Category Archives: Nature

Painters Tell Stories of Nature’s Resilience

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Feel like things are out of balance?  Seven narrative painters let animals take center stage get visitors thinking about the future for nature and the world in Vivarium, Exploring Intersections of Art, Storytelling, and the Resilience of the Living World at the Albuquerque Museum through February 9, 2025..

Big, bold paintings let nature tell the story and present juxtapositions that present questions about society, environmental dissonance, and what messages animals might want to send. See some of our favorites in our Flickr album.

2023 oil Astrid by Stephen J. Yazzie (Laguna Pueblo/Diné). Courtesy: private collection

Although the exhibition begins with a small selection of works from Santa Fe’s Tia Collection – Dan Namingha (Hopi-Tewa), Nanibah Chacon (Dine/Chicana), and others – the majority of the space features a selection of works by the seven featured painters. Clusters of paintings immerse viewers in each artist’s unique world, style, and narrative – mini-vivariums, or artificial worlds.

Nature explodes of Nathan Budoff’s giant canvases – tigers, meerkats, swimming octopii, schools of fish, prarie dogs – all floating and interacting in a pure, white space.  He creates realistic depictions in charcoal, oil, acrylic, and ink, but juxtaposes natural components that are startling. Visitors stand back, pause, take it all in at once, trying to make sense of how these magnificent creatures interact in unusual landscapes.  Mostly, the canvases do not include people, but Nathan enjoys letting the remarkable, minutely observed wildlife speak their own truths.

2017 charcoal, oil, acrylic, and ink Imminent Danger by Nathan Budoff – showing systems and social behaviors in the natural world. Courtesy: the artist.

Paintings by Patrick McGrath Muñiz are intellectual puzzles, mixing modern issues, depictions of modern technology, and classical Renaissance and

Baroque painting techniques.  Signs, symbols, and details on the horizon demand slow scrutiny to unravel the allegories and associations packed into the paintings.

2018 oil painting Terram Ignoramus by Patrick McGrath Muñiz – a warning about the perils of climate change; depicting a perilous Arctic journey in a boat named “We know not the earth.” Courtesy: the artist

Eloy Torres, a Chicano activist and muralist, uses religious, mythological, and surrealist pictorial conventions to construct worlds that lets the viewer their intuition to connect the dots.

2006 oil portrait of Cheech Martin It’s a Brown World After All by Eloy Torrez; the crown connects him to his ancestral past. Courtesy: Riverside Art Museum.
2010 oil on panel Meat by Eloy Torrez, a surreal allegory on precarious relationships between humans and thenatural world. Courtesy: the artist.

Stephen J. Yazzie (Laguna Pueblo/Diné) exhibits a series of works in which Coyote inhabits upscale suburban interiors, emphasizing the inside/outside, nature/culture dichotomies in contemporary life.

Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma), a member of her tribe’s Deer Clan, creates narratives featuring animals as protagonists, often metaphors for interactions between natural and spiritual realms. Large works allow players in her stories to prance, dance, and float across saturated color fields.

2018 oil and pastel Straight Legs by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) – a painting reflecting her membership in the Deer Clan. Courtesy: University of Wyoming Art Museum

Artist/educator Stan Netchez (Shoshone/Tataviam) presents a throught-provoking masterpiece, using Picasso’s Guernica imagery, US brands, and indigenous spiritual icons to display the chaos and destruction inflicted on indigenous peoples.

2019 acrylic, oil, and metal leaf “Guernica Flag” by Stan Netchez (Shoshone/Tataviam) – a critique of colonialism’s impact. Courtesy: Tia Collection

Listen in on a panel with four of these storytellers conducted by the Albuquerque Museum.

MIAC Connects Diné Textiles to Land and Community

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Building on the groundwork laid in the artist-curated exhibition Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery (opening in St. Louis on March 7), Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture asked five Navajo textile artists, photographers, and scholars to delve into MIAC’s historic collections to tell the story of Diné weavng.

Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles, on view through February 2, 2025, presents historic and contemporary weavings alongside epic photographs of Navajo Nation landscapes to show the connections textile artist have to ancestors, their mentors, the community, the land, and their materials.

Historic Diné weaving with photomural by co-curator Rapheal Begay. Courtesy: the artist.

Appropriately, the story told by over 30 historic textiles is presented in MIAC’s Masterpieces gallery.

The entrance presents a dazzling display – a pictorial blanket woven in the 1890s set against a photomural of co-curator Rapheal Begay’s family sheep corral. It’s a visual testament to the importance of wool, life, and the 27,000 square miles of Navajo Nation. 

The blanket’s creator (unknown today) was an astute observer of the life on the land and translated it all into warp and weft – cow punchers, cattle, boots, birds, and new-fangled railroad cars, that only arrived in Navajo Country around the 1880s. Click here to see the detail.

1885 pictorial blanket created with Germantown wool yarn introduced in the Southwest by the railroads; photomural Navel (Hunter’s Point, AZ) by co-curator Rapheal Begay. Photo courtesy of artist.

Nothing was newer than the railroad, at the time this artist depicted it – a steam-fed invention from the East that would change western life forever, but that also brought a wide array of colorful yarn that could be mixed and matched with vegetal dyes to create new Native designs.

The intertwined history of Diné (“The People” in the Navajo language), textile art, and the land is told through quotes and recollections by the exhibition’s Native collaborators. While examining masterful geometric weaving techniques in 19th-century works, visitors are provided with an historic context – the types of art materials introduced to captives imprisoned at Bosque Redondo after the Long Walk, the images that could be interpreted as a longing for the homeland by the incarcerated, and coded spiritual affirmations.

1850-1860 hand-spun wool child’s (or saddle) blanket with Spider Woman crosses; created with natural cocineal, indigo, and chamisa dye
1880-1897 rug made with Germantown wool yarn, cotton string, and raveled yarn; materials used in weaving at Bosque Redondo era, post-Long Walk.

The participants in the exhibition make sure that viewers also experience how the landscape inspires the work of the past and contemporary Native textile artists. Diné fiber artist Tyrrell Tapaha includes her two-panel dress in which incorporates images of the Utah clouds and mountains that bring her spiritual peace. The masterful wall hanging by Lillie Joe uses the palette of the desert to create a mesmerizing geometric dazzler.

2020 two-panel dress by fiber artist Tyrrell Tapaha with images from Utah landscapes that inspired her; woven from churro, silk, mohair, and marino wool..
Close up of highly detailed 1980s Burntwater wall hanging by Lillie Joe, reflecting colors and patterns of the Navajo Nation landscape.

The curators feature both the photography of co-curator Rapheal Begay and Darby Raymond-Overstreet to allow gallery visitors to experience the awesome beauty of the homeland that inspires artists. Digital artist Raymond-Overstreet overlays geometric textile patterns across his luscious, beautiful landscapes.

2018 digital print Woven Landscape, Shiprock by Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), overlaying digital landscapes with traditional weavings. Courtesy: the artist

Take a look at some of our favorite works in our Flickr album. And enjoy these historic and contemporary dazzlers.

Detail of 1895 wedge weave blanket made with commercial cotton string and Germantown wool – a dramatic 19th c. weaving innovation. Courtesy: International Museum of Folk Art.
2022 wedge weave by Kevin Aspaas; white and grey wool yarn with indigo dye. Courtesy: private collection.
Detail of dynamic Diné 1960 wool tapestry weave. Courtesy: International Museum of Folk Art

Alma Thomas Splashes Denver with Color

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For a pop of color in the winter season, see Composing Color: Paintings by Alma Thomas from the Smithsonian Museum of American Art at the Denver Museum of Art through January 12 and at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York February 8 through May 25, 2025.

Denver has welcomed this mid-century modern painter with open arms, with visitors lounging in several living-room settings surrounded by abstractions from the Sixties and Seventies by a Washington, D.C. painter who born in the late 19th century but who lived to see a man land on the Moon.

1960 Red Abstraction by Alma Thomas. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Alma Thomas grew up in Georgia, and earned the first fine arts degree ever granted by Howard University in 1924.  After receiving a masters in education from Columbia, Alma spent the next 30 years teaching in Washington, D.C. public schools. 

Ida Jervis’s 1968 photo Alma Thomas working in her studio. Courtesy: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

But she stayed close with her professors at Howard, who founded the Barnett Aden Gallery, one of first racially integrated and Black-owned art galleries in the United States.  Alma served as the gallery’s VP, which displayed a who’s who of contemporary African-American artists, like Elizabeth Catlett, Aaron Douglas, Jacob Lawrence, and Henry O. Tanner. 

By the early 1950s, Alma’s work was regularly shown in exhibitions at the gallery. When Alma finally retired from teaching in 1960 at age 69, she was finally able to paint full time. The Smithsonian’s exhibition features Alma’s work from this highly productive period.

Take a look at our favorites in our Flickr album.

The exhibition is centered around three subjects that inspired her – nature, the cosmos, and music. Her vivid color paintings welcome you to the exhibition but around the corner you see what really inspired her – a wall-sized photo of Alma’s beloved flower garden. 

Mid-century modern lounge in the Denver exhibition with paintings by Alma Thomas inspired by her garden

She loved the changing seasons, the patterns of gardens, and patterns observed by light flickering through the crepe myrtles in her garden or through the trees on her walks through DC’s endless greenways and parks.

1976 oil Fall Begins, suggesting rustling leaves. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Detail of 1972 acrylic, Arboretum Presents White Dogwood. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The exhibition also features an immersive environment where visitors can use colors and shapes from Alma’s paintings to splash supersized across the gallery walls.

Room in Denver where visitors use filters to create lightscapes on the gallery walls.
1976 acrylic, Grassy Melodic Chart. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

By the 1970s, Alma’s love of music and rhythm were reflected in her abstractions, although the titles of her canvases tell us that she saw expressive melodies in nature too.

Captivated by the promise of technology, Alma also reveled in the mysteries and rhythms of the planets, space, and those frontiers of exploration. She really felt that the Moon, planets, and stars represented the peace and harmony that were sometimes lacking on Earth.

Always searching for beauty in the world, continuing to paint, and contemplating a brighter future, Alma achieved unprecedented art-world recognition in 1972 at age 80 –a one-woman show at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and in New York at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Not bad for a gal who grew up in “horse and buggy days” in Georgia! Thank you to the Smithsonian for collecting Alma’s work and producing this joyful, colorful show.

1970 acrylic The Eclipse, based on the March 7, 1970 total solar eclipse. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.
1973 acrylic Celestial Fantasy. Courtesy: Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Click here to read more in Denver’s exhibition guide and watch this short glimpse of the galleries below:

Listen to curator Rory Padeken discuss Alma Thomas’s life and work with artist Jordan Casteel, choreographer and dancer Cleo Parker Robinson, and floral artist Breigh Jones-Coplin.

O’Keeffe Above and Beyond the Grid

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Six years before she became transfixed with the drama of the colorful New Mexico desert, Georgia O’Keeffe began translating another magnificent, magical view from her skyscraper home in Manhattan. You can see all her transformational aerial cityscapes in Georgia O’Keeffe: “My New Yorks” on view at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art through February 16, 2025.

Created by the Art Institute of Chicago, the show assembles Georgia’s breakthrough city paintings and puts them squarely into the context of her better-known nature close-ups and other modernist takes – just the way she wanted it.

O’Keeffe’s 1927 Radiator Building – Night, New York. Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Listen to the Art Institute curators talk about Georgia’s approach to New York landscapes, her life in the city’s Roaring Twenties, and what inspired her walking Manhattan’s grid at a time of of such transformational urban change:

As a total modernist, Georgia couldn’t wait to move into the Shelton Hotel, a brand-new skyscraper, with her brand-new husband (Stieglitz) in 1924. As half of New York’s art-world “power couple” it’s most likely that Georgia was one of the first women to enjoy high-rise living in Manhattan.

O’Keeffe’s 1926 The Shelton with Sunspots, N.Y. Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago

The Shelton (still there at Lexington and 49th Street) was an apartment-hotel built in Midtown around Grand Central. Although it was first envisioned as a men’s residence, the marketing team soon pivoted a more expanded market with newspaper ads that would attract women, couples, and artists!

Read more about the Shelton, Georgia’s life there, and see 1920s photographs on the Art Institute’s blog post.

Georgia and Alfred moved in, captivated by the views of the East River and rapidly changing Manhattan skyline, where new skyscrapers were popping up like daisies.  Alfred took photographs and Georgia recorded ths shifting light, atmosphere, and moods of the rapidly changing landscape.

O’Keeffe’s 1928 East River from the 30th Story of the Shelton Hotel.
Courtesy: New Britain Museum of American Art.

As the exhibition demonstrates, Georgia didn’t limit herself to urban landscapes at the time. She was still depicting the natural world, but was determined to channel the rising modern city.  At the time, Alfred and her fellow artists strongly discouraged her from displaying her urban work, arguing that painting cityscapes was “best left to the men.”  You can just imagine what our Georgia thought about that! Naturally, it was full steam ahead! 

Before Google Street view, Georgia walked the Midtown Grid, exploring (and remembering) her neighborhood streets as they transformed into skyscraper canyons. More high rises! The Empire State Building! Rockefeller Center!

O’Keeffe’s 1926 City Night. Courtesy: Minneapolis Institute of Art
O’Keeffe’s 1925 New York with Moon. Courtesy: Carmen Thyssen Collection

Who knows if Georgia ever experienced Manhattanhenge, but she certainly enjoyed the verticality and sky views between the buildings.  A nature-lover, modernist, and virtuoso painter! 

Despite Stieglitz’s misgivings about her city paintings, when she finally had her annual one-woman show at his gallery, her city painting was the first work that sold!

The curators have hung some of Georgia’s paintings just as she displayed them – side-by-side flower close-ups, other nature-inspired works, and City views – to provide the full experience of a modern woman’s mastery.

O’Keeffe’s 1924 From the Lake, No. 1.
Courtesy: Des Moines Art Center
O’Keeffe’s 1929 Black Cross, New Mexico.
Courtesy: Art Institute of Chicago

For more, here’s a longer discussion about Georgia rip-roaring 1920s life and work by one of the Chicago Art Institute curators for Georgia O’Keeffe Museum members.

Fernandez Curates Smithson at SITE Santa Fe

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It’s not often you get to see Robert Smithson’s large-scale works inside gallery walls. Strolling through SITE Santa Fe’s magnificent Teresita Fernández/Robert Smithson exhibition, through October 28, provides an opportunity to see how a contemporary Brooklyn-based Cuban-American artist – inspired by landscape and societal histories of the Caribbean – positions her own work “in conversation” with Smithson’s 1960s-1970s geologic works, drawings, and photo installations.

SITE invited art-world superstar Teresita Fernández to curate this show with the Santa Fe-based Holt/Smithson Foundation. Prior to her deep dive into Smithson’s career, her primary knowledge centered around his 1970 epic Spiral Jetty – 6,650 tons of rock and earth jutting out from the shore of Utah’s Great Salt Lake.

Smithson’s 1969-1970 Mirrors and Shelly Sand and two by Fernández: 2009 Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) and 2024 Sfumato (Epic) 2. Courtesy: Dallas Museum of Art; the artist and Lehmann Maupin.
Still from Robert Smithson’s 1970 film Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake, Utah. Courtesy: Holt/Smithson Foundation.

But Fernández found a lot more from Smithson’s too-short career that she could couple with her own work to create SITE’s spectacular installation. Both artists use landscapes, deep time, ancient history, and travel.

Smithson’s 1968 installation A Nonsite (Franklin, New Jersey) with 2020 Archipelago charcoal work by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; private collection

In the first gallery, Fernández selected a Smithson “nonsite” work – a minimalist series of boxes, each packed with rocks from the decidedly unromantic site of Franklin, New Jersey. Smithson’s “nonsite” includes a framed aerial photo that appears to document the site, but it’s a “readjusted” depiction of it. Not what it seems.

Next to the “nonsite,” Fernández hangs Archipelago, a charcoal wall sculpture., which appears to be a legit map, but it’s not. It’s an imagined map of separate Caribbean islands and continents linked together, making us reflect upon their shared socio-political colonial histories.

Viñales (Plateau) is a wall-sized “stacked landscape” depicting Cuba’s Viñales Valley, home of ancient karst caves once inhabited by Taino people and later where escaped plantation slaves sought refuge. At a distance, it evokes the valley’s ecological, social, and political legacies; up close, you see that the image is made up of thousands of tiny ceramic tiles. Something to get lost in.

2019 ceramic mosaic by Teresita Fernández Viñales (Plateau). Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin.

Both artists use reflection in their works. Manigual (Mirror) by Fernández– a tropical forest created from charcoal and sand – is affixed to a reflective surface, so you can “see yourself” in the charred thicket when you get right up to it. Smithson designed his earth-and-mirror Red Sandstone Corner Piece so that every gallery goer’s image is part of the visual experience – from close up, far back, and far away. You’re linked to the red sandstone.

Detail of 2023 Manigual (Mirror) by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

On the other hand, Smithson famous photographic series, Yucatán Mirror Displacements, documents his meticulously arranged mirrors set into Mexico’s coastal landscapes. Just reflections of landscape and sky in all the settings he documented his set of mirrors; no people.

Detail of Smithson’s 1969 Yucatán Mirror Displacements (1-9). Courtesy: Guggenheim Museum.

Nature’s continual ebb and flow, the Earth’s surface, ecosystems, and the cosmos ­are all subjects explored by both artists.What’s beneath the Earth’s surface, forces of nature, and human impact on it all pop up covertly in every room.  See more in our Flickr album.

Detail of 2017 charcoal work by Fernández Charred Landscape (America). Courtesy: the artist, Lehmann Maupin.
Detail of Smithson’s 1971 ink drawing A Profile of the Atlantic Bottom. Courtesy: private collection.

And learn more about the “conversations” that works by these artists are having in the curator lectures in SITE Santa Fe’s videos with Fernández herself and her co-curator from the Holt/Smithson Foundation.

Detail of Robert Smithson’s 1961-1963 paint and photo collage Algae, algae. Courtesy: Holt/Smithson Foundation and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Detail of 2019 graphite-covered shell installation Chorus by Teresita Fernández. Courtesy: the artist and Lehmann Maupin.

National Gallery Celebrates 50 Contemporary Native Artists

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If you want to take a trip across American land with 50 living Native artists, there’s still time to catch the ground-breaking exhibition, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, at Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art through September 15, 2024.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. asked Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) to survey the United States and create an exhibition reflecting the diversity of the living Native American artists.

2014 wool weaving World Traveler by Melissa Cody (Navajo). Courtesy: Stark Museum of Art.

Smith, whose own artistic achievement was honored most recently in a three-museum retrospective in 2023-2024, became the first artist invited to curate a show at the National Gallery.

Entrance banner features Orchestrating a Blooming Desert by Steven Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo).

Smith has always done whatever possible to increase the visibilty of Native artists in the contemporary art world. For this exhibition, she chose 50 intergenerational artists from diverse regions, cultures, and artistic practices. Look at our Flickr album of the National Gallery installation to see some of our favorites.

All of the works reflect the artists’ deep connection to the land, especially Orchestrating a Blooming Desert by Steven Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo), a painting that reflects one man’s joyful encounter with a lush landscape.

Some works depict a tribe’s link to the natural world through origin stories. Visitors are mesmerized by Preston Singletary’s exquisite sculpture of Tlingit creation-myth legend, Raven stealing the Sun. It’s glorious to admire this dramatic icon fully realized in a distinctly nontraditional medium – blown and sand-carved glass.

Experiencing the large, spiritual earth-colored ceramic figure by Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) harkens back to eras when people had a more integral connection to the earth. Simpson calls her figure Tonantzin, an Aztec name for earth mothers, corn mothers, and even the Virgin of Guadalupe.

2017 blown and sand-carved glass Raven Steals the Sun by Preston Singletary (Tlingit). Courtesy: private collector.
2021 ceramic, steel, leather, and brass Tonantzin by Rose B. Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo). Courtesy: Tia Collection.

Smith has chosen to hang many smaller two-dimensional works across a long wall in a checkerboard to suggest that visitors reflect on the impact of 1887 Dawes Act upon Native lands – a law that cut Native territory into “checkerboard” lots to facilitate private ownership.

At the National Gallery, Jeffrey Gibson’s punching bag (all made of found materials) was hung nearby, reminding us of the delicate balance that has to be struck by simultaneously caring for and taking gifts from the earth.

Next to checkerboard wall, the 2020 beaded punching bag To Feel Myself Loved On the Earth by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee Nation). Courtesy: Hirschhorn Museum.

Some artists mix impressions of modern life with tribal lands, such as satiric works by Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) and stylized symbols in a monoprint by Joe Fedderson (Colville Confederated Tribes).

2017 lithograph Girl in the Anthropocene by Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo). Private collection

In addition to sculptures, paintings, and photos, Smith has also included pieces made for fashion runways, live performances, and social protests.

Fashion designer Jamie Okuma (La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians) beaded her fringed fashion boots with a portrait of her family’s pet scrub jay.

Ten foot-long fiber seashell earrings designed for an interactive video and gallery performance by fiber and performance artist Eric-Paul Riege (Diné) are a reminder of the ancient trade networks that brought trade items from the ocean to the interior deserts.

2021 beaded and fringed Casedei boots by Jaime Okuma (La Jolla Band of Luiseno Indians). Courtesy: Dartmouth College’s Hood Museum
2020 mixed-fiber installation jaatloh4Ye’iitosoh [3-4] by Eric-Paul Riege (Diné). Courtesy: Tia Collection.

A wall of “mirror shields” were mounted by artist-activist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), showing just a small sample of the 1,000 protective and reflective shields made by people to help water protectors during thre 2016 pipeline intervention at Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, Luger’s childhood home. Take a look at Luger’s instruction video here.

The shields served to protect the peaceful protesters from rubber bullets and water cannons, and reflected images of the security forces back to them. The crowd-sourced shields were also used in a social-action performance piece at Standing Rock.

2016 mirror shields and video for Mirror Shield Project – River (The Water Spirit) by Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). Courtesy: the artist, Garth Greenan Gallery.

Textiles and vinyl drawings also pack a punch in this show. Take a look at the dazzler woven by Melissa Cody (Diné), who draws inspiration from video gaming and the matriarchs of Navajo Nation. Watch her interview from her recent exhibition at MoMA PS1.

Here, John Hitchcock explains how his room-sized drawing, Impact vs. Influence, incorporates his influences – nature, family, Native beadwork, and the next-door military base:

Take a look the National Gallery’s trailer and meet the 50 contemporary artists whose work and relationship to the land is celebrated in the show:

How Philadelphia Made American Artists

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How does it feel to have the eyes of 200 years of art history upon you, peering out from portraits, history paintings, and scenes of everyday people? What stories do they have to tell you? And who gets to tell the history and make the story?

Find out by contemplating works by over 100 artists nurtured and celebrated by PAFA in Making American Artists: Stories from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1777-1976, currently on view at the Albuquerque Museum through August 11, 2024…but coming soon to a museum near you (see below)!

Charles Willson Peale’s 1779 George Washington at Princeton, painted during the War of Independence. Courtesy: PAFA

While renovations are happening at the Academy in Philadelphia, the curators have chosen some of PAFA’s most iconic works to be shipped cross-country and installed “in conversation” with works by PAFA artists who may not be household names but were nonetheless ahead of their time.

It’s all a tribute to legacies preserved in the oldest art museum + art school in the United States, founded in 1805 by the dynamic duo of William Rush and Charles Willson Peale, both Continental Army militia (and artists!) during the American Revolution.

1810 painted pine sculpture Eagle by PAFA co-founder and Revolutionary War veteran William Rush.

Mr. Rush carved the bow figures on most of the ships for America’s first Naval fleet. All of those ships are now long gone, so it’s nice to see that we can admire his majestic Eagle in this exhibit.

Mr. Peale, one of the Sons of Liberty who served under and painted General Washington, later founded America’s first natural history museum on the second floor of Independence Hall. He also passed his talent on to the next generation through his very large family of artistic prodigies.

These two artists of the Revolution walked the walk and talked the talk and passionately felt the young nation needed an art academy.

PAFA’s first hundred years had some ground-breaking firsts – the first exhibition that included both male and female artists (1811), admission for Black artists (1857), and first female instructor (1878).

Charles Willson Peale’s 1822 self portrait (painted at age 81), The Artist in His Museum proudly showing his collection, turkey, and mastodon. Courtesy: PAFA

The show kicks off with a masterful history painting by Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania painting genius who landed in England in 1763, helped to found the Royal Academy, and somehow remained best friends with both King George III and Benjamin Franklin at the same time. He revolutionized history painting by depicting contemporary subjects and taught (in London) a who’s who of Americans artists – Peale, Stuart, Sully, Morse (who invented the telegraph and code), and Fulton (who invented steamships).

Benjamin West’s 1771-1772 Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, an imaginary scene painted to rehabilitate Penn’s image at the time, although it does feature Lenape chief Tamanend;. Courtesy: PAFA

In addition to masterworks by West and Gilbert Stuart, the exhibition showcases many works by female and African-African artists associated with PAFA – Patience Wright (America’s first professional sculptor), Cecilia Beaux (first female teacher), Henry O. Tanner (first successful African-American painter), and superstar Mary Cassatt.

1784-1786 wax relief portrait of George Washington by Patience Wright, the oldest American sculpture in the PAFA collection
1887 A Little Girl by Cecilia Beaux, an acclaimed female portraitist known for her insightful psychological depictions of young women. Courtesy: PAFA

In the day, grand history paintings were primarily the work of men, but the exhibition emphasizes that many enterprising 19th century women still found ways to make it in the art world. They specialized in “lesser genres,” like portraits, still lifes, and scenes of everyday life. Check out our favorites in our Flickr album.

Making American Artists really comes alive by adding 20th century works on the walls. Alongside the Founding Fathers, the portrait section features liberated women, bohemian artists, and proud Black artists with attitude.

Margaret Foster Richardson’s 1912 A Motion Picture – an honest self-portrait reflecting society’s changing views of professional women. Courtesy: PAFA
Barkley L. Hendricks’ 1968 J.S.B III, a fashionable, life-sized, postmodern portrait of his PAFA classmate James Brantley. Courtesy: PAFA

The section of the exhibition on still life focuses on early female painters who made decent incomes from their work, as well as modernist superheroes O’Keeffe and Nevelson. The history painting section presents 20th century show-it-like-it-is artists, like Horace Pippin and Alice Neel.

Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1923 Red Cana, an early abstracted floral still life. Courtesy: PAFA
Detail of Louise Nevelson’s 1972 South Floral. Still life section. Courtesy: PAFA

We’re reminded that many of the great masters of American landscape, like Thomas Moran, got their starts by painting bucolic views of Philadelphia’s Wissahickon and Schulkyll Rivers. Painting Philadelphia’s river landscapes may have even inspired the rise of the Hudson River School.

Thomas Moran’s 1870 Two Women in the Woods enjoying the green along the Wissahickon in Philadelphia. Courtesy: PAFA

And it was PAFA that gave Winslow Homer his professional start.

Winslow Homer’s 1893 Fox Hunt, where predator becomes the prey; Homer’s first painting to enter a museum collection. Landscape section. Courtesy: PAFA

The entire exhibition is a fresh look at American masters who created an astonishing legacy at one of our oldest art institutions ­and upstarts who never quite got their due. There’s so much to appreciate from this fresh, 21st century perspective!

Earlier this year, Making American Artists was at the Wichita Art Museum. Its next stop is the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma (September 25, 2024), followed by a spectacular road show: Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse (February 2025), the Peabody-Essex in Springfield, Massachusetts (June 2025), and the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia (October 2025).

Don’t miss it. While you’re waiting, listen in to curator Anna O. Marley’s May talk at the Albuquerque Museum:

How O’Keeffe Saw Trees

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Whether she contemplated her surroundings among the greenery at Lake George or the multicolord rocks at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keefe often started by sketching the trees around her.

in Rooted in Place, a special exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe through November 3, 2024, you are surrounded by Georgia’s watercolors, oils, and sketches interpreting (and abstracting) trees she encountered on her walks and international travels.

Take a look at our favorites in our Flickr album.

Georgia’s 1937 painting Gerald’s Tree I, a tree enjoyed by her friend, science historian Gerald Heard

The curators have selected works from the full span of Georgia’s life. The earliest are from her trips to Lake George, such as the glorious autumn maples surrounding the Stieglitz home.

The show’s curators leverage Georgia’s habit of collecting inspirational bits and pieces of nature from her Ghost Ranch walks, showing the twisted juniper she brought home alongside the dramatic oil painting in which it stars.

Piece of juniper that Georgia collected from the land surrounding her Ghost Ranch home.
Georgia’s 1940 painting Stump in Red Hills

The museum’s collaboration with the Santa Fe Botanical Garden adds scientific insights about the three cornerstone species of New Mexico wilderness that from which Ms. O’Keeffe drew inspiration – pinons and junipers next to the red rock, and wide, leafy cottonwoods along the river.

Georgia’s 1930 Cottonwoods Near Abiquiu showing the breeze catching the wide branches

A gorgeous photo by Ansel Adams shows Georgia nestled up against one of her favorites nearby in the desert. She loved the fruit trees she planted near her home garden, but she never painted them.

When Georgia was a young student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1905-1906, she studied with John Vanderpoel, well known for being a master educator in figure drawing. Looking at her drawing of a banyon tree from her trip to the Bahamas over thirty years later, it’s clear she employed those early lessons – bringing trees to life as living beings in her work ­– throughout her life.

Ansel Adams’1938 portrait of George O’Keeffe resting against a dramatic tree stump in northern New Mexico
Georgia’s 1934 figure-like drawing Banyon Tree created on her trip to Bermuda

Listen to the museum’s panel about Georgia’s approach to painting her favorite trees and the role they play in the ecosystem of northern New Mexico:

Contemporary Artists Talk with Thomas Cole

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There’s a big conversation going on about epic landscapes, people’s impact upon the wilderness, and personal connections to nature. It involves four contemporary artists and American master Thomas Cole, mid-19th century landscape painter and visionary, through February 12 at the Albuquerque Museum.

Plus, visitors are able to step back in time to visit Cole’s studio, arranged much as it was at the moment of his untimely death at the age of 47 – an unfinished canvas, paint palettes, his paint box, plaster casts, and mementos of his wilderness walks and trips abroad.

1835-1845 paint box, palette, and tools in Cole’s studio. Courtesy: Greene County Historical Society’s Bronck Museum.

This section of the four-in-one exhibition is Thomas Cole’s Studio: Memory and Inspiration. The curators have also surrounded the studio recreation with a wide range of Cole’s studies and finished works, including his last completed commissioned work. Take a closer look in our Flickr album.

Unfinished Landscape with Clouds, paints, plaster casts, and furniture in Cole’s studio when he died in 1848. Courtesy: Thomas Cole National Historic Site.

Cole redefined American landscape painting in the 1830s and 1840s by merging the style of romantic European landscapes with the dramatic skies, vistas, and mountains of New York’s Adirondack wilderness. His work kick-started the Hudson River School of landscape painting, and by the time of his untimely death at age 47, he was America’s best known and best loved artist.

Cole’s 1848 Gothic Ruins at Sunset, an unfinished work from his studio. Private collection.
Cole’s 1846 Schroon Lake, showing a civilized landscape at the edge of mountain wilderness. Courtesy: Adirondack Experience

During his life (1801-1848), Cole witnessed how pristine American wilderness was changed by proliferating settlements, roads, bridges, mills, and commerce along the rivers. Sometimes he chose to paint sights, like Niagara Falls, minus human intrusion; other times he gently inserted “civilization” into magnificent landscapes, as in Schroon Lake.

Cole had been a mentor to innovative landscape painters like Durand, Church, Kensett, and Cropsey. When Cole passed away suddenly, they were devastated. His wife left his studio just as it was, and for the next ten years she welcomed painters to make the pilgrimage to visit it, spend time, and gain inspiration.

Visitors enter this exhibition and confront Cole’s large 1838 work, Dream of Arcadia, showing a mythical time when civilization existed in harmony with nature.  Can this ideal state truly exist?

Thomas Cole’s 1938 Dream of Arcadia. Courtesy: Denver Art Museum.

The Thomas Cole National Historic site, which organized three of the four shows, answers this question through the eyes of two well-known contemporary artists – Kiki Smith, who owned a house along a creek a short distance from where Cole lived, and Shi Guori, who created camera obscura images at Hudson Valley sites where Cole stood and painted.

Kiki Smith: From the Creek is an immersive exhibition populated by the birds, beasts, insects, and plants along Catskill Creek – an area that Cole walked and knew well.

Kiki Smith’s 2016 bronze Eagle in the Pines in gallery with 2012-2014 jacquard tapestries

Visitors look up, down, and around to see owls, eagles, wolves, and pheasant peering back at them from perches, tapestries, frames, and vitrines…observing and being observed. Take a look at here.

2019 bronze Coxsackie sculpture of owl at the exhibition entrance.
Detail of Kiki Smith’s 2012 Cathedral jacquard tapestry (published by Magnolia Editions).

Kiki’s work always brings an air of other-worldly mystery. Here, it’s easy to enjoy all of her varied creations, which display her deep connection to nature and ask us to contemplate the cycles of life that busy people sometimes forget to notice. Cole’s paintings had the same impact.

Shi Guori’s Katerskill Falls, New York, July 26-28, 2019 – a 72-hour exposure made where Thomas Cole sketched in 1824. Courtesy: private collection.

Shi Guori: Ab/Sense – Pre/Sense presents monumental camera obscura images of landscapes Cole painted in the Hudson Valley 180 years ago. When he was growing up in China, Guori experienced the shock of rapid environmental disruption as Mao’s Cultural Revolution transformed the countryside.

Guori studied Cole’s documentation of similar 19th-century transformation in the Northeast, and traveled back to sites that Cole documented to bear witness to natural settings – somewhat still undisturbed – that resonated with Cole.

Guori built large camera-obscura tents, sat inside for up to 72 hours, and exposed light-sensitive paper to create his images. Images of Cole’s oil paintings at the same site are mounted nearby with Guori’s meditations on the experience.

Shi Guori’s camera obscura image The Clove, Catskill Mountains, New York, April 25, 2019. Courtesy: the artist
Basis for camera obscura work by Shi Guori: Thomas Cole’s 1827 oil The Clove. Image: Connecticut’s New Britain Museum of American Art.

In one case, Guori turned Cole’s own sitting room into a camera, capturing not only furniture that he would have used, but showing the image of nature that Cole surely would have spent hours gazing upon. View more of Guori’s work here.

Shi Guori’s camera obscura image View of the Catskill Mountains from Thomas Cole’s House, August 12, 2019 – which turned Cole’s sitting room into a camera. Courtesy: the artist

The fourth exhibition, Nicola López and Paula Wilson: Becoming Land, present large-scale environmental meditations on Southwestern desert landscapes. The Albuquerque curators selected these two popular New Mexico artists to get a bit of cross-cultural discussion going with Mr. Cole.

Glimpse some of the work in their gallery here.

Wilson, who works in Carrizozo, creates gigantic, mixed-media installations that prompt viewers to consider the interconnection among different people, desert landscapes, agricultural technologies, and even the debris left by civilization.

Paula Wilson’s 2021 monumental printed and painted installation, Yucca Rising. From the artist.

López, who works and teaches in New York, presents a large-scale cyanotype. Unlike Guori, who traveled to the Catskills to create his ghostly images with light, López was unable to travel during the pandemic and made this monumental work at home with the materials around her – a driveway, nearby desert plants, and the blazing New Mexico sun.

Detail of 2021 NeverWild cyanotype by Nicola López – ghostly images of New Mexico plants dwarfing mysterious architectural structures in the desert.

Congratulations to the Albuquerque Museum for inviting Thomas Cole’s team to collaborate in mounting such a beautiful, thought-provoking show.

O’Keeffe Museum Shows Georgia at Home

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One of the most photographed artists of the 20th century, everyone is used to seeing Georgia O’Keeffe in her “formal” pose and gear – angular black hat, stark wrap dress, punctuated by her modernist Calder pin, standing against the New Mexico sky peering solemnly into the future.

In its latest offering, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum is giving fans a special treat (and a different view) through its exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe, a Life Well Lived: Photographs by Malcolm Varon, on display in Santa Fe through October 31.

2021 print of Varon’s 1977 photo of Georgia relaxing at Ghost Ranch. Courtesy: the artist
Georgia’s 1946 Part of the Cliff, a painting inspired by the view through her studio window.

The show features a smiling, at-ease 89-year-old surrounded by family, friends, companions, and pets – images quite apart from the GOK that we all admire and revere. How did this happen?

In the 1960s in New York, photographer Malcolm Varon established quite a reputation for documenting painters’ works in a way that captured a lot of their spirit. No wonder that in the mid-1970s, he was summoned out to Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu to document some of Georgia’s huge body of work.

While he was working with the artist during the summer of 1977, a journalist arrived to interview the icon for a feature in ARTnews.

No photographer had been attached to the story, so Georgia came up with hew own solution – ask her colleague Malcolm to shoot her in the setting of her Ghost Ranch home.

Since Malcolm was already familiar with the operations around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu, he ended up taking about 300 photos of her homes, the landscapes that inspired her, and the people who kept things humming.

2021 prints of Varon’s 1977 portraits of Ida Archuleta, Candelaria Lopez, and Estiben Suazo, the people who managed Georgia’s homes and properties. Courtesy: the artist.

Despite Georgia’s reputation as a loner living out in the middle of nowhere, Malcolm appreciated that the day-to-day operations in the outback were quite fun, busy, natural, and happy at her two studio compounds.

ARTnews made a few selections from Varon’s photographs and ran them in the feature, but the majority of the 300 shots were never printed or seen…until now.

Visitors at the GOK museum pour over every detail of the portraits and landscapes, enjoying a new, different glimpse of the artist and her world – Varon’s portrait of Georgia’s sister, beautiful portraits of her property caretakers (whose families still take care of the GOK home for the museum), and her assistant Juan Hamilton.

The curators present several paintings from the 1940s showing the same cliffs, landscapes, and skies that Varon captured in the summer of 1977. Visitors have fun shifting back and forth between the oil paintngs and photos.

2021 print of Varon’s 1977 photograph of the tall ladder at Georgia’s Abiquiu home – a platform from which she surveyed the world. Courtesy: the artist

2021 print of Varon’s 1977 fun photograph of Georgia at Ghost Ranch with her friend and assistant, artist Juan Hamilton with the Pedernal as backdrop. Courtesy: the artist

Take a look at some of our favorites in our Flickr album.

Listen in as the curators of this delightful show draw back the curtain on the legendary O’Keeffe, her relationship with photography, and what happened when a trusted friend got her to smile for the camera: