As a senior art history major at the galleries, I had the honor of curating a landscape exhibition to accompany local artist Elizabeth Bradford’s stunning exhibition Warp Weft Water Weeds.
The show takes a look at landscapes, both historical and contemporary, to contemplate who creates and is included in the landscapes presented. Whether through imagined worlds or attempts at the “real,” artists use landscapes as a medium to hint at deeper issues of identity, inclusion, and ancestry.
Curatorial Statement
The natural environment, with its shades and hues, beauty and monstrosity, has been an inspiration for humans since the beginning of time. The tradition of painting landscapes has persisted through changes in style and taste. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Western artists vied for approval from the Paris Salon and the Académie des Beaux-Arts, where strict juries accepted only what they deemed worthy as “fine art.” Until the mid-19th century, the only landscapes admitted into the Salon used landscape as a backdrop for historical or allegorical scenes. Artists of the Barbizon and Boston schools favored the romanticized landscape, usually devoid of human life. Contemporary artists continue to innovate and draw from a changing landscape, especially in response to climate change, wars, and human intervention.
The Van Every/Smith Galleries hold a robust collection of landscapes, ranging from the Barbizon and Boston schools to contemporary abstractions. This exhibition includes both real and imagined landscapes, and explores how the genre of landscape can be used to address identity, personal hopes, and political warnings. Some artists have depicted real locations, such as the Forêt de Fontainebleau, the Afghan countryside, and Jamaican coastline. Other artists conjure worlds through bold color and composition, from Natvar Bhavsar’s abstract invocation of the Holi festivals of his youth to Katie St. Clair’s naturally derived colorscapes. Although the majority of these scenes are devoid of human figures, each artist’s choice to romanticize, disfigure, or complicate the landscape reveal deeper truths about who gets to exist in each setting.
The earliest works in the show are from the Barbizon School, a group of late 19th-century Parisian artists who gathered at the Forêt de Fontainebleau and felt that non-historical landscapes belonged in the Salon. To create a new genre of landscape, they combined the material and the imagined, painting en plein air, or in nature. In 1849, portrayals of the romanticized natural world outside of the historical landscape were accepted into the Salon for the first time, leading the way for landscape to be taken seriously in the art historical canon.
The Galleries have an extensive collection of Barbizon paintings, in which artists depicted scenes devoid of human presence, an idealistic and romantic vision of the French countryside. It wouldn’t be until the late 19th century that artists began experimenting with abstracting the landscape. En plein air observation began to lose favor, with artists instead using abstraction and natural processes to create imagined worlds.
Richard Mayhew was a pioneer of the abstracted landscape. Of Native American and Black descent, Mayhew was not only inspired by his heritage but also the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s in New York. The result was dramatic “mindscapes” of Mayhew’s imagination and experience, composed with soft edges and bright colors. The Galleries have several of Mayhew’s sketches that deviate from the bold colors of his painted works and instead create layers of trees and fields that diffuse into blank, negative space. The works feel both real and mystical, familiar but fictional.
Kay WalkingStick is one of the most prophetic landscape artists of the past century. Of Cherokee descent, WalkingStick grew up admiring Hudson River School landscapes but found them far from realistic— the American landscape was never devoid of human life but rather had been inhabited by Indigenous peoples for millennia before colonization. In turn, her approach to landscape became to create abstracted and imagined scenes to connect to ancestral lands.
As a young graduate student, WalkingStick primarily worked in abstraction, taking the landscape out of the composition in exchange for bold marks and naturalistic tears. Later in her career she would begin pairing abstract works consisting of planes of color with recognizable landscapes to create diptychs. For Walkingstick, the abstracted works evoke her own personal emotions and feelings of a landscape, while the rendered landscape gives the viewer a familiar image to connect to. Her work bridges the soft and imaginative with the harsh and realistic.
Many contemporary artists have drawn upon the rich history of landscape to touch on such modern issues as war and violence. Liên Trương’s work draws inspiration from a variety of influences but uses these motifs to critique Orientalism and brutality against women. Her work Translatio Imperii depicts an Afghan landscape in a manner similar to that of Barbizon and Boston schools but blacked out with a lashing mark. In turn, Trương is able to use an imaginative and rendered landscape to show the harsh realities of American imperialist violence in the area. Trương even takes this symbolism to the frame, which although ornate like several of the frames in the Barbizon section of this exhibition, is completely painted in black as an extension of the interior darkness of the painting. In turn, both the image and its exterior frames are flattened into one plane.
Through the use of a common medium of landscapes, artists are able to both appropriate and complicate the idea of the “real” environment. The Barbizon School sought to paint the natural world romantically, but as art progresses, artists have found ways to use landscape to hint at bigger issues of violence and identity. In many ways, the idea of painting a landscape is inherently universalizing. Yet, the privileges and nuances of who is painting the landscape and who is included in the composed narrative demonstrates the fictitious nature of seemingly real landscapes.
To learn more about the exhibition, click here. A reception will be held on February 27th at 6:30 in the Smith Gallery.
– Sarah Willoughby ’25