What does it mean to “capture” the landscape? To convey its essence? To harness its power and reap its bounty? To possess it? To make it your own?
Organized in dialogue with Making Their Way: The Florida Highwaymen Painters and consisting of works drawn almost entirely from the Addison’s rich permanent collection, Captive Lands offers varied frameworks with which to engage with the complex and often fraught histories of the lands now known as the United States. Unfolding over five distinct sections, this exhibition is not based on one unifying thesis or a single cohesive narrative. Instead, each gallery offers visitors the opportunity to reflect on the American landscape through a distinctive lens grounded in the overarching, expansive theme of capture. The first gallery, comprised largely of romanticized nineteenth-century landscape paintings, explores the ways in which artists have fundamentally defined our collective understanding of the American landscape. The second considers the ways in which the land has been cultivated to extract its resources. The third engages with the profuse visual culture of two major nineteenth- and twentieth-century tourist meccas—Niagara Falls and Florida—to explore how the land’s natural beauty can be simultaneously celebrated and commercialized. The fourth gallery examines the ways in which the land is transformed by historical trauma and retains it in ways both literal and metaphorical. The final gallery, focused on the American West, positions the region as the ultimate bellwether of America’s shifting, contradictory relationship to the natural world—a place that is variously revered, documented, developed, and destroyed.
The land belongs to the future.
–Willa Cather, O Pioneers!, 1913
Generous support for this exhibition has been provided by the Sidney R. Knafel Fund.
