and then drawing a different species. Honestly, I think a lot of us would pay for that sort of curriculum. She now even has a research paper in the works, co-authored with students, that will describe a new species of mushroom. These are inmates turned students turned scientists.
She also exposes her students to practical applications of mycology to hopefully inspire them for life after prison. She shows them videos like cordyceps cultivation with William Padilla-Brown, and many leave the class inspired to start their own mushroom business when they get out. She imbues an aspect of mycology that I was captured by when I first started learning about mushrooms — it’s a very open and inviting community. We’re all here to learn and grow. If you’re interested in your Amanitas, no one’s going to hold your priors against you.
Life In and Out of the Museum
BPI is an extracurricular, altruistic endeavor for Patty. Her full-time role is as Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum in Albany. She got to the museum around eighteen months ago and has been busy ever since. Her position hadn’t been staffed since 2005 so there was plenty of work to be done.
The museum houses over 90,000 fungal specimens and the entirety of Charles Horton Peck’s original collection, all dried and labeled. Peck was the state botanist in the late 1800s but focused mostly on mushrooms (which were considered plants until 1969), describing over 2,700 new species throughout his 40+ year tenure. Every specimen can be loaned out to other institutions or scientists if they’re researching a particular mushroom, want to sequence DNA, or just look at morphological characteristics of older specimens. While the majority of specimens are from New York State, collected by Peck and his predecessors, there are a fair amount of fungi from the tropics housed in the herbarium as well.
However, curating this collection is just one facet of her role at the museum. Research is also an element and Patty is able to travel all over the state to survey and collect mushrooms. In addition to one-off trips, she conducts a weekly survey of a forest in Rensselaer County where she surveys the mushrooms present and collects those that are notable for the herbarium.
The museum recently asked her to put together a new exhibition centered on mushrooms. The exhibition, opening in April, will focus not just on mushrooms, but on Mary Banning as well. Banning was a colleague of Peck’s who in her own right described 23 new fungal species and was a phenomenal fungal illustrator, but unfortunately died in obscurity as women in science did not receive any accolades at the time. Banning’s story is analogous to that of fungi: overlooked and underappreciated. Patty will look to give both their proper due with the exhibit. The New York Mycological Society is co-hosting a reception for the free exhibit on April 4th at 7pm (check the website for details when they’re posted).
Becoming an Author
If that’s not enough activity, Patty is scheduled to publish her first book in May. Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature is a collection of essays on different organisms and ecological systems that have been marginalized, misunderstood, or just flat-out deemed unworthy. The book isn’t just about mushrooms; she dives into other stories about snakes, swamps, and eels while weaving in narrative of her own life experiences.
In Forest Euphoria, Patty explains how the idea of “the binary” — whether in sexuality, science, or other facets of life — is often over-simplistic and we as a society could benefit from broadening our horizons. Her overall message in the book is that our lives will be better if we love nature and see ourselves in it. We’re all in this together, gang. Click here to order an advanced copy of the book.
This Mushroom Monday feature doesn’t account for all of Patty’s endeavors (she also co-founded the International Congress of Armenian Mycologists), but even just a glimpse into her life exposes how fungi can truly change the world. Dr. Kaishian intertwines her passions for mycology and social justice as a unique expression of herself, and through that authenticity, is making strides in revolutionary ways.
Hope that expanded your boundaries of the different realms in which mycelium can wind their way, and let’s all draw inspiration from another impressive mushroomer,
Aubrey
Bonus mastodon picture from the museum:
References: