Shifting Shorelines
Shifting Shorelines brings together historic and contemporary art, visual culture, and environmental science to engage the history of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary. Focusing on the river鈥檚 edges from Albany southward to its flow into the Atlantic Ocean, the exhibition foregrounds the impact of local industry on the natural environment, highlighting the history of the river's distinctive ecological features such as brackish and salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches, along with the docks, factories, and buildings that crowded them out. Through visual and material evidence, Shifting Shorelines demonstrates the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation.
Shifting Shorelines actively engages in a critical dialogue with images of the river as a natural paradise by showing these seemingly hegemonic portrayals alongside contrasting representations that consider the exploitation and environmental damage to the river that has accompanied many of the human endeavors along its shores. In so doing it offers a counter reading of the received art historical narratives鈥攏arratives overwhelmingly grounded on the work of white male artists鈥攖hat aims for a rich and complex understanding of the legacy, life, and livelihoods along the river informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators.
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Shifting Shorelines brings together historic and contemporary art, visual culture, and environmental science to engage the history of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary. Focusing on the river鈥檚 edges from Albany southward to its flow into the Atlantic Ocean, the exhibition foregrounds the impact of local industry on the natural environment, highlighting the history of the river's distinctive ecological features such as brackish and salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches, along with the docks, factories, and buildings that crowded them out. Through visual and material evidence, Shifting Shorelines demonstrates the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation.
Shifting Shorelines actively engages in a critical dialogue with images of the river as a natural paradise by showing these seemingly hegemonic portrayals alongside contrasting representations that consider the exploitation and environmental damage to the river that has accompanied many of the human endeavors along its shores. In so doing it offers a counter reading of the received art historical narratives鈥攏arratives overwhelmingly grounded on the work of white male artists鈥攖hat aims for a rich and complex understanding of the legacy, life, and livelihoods along the river informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators.
Artists on show
- Aaron Douglas
- Alan Michelson
- Alex Mathew
- Alfred Stieglitz
- Alvin Baltrop
- An-My Lê
- Anthony Papa
- Athena LaTocha
- Charles Frederick William Mielatz
- Courtney M. Leonard
- Daniel Putnam Brinley
- David Hammons
- David Johnson
- Donna Hogerhuis
- Edward Hopper
- Emil Ganso
- Ernest Fiene
- Ernest Lawson
- Every Ocean Hughes
- Frederic Edwin Church
- George Bellows
- George Luks
- Gifford Beal
- Glenn O. Coleman
- Gordon Matta-Clark
- Henry Ary
- Henry Ernest Schnackenberg
- Henry Golden Dearth
- Jacques-Gerard Milbert
- Jasper Francis Cropsey
- Jean-Marc Superville Sovak
- Joellyn Duesberry
- Johann Herman Carmiencke
- John Ferguson Weir
- John Marin
- John V. Cornell
- Joost Hartgersz
- Joseph Vollmering
- Julia Hart Beers
- Kryn Frederycks
- Leon Kroll
- Lisa Sanditz
- Marie Lorenz
- Palmer Hayden
- Reginald Marsh
- Regis-Francois Gignoux
- Reva Fuhrman
- Ruth Orkin
- Samuel Colman
- Shi Guorui
- Thomas Cole
- Thomas Moran
- Thomas W. Commeraw
- Thomas Worthington Whittredge
- Victor Gifford Audubon
- William H. Moschett
- William Henry Jackson
- Yvonne Jacquette
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For every idyllic image of the Hudson River Valley in Shifting Shorelines, there are many others in which human industry intrudes upon the view.
Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River offers a transhistorical reading of human endeavors along the edges of the Hudson as depicted through the observations of artists.
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