| For more information about this article or gallery, please call the gallery phone number listed in the last line of the article, "For more info..." |
February Issue
2011
Ackland Art Museum in Chapel Hill,
NC, Features American Landscapes of Wilderness
The Ackland Art Museum, at UNC - Chapel Hill
in Chapel Hill, NC, is presenting the exhibit, At Work in the
Wilderness: Picturing the American Landscape, 1820-1920, on
view through Mar. 20, 2011.
The exhibition examines how American landscape painting of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embodied Americans' conflicting
ideas about the status of land and the natural world within the
rapidly modernizing nation. The exhibition considers the strategies
that American artists developed to reframe the natural spaces
in which they worked -- spaces that were rapidly developing, that
were increasingly familiar to period audiences, and that were
thoroughly implicated in period circuits of landscape travel and
tourism. Seen together, the works on view illuminate the complex
relationship between humans and nature through examples of "touched"
and "untouched" landscapes.
Artists with works in the exhibit include: Thomas Birch, Thomas
Doughty, Jasper Cropsey, Albert Bierstadt, Robert Duncanson, Jervis
McEntee, Albert Blakelock, William Trost Richards, Eastman Johnson,
William Boardman, Elliott Daingerfield, George Bellows, and others.
An accompanying audio tour - with selections from artists' letters,
poetry, and philosophers of the period - presents a range of nineteenth-century
ideas about landscape.
The exhibition was organized by guest curator Ross Barrett, Assistant
Professor and David G. Frey Fellow in American Art, Art Department,
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was assisted
by Annah Lee, Eaton Curatorial Intern for American Art, and the
students in his Fall 2010 seminar in American art.
At Work in the Wilderness was made possible by the generous
support of David G. Frey, the William Hayes Ackland Trust, and
friends of the Ackland Art Museum. Special thanks to the North
Carolina Museum of Art and Hugh A. McAllister Jr., MD (UNC-Chapel
Hill School of Medicine, '66) for their generous loans to this
exhibition.
For further info check our NC Institutional Gallery listings,
call the Museum at 919/966-5736 or visit (www.ackland.org).
Carolina Arts is published monthly by Shoestring Publishing Company, a subsidiary of PSMG, Inc. Copyright© 2011 by PSMG, Inc., which published Charleston Arts from July 1987 - Dec. 1994 and South Carolina Arts from Jan. 1995 - Dec. 1996. It also publishes Carolina Arts Online, Copyright© 2011 by PSMG, Inc. All rights reserved by PSMG, Inc. or by the authors of articles. Reproduction or use without written permission is strictly prohibited. Carolina Arts is available throughout North & South Carolina.