Alice Tangerini

In 1972, Tangerini was hired as a staff illustrator for the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History by American botanist Lyman Bradford Smith.

Aside from illustration, Tangerini also teaches classes on the subject and serves as a manager and curator for the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History.

[3] Following her graduation, Tangerini was hired by Smith to work as a staff illustrator for the Department of Botany at the National Museum of Natural History.

[4] Even though she frequently relies on pressed and dried herbarium specimens as her models, she does go on location to areas such as California, Hawaii, and Guyana to see the flora in their natural environment.

[3] She typically draws her specimen in black and white, with minimal shadow, and frequently places the light sources in the image's upper left corner.

[1][3][4] In 1980, she created a "one-man show of palm drawings" in the National Museum of Natural History and she curated the "North American Wild Flowers: Watercolors by Mary Vaux Walcott" exhibit in 1990.

[9] In the same year, scholars Theodore H. Fleming and W. John Kress thanked Tangerini in the preface of their book The Ornaments of Life: Coevolution and Conservation in the Tropics for her help with the cover and a figure included in the text.

Tangerini returned to work and, in addition to wearing an eyepatch, started to use a graphics tablet and Adobe Photoshop and relied more on digital technology to give her a clearer view of an image.

[14] Warren H. Wagner described her as the best artist in her field,[4] and the Smithsonian Associates called her a "leading contemporary practitioners" in botanical illustration.