Landscape painting has always had a unique place in the history of American Art. Earlier settlers and colonists especially celebrated the American landscape – one that has been shaped by the stewardship of Native peoples through the ages. For many Europeans, however, civilization, cities, and the memory of Greece and Rome were key ways of understanding the world, and the presence of Native people in the American landscape was largely dismissed. The American landscape paintings in the museum’s collection capture the full breadth of the country’s history and relationship to land from the settler’s point of view, ranging from the earliest Hudson Valley painters, to the works of Americans abroad and the urban landscape.
Since long before colonists arrived, Native people have continued to live in communion with these same lands despite their violent displacement through the forces of colonization. This gallery includes contemporaneous works of Native art that reflect their connection to the natural world and also demonstrate how Native artists transformed what they gained through global trade into their aesthetic systems.