April Gornik, “Approaching Night,” Image via Heritage Museums & Gardens

Works by many of the most compelling American landscape painters feature during a hypnotic group exhibition that seeks to explore a number of engaging historical and contemporary concepts. Who’s included and where?

On view now through October 9 at the Heritage Museums & Gardens in Sandwich, Massachusetts, “Painted Landscapes” is an incredibly diverse group exhibition showcasing works by nearly 50 world-class artists. The aim of the robust show is to illuminate the compelling new ways in which contemporary artists both employ and interpret the traditional genre of landscape painting. Among the themes are artists who “address contemporary issues of land use, nature appreciation, and ecology through their paintings of the American environment,” the museum reports. “The exhibit examines landscape paintings in terms of their historical inspiration, their formal elements of structure and form, and their theoretical underpinnings in which a landscape could be read as a specific location or as a place of human experience.

Clay Wagstaff, “Light on Rock No.10,” Image via Heritage Museums & Gardens
Sylvia Plimack-Mangold, “Summer Maple, 2009,” Image via Heritage Museums & Gardens

“The exhibit features key aspects of what defines landscape paintings, including History & Inspiration (documenting change in America from a rural, agrarian society to the urban, populous place it has become, capturing the countryside, the seaside, and all the places artists live and work), Place (whether natural or man-made, urban or rural, real or imagined), Structure & Landscape (either imposed upon the natural landscape through man-made structures or in naturally occurring formal features of the landscape itself), The Tree (depiction of the common and familiar tree), and The Act of Painting (where the subject of ‘landscape’ and the place depicted are almost secondary to the process and stylist choices of the artists).” The exhibition was curated by Lauren P. Della Monica.

To learn more, visit the Heritage Museums & Gardens.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.


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Andrew Webster is the former Editor of Fine Art Today and worked as an editorial and creative marketing assistant for Streamline Publishing. Andrew graduated from The University of North Carolina at Asheville with a B.A. in Art History and Ceramics. He then moved on to the University of Oregon, where he completed an M.A. in Art History. Studying under scholar Kathleen Nicholson, he completed a thesis project that investigated the peculiar practice of embedded self-portraiture within Christian imagery during the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy.

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