The first show will feature two major surveys by leading American landscape photographers Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz that were recently acquired by the Yale Art Gallery.
Adams' "What We Bought, The New World" and Baltz's "Park City" were purchased by the gallery in 2000 and will be on public exhibition for the first time.
"No two American photographers working in the 1970s paid closer attention than Adams and Baltz to how public and private interests were building wantonly and wildly in the American West, dramatically suburbanizing the region," says Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director, who orchestrated both the acquisition and the exhibition of these visual surveys. "Their remarkable photographs document this activity with a stunning clarity and what I can only call a terrible and ironic beauty."
Like Gowin, both Adams and Baltz record the way humans abuse the Earth, both consciously and unconsciously. However, they explore this topic from a very different vantage point -- close up and on the ground.
The 193 images in the Adams portfolio document the development of the Denver metropolitan area from a region described just 50 years ago as "the Promised Land" into a banal suburb, with hastily conceived commercial and residential buildings.
Adams has written: "In a few years ... the area's ruin would be a testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves and, in turn, from the natural world that we professed to love."
The Baltz portfolio consists of 102 images taken in 1978 and 1979 that document the construction of Park City, Utah, the second-home development and ski resort east of Salt Lake City that was one of the sites of the 2002 Winter Olympics.
When Baltz first saw Park City it was a ghost town surrounded by a landscape littered with the debris of abandoned silver, lead, gold and zinc mines. In just two years, the area was covered with houses and commercial structures. One critic wrote that Baltz's survey "recording the rapid suburbanization of the formerly rugged wilderness around Park City, Utah, exposed new and disturbing meaning for the word 'park.' These parks weren't pastoral, bucolic or publicly held, but bleak, monotonous and privately controlled."
The acquisition of the Robert Adams and Lewis Baltz photographic surveys was made possible by the Janet and Simeon Braguin Fund. The exhibition was supported through the generosity of Jan and Frederick Mayer '50.
"Looking at America"
The exhibition "Looking at America" explores how contemporary artists view the nation's landscapes.
The exhibition was organized by Jennifer Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr. Curator of European and Contemporary Art.
In creating the show, Gross says, she was influenced by the writings of John Brinckerhoff Jackson (1909-1996), a cultural historian and founding editor of the journal Landscape. Jackson, she notes, "anticipated the disjunction that exists between the places many contemporary artists and viewers inhabit and the landscapes they have been taught to see and value." In his writings, Jackson maintained that the development of shopping malls, subdivisions and highway systems were the new hallmarks of "the vernacular American landscape."
Instead of the idealized views created by artists in previous centuries or the farming and industrial landscapes favored by early 20th-century realists and modernists, the landscapes recorded by the 11 artists in the exhibition are "culturally self-conscious," says Gross.
These include such artificial views of nature as Tony Tasset's 10-by-12-foot steel sculpture "Cherry Tree," Adam Cvijanovic's wall mural "New City" and Gregory Crewdson's stagings of disturbing incidents in suburbia. Other works include paintings by Patricia Cronin, Rackstraw Downes and Yvonne Jacquette; digital works by Sven Pahlsson and Jeremy Blake; photography by Uta Barth; a graphic drawing by Heide Fasnacht; and a video by Burt Barr.
The exhibition and accompanying brochure are supported by an endowment made possible by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Jane and Simeon Braguin Fund.
Some of the artists represented in the exhibit will talk about their works at the gallery in May. Information will appear in future issues of the Yale Bulletin & Calendar.
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