Story Archive

Story Archive

  • Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    How can paintings from the nineteenth century reflect views about westward expansion? What can a high chest of drawers from Philadelphia reveal about the trade of mahogany? How have works by contemporary artists contributed to modern ecological consciousness? These are...
  • A Double Take on Picturing Place in Japan

    A Double Take on Picturing Place in Japan

    Three galleries in the Art Museum are currently filled with this prodigious output in the exhibition Picturing Place in Japan . Each gallery treats a different theme: Imagined Places, Famous Places, and Sacred Places, with a final coda of photographs...
  • Teaching Nature's Nation

    Teaching Nature's Nation

    Among the most enjoyable aspects of producing the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment is the opportunity it has afforded to teach related courses at different stages in the project’s gestation.
  • The Modern Museum: Between Preservation and Action | Director's Letter Winter 2019

    The Modern Museum: Between Preservation and Action | Director's Letter Winter 2019

    James Steward discusses ways in which the modern museum’s origins in the European Enlightenment continue to inform the core missions and strategies of most museums today, and the potential for museums to act as change agents that might foster critical...
  • Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Convened in conjunction with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment , this two-day symposium extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places. Seventeen international speakers offer compelling ecocritical analysis of a...