Art History News: (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

June 12– September 14, 2025

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art presents (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art, a collaborative exhibition that explores the rich, complicated, and evolving topic of the American landscape, from its origins in 19th-century painting to the present. The exhibition is the culmination of a multi-year collaboration between four participating museums in the Art Bridges Cohort Program’s American South Consortium. (Un)Settled will be on view at the Wadsworth June 12– September 14, 2025. (Un)Settled uniquely brings together artworks from each of the partners’ collections to broaden the story of American art.

The show presents a more expansive and complex view of landscape and its relationship to identity by including artwork spanning hundreds of years and representing regions across the United States and sites in Latin America.

“In collaboration with our three nationally acclaimed museum partners through the Art Bridges Cohort Program, this show brings together selections of American art and material culture that are beautiful, poignant, and thought-provoking. The Wadsworth is proud to celebrate the significance of landscape across art history and its relevance in American art and visual culture. Additionally, the display of many incredible loans in this museum will provide visitors with a rich, meaningful experience,” says the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Director Matthew Hargraves.

Why (Un)Settled?

(Un)Settled highlights shifting attitudes toward landscape’s relevance and resonance in American art. This multidisciplinary show features over 60 works of art including baskets, ceramics, glass, photography, and painting. Building upon a central framework of the Wadsworth’s noted Hudson River School paintings, each section opens with an artwork from the nineteenth century in conversation with modern and contemporary interpretations.

To present a more comprehensive history, the curatorial selection included the perspectives of Native American artists, women, and artists of color. (Un)Settled foregrounds multiple historic and cultural perspectives in each of its five thematic sections: The Beaten Path opens the show by revealing moments of connection and tension between people and their surroundings. Expanding Horizons features artists whose travels changed their perspectives and points of view. Counterpoints relates place and identity, foregrounding the experiences of individual. Seminatural explores the romanticization of our views, be they natural or urban, and attempts to impart order onto our surroundings. (Un)Settled closes the exhibition, reflecting upon this multifaceted term that addresses the movement of people over time, conversations about the significance of place, and how landscape relates to a dialogue about national identity.

The exhibition in its totality reveals how artist’s impressions of the landscape are an enduring cultural touchpoint, and are inherently unsettled. There are through lines from historic to contemporary, such as environmental awareness which emerges in the first section in Thomas Cole’s 1827 View of the White Mountains and remains a central part of Jacqueline Bishop’s electrifying painting After the Rain (Methane) (2014–15), displayed in the final section.

Similarly, contemporary artist Tom McGrath’s abstracted view of downtown Los Angeles appears alongside Albert Bierstadt’s romanticized topographical views of the American West, which McGrath cites as inspiration for his panoramic style. The juxtaposition of a traditional 19th-century Coast Salish basket with a contemporary response by glass artist Dan Friday (Lummi Nation, Coast Salish) brings to light the role of tradition and memory sustained over generations.

William Christenberry’s photographs record specific places, primarily in the western part of his home state of Alabama, and reflect upon memory, transformation, and physical change wrought by time on landscape and the built environment. Similarly, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe’s black and white portraits of the Gullah Geechee on Daufuskie Island off the coast of South Carolina address disappearing or threatened cultural heritage and, in the artist,s words, “keep for the eyes of history the way Daufuskie was.”

“From the local scenery to national parks, the individual to the communal, our cultural values and beliefs can be shaped by our surroundings. (Un)Settled reminds us of this through beautiful and compelling works of art,” says Erin Monroe, Krieble Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art.

Monroe worked with Laura Leonard, Art Bridges Project Coordinator and Curatorial Researcher on the final artist selection and interpretative materials. As Leonard stated, “This project was enriched by the dialogue we had with our partners and sharing different viewpoints on the topic. As a result, the exhibition includes several regional artists to expand beyond the familiar and expected.”

For the Wadsworth’s presentation as the final venue for this traveling exhibition, the museum will include additional works from the permanent collection that further highlight the significance of artists relating to the landscape, such as Mark Dion’s sculptural display of objects excavated from the Seekonk River Providence Cabinet (2001) and Alma Thomas’s abstract painting Red Azaleas Jubliee (1976).

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Hartford, CT), is the lead institution in the Art Bridges Cohort Program, centered on collection-sharing initiatives with its three partner museums: the Columbia Museum of Art (Columbia, SC), the Mobile Museum of Art (Mobile, AL), and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Together, the four institutions are known as the American South Consortium. An Art Bridges Foundation partnership (Un)Settled: The Landscape in American Art , a mid-sized exhibition, is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.

Images

Thomas Cole (1802–1848), View in the White Mountains, 1827. Oil on canvas. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Bequest of Daniel Wadsworth, 1848.17

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe (b. 1951) Jake with his boat arriving on Daufuskie’s shore , 1978. Columbia Museum of Art, Gift of Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, 1985.4.38 © Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe

Jacqueline Bishop (b. 1955), After the Rain (Methane), 2014–2015. Oil on linen. MontgomeryMuseum of Fine Arts Association Purchase, 2018.7 © Jacqueline Bishop;