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Description: Colonization, Wilderness, and Spaces Between: Nineteenth-Century Landscape Painting...
The Terra Foundation for American Art is proud to copublish this volume with the University of Western Australia’s School of Design...
PublisherTerra Foundation for American Art
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Forewords
The Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art is proud to copublish this volume with the University of Western Australia’s School of Design. This publication arose from an inspired partnership between the Terra Foundation, the University of Western Australia, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and the University of Melbourne’s Ian Potter Museum of Art. Together, the partners co-organized and presented the Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Continental Shift: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting (shown in Melbourne as Not as the Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting).
Operating as a museum without walls, the Terra Foundation seeks to foster the exploration, understanding, and enjoyment of the visual arts of the United States for national and international audiences, often presenting objects from its own collection in dialogue with works from other collections. Exemplified by Continental Shift, Terra Collection Initiative exhibitions facilitate and benefit from crosscultural exchange and advanced scholarship on American art.
With the goal of aligning the use of its collection with object-based, university-level teaching, this exhibition was conceived to accompany a university course at the University of Western Australia, led by Professor Emeritus Richard Read—one of this volume’s editors—and augmented by visiting lecturers from the United States. Through collaborative projects such as this one, the foundation has cultivated a global network of academic and museum colleagues engaged in the study of the art of the United States.
The essays that make up this volume epitomize the worldwide exchange of ideas that is fundamental to our purpose. They offer a range of new perspectives on Australian and American landscape paintings in relation to contemporary life, encouraging us to think about our relationships to the lands we inhabit and how we came to inhabit them. The institutional collaboration and thoughtful research that make projects like this possible are cornerstones of the foundation.
Central to the foundation’s mission is the belief that art has the potential both to distinguish cultures and to unite them. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to our partner institutions and editors Richard Read and Kenneth Haltman for their commitment to encouraging global dialogue through deep scholarship and the boundless exchange of ideas. I extend my deepest thanks to my colleagues at the Terra Foundation, particularly curator Peter John Brownlee, who conceived and executed this rewarding collaboration.
Elizabeth Glassman
President & Chief Executive Officer
Terra Foundation for American Art
University of Western Australia School of Design
This book is the result of a partnership between the Art Gallery of Western Australia, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the former Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts (now School of Design) at the University of Western Australia. It provides an enduring and expanded record of the magnificent transcontinental exhibition held at Art Gallery of Western Australia from July 30, 2016, to February 5, 2017, which then traveled to the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Accompanying the exhibition was an international symposium convened by Professor Emeritus Richard Read, as well as a course at University of Western Australia that featured visiting lecturers from the United States. In his blog associated with the project, Read observed that visitors to exhibitions spend on average only a matter of seconds viewing an artwork. It is to the great benefit of all who did or did not see the exhibition that the book affords them an unhurried opportunity to absorb the narratives and emotions released by the thirty paintings of American and Australian landscapes it contains.
Structured around the primary themes of “wilderness” and “colonization,” the essays in this collection are linked through the notion of cultivation as the colonial measure of “improvement” from a wild to settled state. We know, mostly with the benefit of hindsight, the ideological imperatives of the cultivating drive to have been harmful to both the environment and the traditional owners of the land on both continents. Not least, cultivation was indelibly achieved through the extensive clearing of wilderness or bushland—clearing that, in the paintings, becomes a key aesthetic space thanks to its creation of openness. Expanding on the exhibited collection and lectures from two symposia, this book brings an important aesthetic lens to the environmental consequences of colonialism and contemporary anthropocenic studies. As a scholar of Australian history, I applaud this international comparative cultural study, which will advance our local understanding.
For their support for this project, thanks must go to former dean of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts, Professor Simon Anderson, and to the University of Western Australia Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual Arts administrative staff who helped organize the international symposium. Editors Kenneth Haltman and Richard Read, along with curator of the Terra Foundation, Peter John Brownlee, must be congratulated for envisaging and delivering the project culminating in this wonderful book.
Dr. Kate Hislop
Dean and Head of School of Design
University of Western Australia
Curator’s Foreword
I first reached out to Professor Emeritus Richard Read over email regarding our mutual interest in American inventor and artist Samuel F. B. Morse, whose connective spirit has steadfastly hovered over our long-distance collaborations. Richard had published a scintillating article about the backs of paintings; one such “reversed painting” features prominently in Morse’s famed Gallery of the Louvre (1831–33), a cornerstone of the Terra Foundation’s collection of American art. Richard’s article added yet another fascinating context for Morse’s grand work, and provided the basis for his participation in a symposium and study day devoted to Gallery of the Louvre as part of a Terra Collection Initiative exhibition co-organized with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in 2012. Richard later contributed an essay to the Terra Foundation’s 2014 publication Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention.1See Richard Read, “The Diastolic Rhythm of the Art Gallery: Originals, Copies and Reversed Paintings,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 10, no. 1 (2010): 57–77, as well as his essay “Painting and Technology: Morse and the Visual Transmission of Intelligence,” in Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention, ed. Peter John Brownlee (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2014), 130–47.
By this time, the foundation had already developed a number of Terra Collection Initiative exhibitions, publications, and programs with major museum partners around the globe.2Terra Collection Initiative exhibitions utilize works of art from the Terra Foundation’s collection and are co-organized by the foundation in collaboration with museums around the globe. For more information and a comprehensive list of Terra Collection Initiatives from 2005 to 2019, see Katherine Bourguignon and Peter John Brownlee, eds., Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2018). It had also orchestrated a growing number of foundation-supported teaching appointments at universities in London, Paris, and Berlin (soon to be joined by others in Kyoto, Sydney, and São Paulo). Accordingly, there was much discussion about how the foundation might look for and create opportunities to align the deployment of its collection with university-level, object-centered teaching.
I immediately thought of Richard. As these things happen, he and his wife, Melanie, were visiting Chicago, so we arranged to meet for an early Saturday-morning breakfast. After a long conversation over coffee and pastries, I asked if a modestly scaled exhibition of paintings from the foundation’s collection could supply the impetus and a portion of the content for a university course of his design. With near-lightning speed, à la Morse, he jumped on the idea.
Before I had arrived home that afternoon, Richard had already forwarded a message from his dean at the University of Western Australia—in Perth, mind you—with a green light to continue exploring this possibility. Richard mentioned the university’s avid and ongoing interest in collaborating with the Art Gallery of Western Australia, and then-director Stefano Carboni, curator Melissa Harpley, and their colleagues joined the project soon thereafter. Over long-distance email exchanges and a couple of strategically timed conference calls, we built and fine-tuned an exhibition of thirty paintings, approximately half of them drawn from each collection, titled Continental Shift: Nineteenth-Century American and Australian Landscape Painting.
Richard’s growing interest in landscape aesthetics had well prepared him to develop a course around this comparative exhibition of nineteenth-century landscape paintings from Australia and the United States. Richard and I launched the course with introductory lectures and close-looking sessions in the exhibition galleries. Soon after, Professors Rachael Z. DeLue of Princeton and Kenneth Haltman of the University of Oklahoma joined the course as visiting lecturers and participants—along with the scholars from the United Kingdom and Australia whose essays populate this volume—in an exchange of ideas that took place during a two-day symposium held at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in late September 2016.
In the meantime, Chris McAuliffe, now Sir William Dobell Chair in the Centre for Art History & Art Theory of the Australian National University School of Art & Design, graciously helped connect us with his former institution, the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. There, Kelly Gellatly, Jacqueline Doughty, and Meighen Katz reshaped the exhibition, retitling it Not as the Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting and adding an entirely different set of Australian objects drawn from the University of Melbourne’s Russell & Mab Grimwade “Miegunyah” Collection.3Professor McAuliffe was a key collaborator in the development of America: Painting a Nation, a 2013 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition co-organized by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. A second symposium took place at the museum in April 2017, where the rich exchange of ideas expanded to include additional scholars from Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as well as Indigenous voices from the Mohawk and Noongar peoples.
As this volume attests, from a rather small set of thirty objects—half from Australia and half from the United States—Richard, Kenneth (who came aboard as the volume’s co-editor), and the other authors have generated a slew of big ideas.4We are particularly proud of the success of the exhibition and university-course model that has brought forth this publication, and are thrilled that it has found a second application in the 2019 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Atelier 17: Modern Printmaking in the Americas, co-organized by the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo and the Terra Foundation. This exhibition was also the subject of an international symposium, a university seminar, and a comparative publication. Another variation on the alignment of the foundation’s collection with university-level teaching both augmented and animated the 2018 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper, co-organized by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the University of Oxford, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. Our collaborative inquiry into the colonizing mechanisms of landscape representation, the unbounded fantasy of wilderness, and the conflicted nature of spaces between has unfolded in dialogue with broader cultural discourses of ecocritical art history and engagement with the vexing issues surrounding Indigeneity in the nineteenth century as well as in the twenty-first.
From one of the foundation’s earliest Terra Collection Initiative exhibitions, Manifest Destiny/Manifest Responsibility: Environmentalism and the Art of the American Landscape (2008), ecocritical thinking has been central to the ways we have thought about and used our deep holdings in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century landscape paintings. The 2015–16 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, co-organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, and the Terra Foundation expanded the terrain of inquiry as it probed relationships between landscape, ecology, and artistic representation in a broader, hemispheric context. So too did the colloquium Mountain Aesthetics and Ecology: The Conceptual Heritage of Alexander von Humboldt in the Americas, co-organized by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Terra Foundation in 2019.
Joining its academic and museum colleagues in the field, the Terra Foundation has turned its attention in recent years to creating opportunities for the study of Indigeneity in a global perspective. A three-year Terra Foundation visiting professorship and research program devoted to Native American art has just launched at the Power Institute Foundation for Art and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney. The subject of Indigeneity will also be taken up by another Terra Foundation visiting professorship, to be hosted by the Universidade de São Paulo, the Universidade Federal de São Paulo, and the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil in 2021. This teaching opportunity is being organized in conjunction with a year-long exploration of the theme of the Indigenous at the Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand. In the meantime, the foundation is co-organizing with the Pinacoteca de São Paulo the Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Refiguring Twentieth-Century American Art (2020–21), which will feature the work of Indigenous artists Fritz Scholder and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith among numerous other artists engaged with the cultural politics of identity.
What have these various projects taught us? They have confirmed and reconfirmed that object-centered study and crosscultural dialogue are central to the foundation’s mission of fostering the study and appreciation of the art of the United States. We have learned that comparative exhibitions, regardless of scale, create unparalleled opportunities to engage with larger questions of national and transnational expressions of identity. And we have learned that that the study of art is not just a study of objects; it is the bringing together of professors and students, museum curators and their audiences, who form networks of intellectual engagement and mutual understanding. My thanks to all who participated in and helped to make this experimental exhibition and university course such a rewarding endeavor and resounding success. Likewise, thanks go to all who helped to make this book a vivid and lasting testament to the spirit of our crosscultural inquiry: James Goggin, Claire Creighton, Gina Broze, Kim Coventry, Michael Tropea, and the book’s two anonymous peer reviewers.
Peter John Brownlee
Curator
Terra Foundation for American Art
 
1     See Richard Read, “The Diastolic Rhythm of the Art Gallery: Originals, Copies and Reversed Paintings,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 10, no. 1 (2010): 57–77, as well as his essay “Painting and Technology: Morse and the Visual Transmission of Intelligence,” in Samuel F. B. Morse’s “Gallery of the Louvre” and the Art of Invention, ed. Peter John Brownlee (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2014), 130–47»
2     Terra Collection Initiative exhibitions utilize works of art from the Terra Foundation’s collection and are co-organized by the foundation in collaboration with museums around the globe. For more information and a comprehensive list of Terra Collection Initiatives from 2005 to 2019, see Katherine Bourguignon and Peter John Brownlee, eds., Conversations with the Collection: A Terra Foundation Collection Handbook (Chicago: Terra Foundation for American Art, distributed by University of Chicago Press, 2018). »
3     Professor McAuliffe was a key collaborator in the development of America: Painting a Nation, a 2013 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition co-organized by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. »
4     We are particularly proud of the success of the exhibition and university-course model that has brought forth this publication, and are thrilled that it has found a second application in the 2019 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition Atelier 17: Modern Printmaking in the Americas, co-organized by the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Universidade de São Paulo and the Terra Foundation. This exhibition was also the subject of an international symposium, a university seminar, and a comparative publication. Another variation on the alignment of the foundation’s collection with university-level teaching both augmented and animated the 2018 Terra Collection Initiative exhibition America’s Cool Modernism: O’Keeffe to Hopper, co-organized by the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the University of Oxford, and the Terra Foundation for American Art.  »
Forewords
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