Saturday, November 18 | 10:30am - 11:30am
Free with admission + Free for students | reservations required
Let the students be our guide! Join students from the Environmental Literature & Action class at University of Wisconsin La Crosse as they lead small-group gallery walks through the Re/Framing the View exhibit. Wade into literary waters as they share readings from poems and short literary passages that reflect on the cultural messages in select paintings from the exhibition. Explore how literature helps us understand what people who viewed these images in the past might have seen or not seen in them, and how literature can reframe what we see in these paintings today. This program is free with Museum admission, and free for students.
Register for the Student Led Gallery Walk
About Re/Framing the View
Drawn from six private collections, the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection, and six strategic institutional loans, Re/Framing the View: Nineteenth-century American Landscapes includes works by William Bradford, John F. Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Jasper Francis Cropsey, George Inness, Francis A. Silva, and Sanford Robinson Gifford, among many others.
As this list suggests, the majority of US based nineteenth-century American landscape painters were men, and heading out into the wilderness to capture the scene was viewed as a masculine pursuit. A selection of objects – including china, nature studies in watercolor, and decorative arts – underscore the gendered aspects of American landscape painting by demonstrating where and how women participated in capturing American flora and fauna.
The realities of women’s opportunities in the arts are elaborated upon through paintings and prints by Fitz Henry Lane and Mary Mellen; Asher B. Durand and Lucy Maria Durand Woodman; Evelina Mount, Adelheid Dietrich, and Claude Raguet Hirst; and Mary Nimmo Moran and Ellen Day Hale.
While the exhibition celebrates the work of these artists, it also offers a layered interpretation of the cultural and historical meaning of such paintings. What such artists often failed to capture are the environmental conditions and social concerns that may underlie picturesque imagery. Learn more about the exhibition.