HUMANIZING LANDSCAPES: Geography, Culture and the Magoon Collection October 6-December 20, 2000

Looking through the interpretive lenses of cultural geography and art history, the seventy British and American works in "Humanizing Landscapes" offer a spectacular tour from the Old World to the New, from the Rhine River Valley and Loch Lomond to sites memorialized by artists of the Hudson River School. In the nineteenth century, an age of rapid technological change and expanding travel opportunities, fine artists and landscape architects were pioneers in the interpretation of historic sites and features of the natural environment. Whether by employing novel viewpoints and framing devices, by promoting aesthetic appreciation of the wilderness, or by transforming established visual conventions to reflect a changing relationship between past and present, artists vividly testified to geography's crucial "humanizing" role as the modern world took shape. The exhibition includes oil paintings, watercolors, prints, and drawings by fifty-five English and American artists, including Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Asher B. Durand, John Ruskin, Joseph Mallord William Turner, and William Trost Richards. Of special regional interest are rarely seen period maps and images of sites in the Hudson River Valley, including Matthew Vassar's estate "Springside," designed by Andrew Jackson Downing in the 1850s.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by the curators. 108 pages, softbound; $20. Shipping, $3.

FREE PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM
"Shaping a New World Vision: Past and Present Perspectives"
October 27-28, 2000 203 Taylor Hall, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY

Friday, October 27, 5 p.m.
Keynote lecture:
David Lowenthal, Historian and Geographer
"Seen from the Other Shore: English and American Landscapes"
Reception follows.

Saturday, October 28, 10 a.m.
Eleanor Jones Harvey, Curator of American Art
"America and the Landscape, from Emerson's 'transparent eyeball' to the American Transcendental Painting Group"

Anne Whiston Spirn, Landscape Architect *
"Reading and Telling Landscape: Dialogues Among Photographs, Words, and Places"

Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee, Photographers * "Photographing the Changing Landscape"

Lunch and concluding discussion

* From mid-October to mid-November, a selection of photographs by Anne Whiston Spirn will be on view in the atrium landing gallery, and photographs by Virginia Beahan and Laura McPhee in the permanent collection galleries.

*** Of Related Interest *** At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, November 29, 2000, the Art Department, Vassar College and the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center present "Turning the Head in Empirical Space," a free public lecture by renowned landscape painter Rackstraw Downes. Taylor Hall 203, Vassar College. For more information, please call the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at (845) 437-5632.