Monuments & Mythmaking: Creating the American Landscape

Art allows humans to imagine people and places they’ve met or visited, but that imagining is always mediated by the artist and their own perspective. As early as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Americans used visual art to imagine North American environments and their place within those landscapes. This talk will examine how artists, tourism boosters, politicians, and others, wielded landscape painting and photography to various ends, including the dispossession of Indigenous lands, imagining technological futures, and the creation of the national park system in the United States.

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