Women Reframe American Landscape

Reframing American Landscape: Women, Land, + Art illuminates the accomplishments of Susie Barstow and her circle, who painted the landscape in the nineteenth century and places them in conversation with women-identifying artists working today who expand and challenge how we think about “land” and “landscape” in our contemporary moment.

Engaging diverse multigenerational perspectives and creative practices, this publication launches an expanded narrative around land and art that strongly positions women in the canon of American landscape art. It includes a deep look at the nineteenth-century landscape painter conversation with artists working today. For the first time, the nineteenth-century landscape painter Susie Barstow is given a solo exhibition and an in-depth publication. Well known during her lifetime, Barstow was written out of art history, but this book, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name, illuminates the significant accomplishments of the artist, and in doing so redefines the history of the Hudson River School. This book further explores how artists working today continue to engage landscape using multi-disciplinary artistic practices and diverse critical perspectives, that at times challenge art and historical narratives. Artists such as Ebony G. Patterson, Mary Mattingly, Tanya Marcuse, Anna Plesset, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Kay WalkingStick, Saya Woolfalk, Cecilia Vicuña, and others, complicate and redefine how we now understand land through art.