Take any major historical Western art movement from the 16th century through today and you can bet women played an important role. Until the last handful of years, you can also bet that male scholars writing the histories of those movements minimized their impact or omitted them all together.

Artemisia Gentileschi in the Renaissance. Berthe Morisot to French Impressionism. Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner with Abstract Expressionism. Only within the past decade have they begun receiving any appropriate measure of due for their contributions.

Add Susie M. Bartow’s name to that list for the Hudson River School, the first major art movement in the United States. Founded in the mid-19^th century along the Hudson River in New York by Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School was a community of landscape painters exalting America’s natural beauty.

Barstow (1836-1923) receives the first retrospective of her career one century following her death during “Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle,” appropriately on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY through October 29, 2023.

No woman from the Hudson River School has ever had a solo show. Anywhere. Until now.

“When you think of the Hudson River School, you think of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand, but the women have been erased from that history,” Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Contemporary Art, at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, told Forbes.com.

Barstow was selected because the Cole Center had one of her paintings in its permanent collection and in researching female Hudson River School painters looking for one to highlight, exhibition co-curator and Professor of Art History at Towson University Nancy Siegel connected with Barstow’s family who still had her sketches, sketch box, paint brushes, numerous paintings, and other items from her art practice.

“While there are certain formal elements that quickly identify Susie Barstow’s painterly style—her particular brush strokes with regard to the bark of birch trees or moon-lit recesses deep within nature—it is important to see how her work rests comfortably within the style of the Hudson River School as it evolved across the nineteenth century,” Siegel told Forbes.com. “Hers are paintings that glorify and celebrate the landscape just as those by her male colleagues. In this regard, these are artists not separated by their gender, rather, the artists of the loosely-defined Hudson River School were united by their passionate quest to hike, sketch, and paint the awe-inspiring views of nature they experienced first-hand.”

Barstow hiked up to 25 miles a day–in period clothing, of course–sketching the Adirondak Mountains, White Mountains and Catskill Mountains. She exhibited and sold paintings alongside major male figures of the Hudson River School, she just wasn’t written into the history books.

“The exhibition is a deep dive on Susie’s work and also includes other painters, specifically women, who were painting in her circle,” Menconeri explains. “We know that there were over 50 women who were painting landscapes in 19^th century America, so we want to bring them a spotlight and recognition.”

Contemporary Practices

“Women Reframe American Landscape” is a two-part exhibition with Barstow centering one half and contemporary women artists who focus on land and landscape in their work the other.

“American landscape painting–the paintings that we’ve been seeing–have all been by predominantly white men, so we’re only seeing landscape according to one specific group of people,” Menconeri said. “At the heart of this (exhibition) we wanted to say, ‘what’s landscape to women, not only in the 19^th century, but today?’ It feels urgent because there’s so much at stake with climate change and recentering people on the land and thinking more deeply about the history of the land in the United States.”

Always remember, America was built by slave labor working stolen land.

The exhibition’s contemporary works come from a powerhouse roster of predominantly African American, Native American and Latina artists including Teresita Fernández, Ebony G. Patterson, Wendy Red Star (Absáalooka), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee).

Diverging from Barstow and their Hudson River School forebearers, they use sculpture, video, collage, photography and site-specific installations to comment on land and landscape. Examples of all are on view during “Women Reframe American Landscape: Contemporary Practices.”

“Landscape art doesn’t have to just be a canvas with a single point perspective horizon line and a gold frame; landscape is something much more complicated,” Menconeri reminded.

Much more complicated in the hands of the contemporary artists.

Their work is less representational, more confrontational. They are not coy in their expressions of how land is contested. They consider themselves more participants in the land as opposed to observers of it. They make definite distinctions between “land” and “landscape.”

Unlike the Hudson River School painters, and most 19^th and early 20^th century American landscape painters, contemporary artists show the land’s human side. Land not removed from people–the so-called “wilderness”–but places that have been peopled for tens of thousands of years.

Concepts of land as either natural and wild, or developed and populated, are 19^th and 20^th century colonial concepts. Land needn’t be either/or.

People can be integral actors in spectacular, healthy landscapes teeming with biodiversity as surely as they can be absent from vast, dead landscapes wrecked by chemical contamination, mining or bomb testing. Think of Indigenous practices, people living productively on the land in balance with nature as opposed to white, settler colonial practices of people having to be removed from land in order to protect it, lest that land be logged, mined, farmed and paved to oblivion.

That tension is the entire foundation of America’s National Park System, the belief that unless people are removed entirely from these remarkable places except to visit, they will surely destroy them, failing to recognize that Indigenous people lived on those lands for thousands of years without doing so.

Cole can be considered an early environmentalist advocating for balance between the built and natural worlds through his painting and writing. He was ahead of his time speaking out against the escalating development and deforestation of the Catskill Mountains almost 100 years ago. Railroads and tanneries and iron foundries and mills chewing up the land, the landscape, but he was oblivious to the thousands of years of inhabitation that had occurred on that land by Indigenous people who didn’t similarly threaten it.

People don’t necessarily endanger the land and landscapes, white people do. Colonizers do.

Contemporary artists make this distinction clear.

Deliciously, their artworks are sited within and in response to Cole’s artwork, home, studios, and bucolic grounds creating one compelling juxtaposition after another.

As is generally the case, the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous troupe of feminist artists, say it best in a text piece specially created for this exhibition which reads, in part: “Hudson River School Paintings depicted a wilderness tamed by white settlers; when, in fact, the land had been inhabited, cultivated and protected for millennia by Indigenous nations. While Hudson River School painters romanticized and idealized the stolen land, robber barons extracted whatever they could, and left a mess for future generations. These same tycoons bought Hudson River School paintings, donated them to museums, and promoted an Eden that never was.”

After leaving the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, “Women Reframe American Landscape” travels to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT from November 16, 2023, through March 31, 2024.

Jean LaMarr’s colorful and seductive yet hard-hitting satirical artworks challenging long-held cultural stereotypes and preconceptions about Native American people and cultures will be on view in the exhibition The Art of Jean LaMarr at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts from August 18, 2023, through January 7, 2024. The Art of Jean LaMarr, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA), features more than 60 artworks including paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning from the 1970s to the present. Jean LaMarr (Susanville Indian Rancheria), an internationally recognized artist, educator, and Native American advocate with ancestral ties to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Susanville, California, sparks powerful and important conversations about racist imagery, representations of Native women, legacies of colonization, and environmental justice.

“The Nevada Museum of Art is proud to present this major exhibition of work by Jean LaMarr, who has been a respected artist involved in the Great Basin arts community for decades,” says NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director Ann M. Wolfe. “While Jean lives and works in the relatively secluded rural community of Susanville, she has exhibited her work widely and is highly regarded by scholars, curators, and artists around the world.” MoCNA Chief Curator Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man adds, “We are excited to host this exhibition at MoCNA, especially since Jean LaMarr taught at IAIA for several years and contributed to advancing contemporary Native art through works that powerfully blend Indigenous cultural elements with Modern art and paved the way for many female Native artists.”

LaMarr (born 1945) is descended from Wada Tukadu Numu (Northern Paiute) and Illmowi, Aporige, and Atsugewi (Pit River) ancestry, with strong family ties to Northern Nevada and Northern California. She was born and raised in Susanville, California, and is now an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria in Susanville, California, where she lives. In 1964, LaMarr relocated to San Jose, California as part of the Indian Relocation Act, and in 1976 she graduated from UC Berkeley, where she became involved in activist politics and participated in protests including the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz (1969) and the Pit River Occupation in Shasta County (1970).

LaMarr founded the Native American Graphic Workshop in Susanville in 1994 to help engage Native American youth, elders, and community members in artmaking. LaMarr largely built her artistic reputation as a skilled printmaker while teaching and practicing as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s. She went on to teach at IAIA in Santa Fe for many years before returning to Susanville.

LaMarr believes “that one painting would be in one home or museum, but a print or video or mural would reach everyone… One painting might be worth a million dollars, but prints will reach millions of people.” For nearly a decade, LaMarr designed the popular Bear Dance posters for the annual Maidu gathering held in the mountain community of Janesville, California, just an hour north of Reno, Nevada. Many of LaMarr’s screenprints feature bold graphics and bright colors that communicate a direct political message to viewers.

My art is a “rejection of the idea of the vanished American Indian,” LaMarr says, explaining that contemporary Native American people are part of vibrant and living cultures. While her paintings, prints, and installations celebrate and honor ancestors and cultural traditions, they also confront racist stereotypes of Native American people, such as those perpetuated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic 1855 poem “Song of Hiawatha,” or Slim Whitman’s popular 1924 song “Indian Love Call.” In her Cover Girl series and in many other artworks, LaMarr has worked tirelessly to reclaim the dignity of Native American women, whose bodies were often exploited by early twentieth-century non-Native anthropologists and photographers and later appropriated for use on consumer product packaging. Another strand of LaMarr’s work tackles the legacies of colonialism, including the impacts of ongoing environmental trauma on Native American tribal communities in the American West.

“Jean LaMarr speaks from a place of fierce pride in her indigeneity, and a willingness to challenge the erasure and structural racism that Indigenous Peoples face in their lives. Her work has that razor-sharp political commentary, yet can transmit the softness and beauty of our cultures, particularly of Indigenous women,” says Dr. Debra Harry (Kooyooe Tukadu Numu from Pyramid Lake), Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies in the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art has published a hardcover book, The Art of Jean LaMarr, which will be available for purchase in the MoCNA Museum Store. The Art of Jean LaMarr includes an essay by Ann M. Wolfe, the NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, with contributions from Allan L. Edmunds, Mary Lee Fulkerson, Debra Harry, Ph.D., Archana Hortsing, Lucy Lippard, Judith Lowry, Susan Lobo, Ph.D., Malcolm Margolin, Raymond Patlan, Jan Rindfleisch, and Peter Selz. The exhibition will also be accompanied by Purple Flower Girl (2022), a short video about LaMarr produced and directed by Tsanavi Spoonhunter, who is a descendant of the Northern Paiute, Lakota and Northern Arapaho nations, and who received her master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus in documentary filmmaking.

The Art of Jean LaMarr is sponsored by Kristi Overgaard; Sandy Raffealli|Bill Pearce Motors; The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada; with supporting sponsorship from Kathie Bartlett, and with additional support from Nevada Humanities and in memory of Bernadette Kaye. The MocNA presentation of The Art of Jean LaMarr is supported by the Ford Foundation.