Objectives: After viewing Like, Love, Lust: Michael Sarich, and learning about the influences, art, and stories of artist Michael Sarich, children participating in the Dose of Art will enter a classroom to create a work of their own inspired by the art of Michael Sarich. Students will learn about different kinds of marks used to make drawings, about the elements and principles of art, and about icons and symbols of personal and cultural significance. Students will then learn about the kinds of marks that can be made using different kinds of media, including colored pencils, crayons, and oil pastels. This process will give children the opportunity to experiment with multiple media, to learn about the elements and principles of art, and to create a drawing of their own from simple materials.
Vocabulary: mark, line, shape, color, symbol, icon, shade, value, tone, layer, study
Materials: 7”x22” railroad board; glue sticks; 5”x20” drawing paper; pencils; colored pencils; crayons; oil pastels; scratch paper
Lesson Description:
• When students come into the classroom from the tours, discuss Sarich’s artwork and what students have learned about it and the artist from their tour and the exhibition.
• Each classroom contains a classroom pack of crayons, colored pencils, and oil pastels, plus pre-cut railroad board and drawing paper, and glue sticks.
• Explain that a drawing can be a sketch, or a study, for a larger artwork, but it can also be a finished artwork itself.
• Explain that a drawing can be made with many different kinds of tools and media, including pencils, charcoal, colored pencils, crayons, oil pastels, chalk, and even dirt!
• Explain that each different kind of media conveys a different kind of feeling when it is used to make a mark on a piece of paper or other drawing surface, but that the way the media is used also has a profound impact on the feeling of a drawing.
• Ask students what kinds of feelings Sarich’s artwork makes them feel.
• Ask students to choose a type of media—a pencil, a colored pencil, a crayon, or an oil pastel. Then, on scratch paper, ask them to make one mark on the paper that feels or looks happy, another mark that feels or looks angry, and another mark that feels or looks sad. Ask the students whether there are other kinds of feelings that could be conveyed by the marks in a drawing.
• Ask students what kinds of symbols and icons they saw in the Sarich exhibition. Why do they think he might have chosen these particular symbols to focus upon in his art? What seems important or significant about the symbols to him?
• Explain that students will be creating a drawing using symbols and icons from the Sarich exhibition as well as symbols and icons that are important to them.
• Ask students to use a pencil and scratch paper and to draw for a few minutes. Ask them to think about three symbols or images that each of them feels is important in one way or another, and to draw those symbols on the scratch paper.
• When each student has two or three symbols sketched on their scratch paper, give each student a piece of the 5”x20” drawing paper for their use. Ask them to re-create the symbols across the paper using pencil if they would like, or any other media (be sure to encourage them to make them large enough to cross the entire paper, and to repeat them, if necessary).
• When the initial symbols are sketched in, ask the students to use and to experiment with multiple media—crayons, pencil, colored pencil, and oil pastel—to to create multiple layers of color, tone, and density in their images. Be sure to encourage them to fill up the paper—fill in the white space with marks!
• Encourage students to use numerous colors, but preferably to encourage them to think about the colors used in Michael Sarich’s work: primary colors, primarily!
• When their drawings are complete, give each student a sheet of the 7”x22” railroad board. Explain that they should turn their drawings over carefully and place just a few dabs of gluestick along the border, center it on the black railroad board, and mount their drawings in a “frame” to take home.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
Michael Sarich Dose of Art Lesson Plan
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Marks on the Land: An Exhibition of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection Tour Blueprint
Introduction
Edward Burtynksy, Nickel Tailings #36, Sudbury, Ontario (1996)
This survey of The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection consists of fourteen photographic prints depicting different kinds of human marks on the land. From the impermanent conceptual marks made by Jim Sanborn in his landscape-scale light projections, to the far more insidious and permanent scars on the land made by mining operations depicted in Terry Evans’ and Edward Burtynsky’s photographs, each of the eight artists in this survey grapples with ideas about how and why people make land-marks—and what effects the marks have on our perception, understanding, and relationship to the land.
The exhibition lends itself to discussions of landscape history (à la Jennifer Bethke’s recent
This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments
The Altered Landscape, the Carol Franc Buck Collection
As you know, The Altered Landscape Collection is the largest collection within the museum—numbering more than 600 pieces—and is made up almost exclusively of contemporary photography, beginning with The New Topographics, and more contemporary work that has grown out of that movement. Historically important twentieth-century photography—that of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, in particular—has been added to the collection to contextualize the work within the collection, as well as within the history of twentieth-century photography in general.
If the NMA is known nationally for its collections, it is known for The Altered Landscape Collection specifically. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the museum began acquiring photography for a new signature focus collection. The museum’s motivation was to gather landscape works that would address audiences across cultural boundaries and, over time, to position the Museum as a unique visual and intellectual resource. The NMA sought to highlight environmental issues, already emphasized in other areas of the Museum’s collection, and provide a forum for the study and appreciation of land, environment, and environmental thought in art. The NMA’s goal was to recognize the tremendous contribution that photographers have made to our understanding of place and environment, while building its collection in a new direction.
The Altered Landscape is, at its core, about the American west, especially the
By the mid-1970s, however, a small group of photographers, including Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Frank Gohlke began to challenge this traditional view. In the influential exhibition at George Eastman House in 1975 titled “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape,” these photographers focused on contemporary industrial culture—land transformed by human presence. Collectively, they rejected the approach of viewing landscape as beauty, for the “sake of art,” isolated from the context of culture. For the New Topographics photographers, as they came to be known, landscape photography needed to reveal a new artistic viewpoint in response to the specific content of the images. For them, and those that followed, landscape photography needed to challenge traditional notions about land and landscape, beauty, and the nature and purposes of photography. It is in this context that we find the newest exhibition of works from this collection.
The current exhibition’s images depict landscapes in the American West and elsewhere that have been marked in some way—physically, conceptually, artistically, irrevocably— documented by photographers such as Richard Misrach and Terry Evans. The critical edge to some of the works in the exhibition is very clear: Robert Dawson and Edward Burtynsky subtly characterize marks on the land caused by dams and mining operations, for example. Others, such as Jim Sanborn and John Pfahl, photograph other kinds of marks: impermanent light projections of which the only record is the photograph, and more physical, yet still temporary, marks made on the land in the conceptual photographs of John Pfahl.
Orientation
You’ll find the exhibition hung in the Altered Landscape Gallery. The east and north walls feature photographs of much more physical marks on the land: Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of nickel tailings in the surface water in
Vocabulary
Silver Gelatin print
Photograph on paper or plasticized paper coated with an emulsion of light-sensitive silver salts suspended in gelatin, printed out or developed out, and fixed. Came into general use in the 1880s; the developed variety remains the standard black-and-white photographic process.
Dye Transfer print (e.g. Polaroid).
Self-developing color photograph. The complex process, first described by Edwin Land in 1947, has been popular among amateurs and artists since the early 1960s.
Chromogenic print (also chromogenic dye coupler or C-Type print)
The most common type of color photograph, printed from a chromogenic color negative; consists of dyes within gelatin layers on a plastic-coated paper base. Subject to fading and color shifts in dark storage and on exhibition. Developed in the 1940s as an outgrowth of chromogenic color transparencies (Kodachrome, invented in 1935). Used by amateurs and artists alike. (Also called "C-print" or referred to by various brand names.)
Tour Framework
- Explain that the Altered Landscape, Carol Franc Buck Collection is the largest collection in the NMA permanent collection, and that it contains almost 700 photographs that depict landscapes changed at the hands of humans, primarily from the second half of the twentieth century forward.
- Ask guests what they see in Robert Dawson’s photograph “Spillway,
- Explain that Robert Dawson is a San Francisco-based photographer whose work deals primarily with altered landscapes of the west. This photograph depicts a dam on the Putah Creek in Solano/Napa Counties in
- Ask guests what kind of message(s)
- Invite guests to look at James Turrell’s photograph “Roden Crater Low Aerial Oblique Looking Toward N.E.”
- Ask guests what they think they are seeing in the photograph. Does anyone know where the Roden Crater is located, or why it exists?
- Explain that Roden Crater is a volcanic crater located at the edge of the
- Ask guests to compare the Turrell image and the
- Explain that Richard Misrach’s photograph “Battleground Point #21” is an image of a part of the Carson Sink, northeast of
- Ask guests to consider Terry Evans’ photograph before they look at or learn its title. What do guests think they are seeing in the image?
- Explain that the image depicts a gravel pit north of
- Ask guests what kinds of things the artist might be choosing to emphasize by taking an aerial photograph of a landscape instead of a “traditional” landscape photograph?
- Ask guests to consider Edward Burtynsky’s photographs before their perceptions are directed by the wall labels and the works’ titles. What do the images appear to be of? Do they look anything like, say, the
- Explain that the images are Burtynsky’s depictions of the effects on the landscape of dangerous nickel tailings near
- Ask guests to compare the marks on the land in Evans’ and Burtynsky’s photographs. In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?
- Ask guests if they thought of the photographs as beautiful initially. Why? Does the information about the subject of the photographs affect their beauty? Why or why not?
- Ask guests to consider how the photographs by Burtynsky, Evans, Dawson, Turrell, and Misrach are different from the photographs of Sanborn, Pfahl, and Volz. How are the marks made on the land different between and among them?
- Explain that one of the ways the marks are different has to do with documenting the relationships people have to land. For example, Burtynsky and Dawson document mining and hydroelectric marks made on the land, whereas Pfahl, Sanborn, and Volz document temporary or ephemeral marks made for a very different artistic purpose. Why? What are the artistic purposes or intents of the different photographs?
- Ask guests to look carefully at the grid of John Pfahl photographs on the west wall of the gallery. What does Pfahl focus the viewers’ attention upon in the image? How can you tell? Why would he choose this as a subject?
Pfahl explains the images this way: “The added elements suggest numerous mark-making devices associated with photographs, maps, plans an diagrams. On different occasions, they may pointedly repeat a strong formal element in the landscape…; they may fill in information suggested by the scen….; they may depend upon information external to the photograph itself…; or, finally, they may be only arbitrarily related to the scene….”
- Explain to guests that Pfahl photographs scenes in which he, the artist, has inserted temporary visual aids to create his photographs: string, tape, or wire, for example, that heighten the visual characteristics of the photographs.
- Explain that Jim Sanborn is a sculptor and photographer who is very interested in conceptual understanding in art, as well as physics, light, and landscape.
Sanborn explains: “My original intention was to recreate in some way the work of the nineteenth-century cartographers and photographers who were hired to map and photograph the monumental western landscape.[…] Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, James Turrell, and other artists were doing large-scale installations in the natural environment. Those projects affected the land tremendously, and not always with a pleasing effect on the environment. Bulldozers were brought onto the land, and the land itself was manipulated. I decided to counteract that in some way and still do very large outdoor installations. I had completed several in the early 1970s in which I placed objects in the environment, and the end result was photographs of the outdoor installations.
- Explain that Sanborn built his own large-scale projectors to project light onto geologic landforms. He then photographed the projections, leaving no trace of the large-scale artwork that he had created; the only record of the work is the photograph.
- Ask guests to consider the Wolgang Volz photographs of Christo and Jean-Claude’s “Running Fence” and “Valley Curtain” projects. In what ways are these photographs different from others in the exhibition? What kinds of marks on the land do the photographs document?
- Ask guests to consider the multi-layering of artistic decisions in the photographs. Not only does the photographer-as-artist decide how to frame and compose his image of the subject, but Christo and Jean-Claude have also made artistic decisions regarding the placement and purpose of their installation of cloth and anchors in the landscape.
Conclusion
Art facilitates learning by engaging the senses, bypassing conditioned patterns of thinking and allowing other ways of knowing to come forward, sometimes subtly, and sometimes forcefully. All of the photographers in this exhibition engage our senses—but for very different reasons and purposes. Whether the works focus on natural, cultural, or political aspects of the environment, artists have always been sensitive to environments and responsive to our relationship to environments.
Robert Beckmann :: The Body of a House Tour Blueprint
Introduction
Robert Beckmann’s The Body of a House Displayed as it is in (1993) is an anchor work for the NMA’s permanent collection. the Installation Gallery, which was designed specifically to hold the works when the new building was constructed, The Body of a House invites visitors to an up-close-and-personal encounter with an emotional and highly-charged period of American—and Nevadan—history. The Body of a House is an eight-canvas series of images depicting 2.33 seconds of real time during the
This exhibition lends itself to discussions of
Wall Text
As a young boy during the Cold War era, Robert Beckmann remembers watching documentary film footage of the
Beckmann, who now resides in
Beckmann joins a long line of artists who have depicted scenes of real and imagined apocalyptic destruction. Most notably, The Body of a House recalls the serialized imagery of Andy Warhol’s silk-screened print Atomic Bomb (1965) that featured an exploding mushroom cloud against a deep red background. The darkened skies and mysterious eerie glow in Beckmann’s paintings are a frightening reminder of the devastating effects of nuclear explosion.
Orientation
The canvases are arranged in the Installation Gallery in the order of their creation and the narrative of the event, beginning with The Body of a House, #1, to the right of the wall text.
Tour Framework
- Ask adult guests what they believe they are looking at when they look at Beckmann’s paintings. Guests of a certain age may know immediately what they are seeing; others will need some guidance to understand the significance of the paintings in terms of the Cold War, the Test Site in
- Ask children what they see in the paintings. A house? A fire? A house on fire? A rising sun? A strong wind? What in the paintings makes them think these things?
- Ask guests what kinds of feelings and reactions the paintings evoke for them.
- Explain that President Harry Truman was the thirty-third President of the
- Explain that the tests ended in 1992 with the passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
- Ask adult guests if they know what the Cold War was, and if it’s appropriate, what they remember of the Cold War themselves. What kinds of feelings do they remember experiencing during the Cold War? What was the political climate like?
- Ask children if they have ever heard of the Cold War before, and if so, what they know about it.
- Explain that the Cold War was an extremely complicated, largely political war waged primarily by two countries, the
- Explain that as an eleven-year-old child, Beckmann had seen an American military film of a bomb called “Annie” exploding at the Nevada Test Site. The 2.33-second film (55 frames long at 24 frames per second) documented the impact of the nuclear blast on a model home constructed 3,500 feet—two-thirds of a mile—from ground zero. “Annie” was part of a series of tests called “Operation Upshot Knothole,” that occurred at the Nevada Test Site in 1953. The tests’ purposes ranged from nuclear weapon design to atomic combat training to, as in the case of “Annie,” testing the blast effect of a thermonuclear bomb on “typical” suburban homes.
- Explain that Beckmann gained access to the eight original still frame images of the “Annie” test through the
- Explain that the canvases average ten layers of paint, and some have as many as fifteen. This is how Beckmann is able to convey the brightness of the explosion in #1 and the chaos of the complete destruction of the house in #8.
- Ask guests what story the eight sequenced canvases tell. What makes them think of the story in this way? What kind of an ending does the story have? Is there a moral to the story?
- Explain to guests that the paintings are of course about nuclear bombs, their use and destructive power, the Cold War, and the Nevada Test Site.
- Explain that Beckmann is also interested the power of film and photography in American culture. The artist notes that Americans consume photographic (or film/video) images with an insatiable appetite, to the point that we become desensitized to violence, poverty, consequence, war, and so on. But even when a painting is based on a photograph, it conveys a very different sense of the material in the photograph.
As writer William L. Fox writes about Beckmann’s work, “The paintings restore our ability to respond because we take them as a primary, involved, direct witnessing of an event, something that took hours and days and weeks and months to create. They are not only images, representations of an event, but are themselves their own events.”
- Ask guests if the paintings move them in some way. Do they experience anger? Fear? Resentment? Sadness? Surprise?
- Explain that some viewers see the paintings as a more-or-less straightforward protest against nuclear bomb testing in
Robert Beckmann, The Body of a House, #1 (1993)
The two YouTube videos embedded below contain some of the actual footage of the 1953 Annie test depicted in Robert Beckmann's The Body of a House.
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Docent Depot Documents
Following the Docent Meeting on November 27, 2007 and the discussion of the availability of Docent Depot posts as printable documents, I have learned a new way to post Adobe PDFs (Portable Document Files) of docent training materials on the blog. You will now find a link in the column to the right for "Docent Depot Documents." If you click on the link, you will be taken to a new web page in which a list of documents will appear. From now on, you will find printable PDF files of all docent training materials on this page, with the most recent items listed first. Clicking on any of the documents listed will produce a PDF of that particular training material. You can then save the document to your own computer or print it as you desire! Check it out! If you think of something that should be in the list and you don't see it, send me an email describing what you were hoping to find, and I'll see what I can do to make it available.
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
The Legend of Tu-Tok-a-Nula a.k.a. El Capitan
Dear Docents-
Here’s a treasure I found in a book in the
While they worked, Tupi coaxed his grandmother to tell him the story of the measuring worm, Tu-tok-a-nula, and how he saved the little Indian children. She had told him the legend more times than she could remember, but she was always glad to tell it again.
One upon a time, long ago, two little Indian boys went swimming in the river which flows through the valley called A-wa-ni. When they tired of swimming they climbed up on a warm rock on the bank and went to sleep. While they slept the rock began to grow. It grew and grew until the top was in the clouds and the little Indians touched their noses against the moon. And still they slumbered on. Finally the children awoke, and seeing how far it was down to the valley, they began to cry. Feeling sorry for them, the animals tried to get them down. First the white-footed mouse and then the wood rat tried but they could only jump a short distance up the smooth rock. Next came the coyote, who went higher, then the grizzly bear, who gave a great leap but fell back. Finally the mighty lion tried, jumping farther than any of the others, but he also failed. When all had tried and failed, the little measuring worm, Tu-tok-a-nula, began to inch his way up the cliff. For many sleeps he climbed until at last he reached the top. Taking the little Indian boys on his back he made his way carefully down. By staying with his task the measuring worm succeeded where the great animals failed. In his honor the Indians named the great rock after him.*
Speaking in 1877 of the legend of Tu-tok-a-nula, Stephen Powers said: “This is not only a true Indian story, but it has a pretty meaning, being a kind of parallel to the fable of the hare and the tortoise that ran a race. What the great animals of the forest could not do the despised measuring worm accomplished simply by patience and perseverance. It also has its value as showing the Indian idea of the formation of
Monday, November 12, 2007
A / Part :: Constructions by Jeremy Mayer
Mayer is acutely aware of the multiple layers of meaning that exist in his works. He steadfastly resists the association of his sculptures with common robots, and instead looks to classical art, anatomy, and typewriter history for inspiration. For example, though Nude III (
Mayer’s sculptures reflect the passage of time and our tendency to relate emotion with objects. As symbols of a bygone era, typewriters evoke a sense of nostalgia. While Mayer dismantles typewriters, he maintains their original mechanical nature, never welding or soldering any components of his sculptures. Mayer’s works, then, lament the loss of visible technological processes—which in today’s world have largely shifted from mechanical to digital.
Margaret Whiting :: Laws of the Land Tour Blueprint
Introduction
About the Artist
A native of northern Minnesota, Margaret Whiting now lives and works in Waterloo, Iowa. She graduated in Medical Technology from the University of Minnesota and received a BA with an emphasis in printmaking and papermaking from the University of Northern Iowa. Whiting worked as a medical technologist for ten years, and now dedicates most of her time to her art. In addition, she performs workshops and teaches classes in paper and bookmaking. Whiting has participated in regional, national and international shows, and her work is included in museum and private collections around the country. Recently, her work was included in two national traveling exhibitions, American River and Paper Cuts: The Art of Contemporary Paper.
Artist’s Statement
I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use our natural resources, but I do not recognize the right to waste them, or to rob by wasteful use, the generations that come after us.
While reading these old law books, I sometimes circle words in the text and create new statements regarding land use and the fundamental need to protect it for future generations. I incorporate found objects from nature, images of animals in old science books or drawings of the land in geological surveys with the law book pages. I juxtapose the written word with seeds, leaves, fossils, shells and other materials collected from nature to create a dialogue between human behavior and the environment. Incorporating texture, I tear, crumple, pierce, fold or bale the books into landscapes. These alterations often reveal landforms within the book itself.
The layers of pages simulate the sedimentary rock deep within the earth’s crust. My manipulation of books is not meant to destroy them or to refer to the destruction of our laws. Instead, I transform them into objects that propose new relationships.
All laws are dispositions for the future… protect the land… it is one estate of inheritance.
NMA Text Panel
In her mixed media sculptures, Whiting does not intend to destroy legal documents and environmental laws, but instead aims to provide new contexts for the information they contain and the authority they possess. According to Whiting, law books, in particular, reveal society’s entrenched cultural priorities; the volumes with which she works often contain legal judgments that have significantly shaped history and that will continue to determine our collective future.
By interacting with and altering the language of the law, Whiting offers her perspective on the complicated relationship between humans and their environment. “American culture seems to have been formed upon opposition between humans and nature,” she has explained. “In reality, man versus nature is an illusion. We live in, depend on, and are part of an ecosystem.” Taken together, the sculptures in this exhibition remind us of the fragile balance that exists between human law and the laws of nature.
This exhibition is presented as part of the NMA’s Art + Environment exhibition series, an initiative that brings community, artists, and scholars together to explore the interaction between people and their environments.
Orientation
You’ll find the exhibition installed in the Feature Gallery North on the third floor. The majority of the pieces are wall-mounted, but a few large pedestals and platforms stand in the middle of the space as well. With these, it is important to take every precaution to ensure that the pieces are neither bumped nor moved, as they are extraordinarily fragile.
Tour Framework
Explain to guests that Margaret Whiting was raised in northern Minnesota in a small, rural mining community not unlike many communities in Nevada.
Ask guests to consider why an artist from such a community might be interested in art that has to do with environmental and land use law.
Ask guests to look at any one of Whiting’s pieces. What do they notice about it? From what does it appear to have been made?
Explain that Whiting’s background is in papermaking and book arts, the mode of artistic expression that takes the traditions of bookmaking, papermaking, letterpress printing, and printmaking as central forms.
Ask guests why they think that the artist might be interested in the relationship between the natural objects she uses—the seeds, shells, leaves, and rocks—and the pages of law books, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and natural history texts.
Ask guests what kinds of messages Whiting conveys by juxtaposing pages of law books and dictionaries with shells, seeds, and images from natural history texts.
Ask guests to look closely at the piece called There is Ground for Consideration but don’t convey to the group what the piece’s name is…yet.
Margaret Whiting, There is Ground for Consideration, law book pages, binder boards, objects from nature, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.Ask guests what they think are some of the notable characteristics of There is Ground for Consideration. What do they notice about the piece right away? What, if anything, do they notice differently or additionally after looking at the piece for a few moments?
Point guests’ attention to the fact that Whiting circles key words on each page of the book from which the piece is made. What words does she circle repeatedly in the pages of the book?
Ask guests why they think Whiting chooses these particular words as opposed to the many others she could have chosen to emphasize.
Ask guests what the words ground and grounds mean as legal terms. In contrast, what do the words mean in terms of place, space, or environment?
Listen to the responses offered to these questions, and offer encouragement to anyone who offers a response to your questions—this is difficult artwork with which to grapple.
Explain that Whiting’s artistic interests lie in book arts and papermaking, but also in the plays on words and double (or more) meanings inherent in the language used in “official” texts such as laws, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. For Whiting, there is a very interesting interplay between American history, land use, land law, and language.
Margaret Whiting, Analysis, 2006, rolled law book pages in test tube racks. Courtesy of the artist.Ask guests if they can think of any ways in which science connects people to the natural world. Can they also think of ways in which science seems to separate people from the natural world?
Encourage guests to think about the privileged status categories of knowledge such as “Science” and “Law” inhabit in our culture. For example, within our culture, scientists, judges, lawyers, and politicians enjoy a certain cultural “status” because of their work. How do such categories of knowledge compare to, say, “Art” or “Literature,” “Education,” “Carpentry” or “Farming?”
Explain to guests that Whiting is interested in these different “strata” or “levels” of knowledge, and the ways in which science and law often enjoy a higher status than art and humanities, and that her artwork raises questions about what are the “highest” or “best” ways to develop knowledge.
Encourage guests to look at the Law of the Land pieces in the gallery.
Explain that Whiting’s art, in addition to being examples of book arts and conceptual artwork, are also examples of abstract landscape artwork. Whiting cuts the books she uses laterally, and places the cut pieces side-by-side. The effect is a sort of silhouette or profile representation of a landscape, and harkens back to her interest in the words she highlights in the pages of the law books she uses: ground.
Ask guests to consider the piece entitled By Putting in More Cattle than the Pasture Can Sustain Both the Land and the Right of Common are Injured.
Ask what the guests make of the artist’s meaning.
Explain that the work references the ancient idea of the “tragedy of the commons.” This theory—largely based on ideas about economics—deals with conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good.
Explain that this is an idea that has roots in Aristotelian philosophy, but also in much more contemporary science writing—though it is not without controversy.
Explain that Whiting’s By Putting More Cattle […] gets at the problem of the use of common space—in this example it might be a cattle pasture, or Yosemite National Park—that suffers overuse because of unregulated use of the pasture by cattle, or unregulated use by National Park visitors.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
Yosemite: Art of an American Icon Tour Blueprint
Introduction
The Yosemite exhibitions consists of more than one hundred photographic prints, paintings, baskets, drawings, and media installations—all depicting and representing Yosemite National Park. The works range in time from 1855 to 2005, representing a century and a half of depictions of the park. Amy Scott, Curator of Visual Arts at Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West, curated all of the works for the exhibition, which come from the Autry’s permanent collection, as well as numerous private, public, and museum collections from around the U.S. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition, published by the University of California Press and the Autry National Center, is available for purchase at the museum store, and at local and online booksellers.
In addition to the rich artistic qualities of every one of the pieces in the show, the exhibition lends itself to rich discussions of California, National Park, and environmental history; tourism and railroad history; the human impact on and alteration of landscapes; ecology, biology, anthropology, and geology. Finally, the exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity to discuss the NMA’s collections and focus areas, as well as the Center for Art + Environment initiative.
The “Yosemite: Art of an American Icon” exhibition was organized by the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West and Amy Scott. Most recently the work was exhibited at the Oakland Museum of California; before that, its premiere exhibition occurred at the Autry National Center. After the show closes at NMA, the exhibition will be shown one last time at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Curator’s Statement
…myth and history are powerful, interwoven forces in the creation of the American West […and this exhibition helps] to reveal a much more profound understanding of the West as a place both real and invented, a place of historic consequence and contemporary distinction, a place full of diversity and situated within a unique environment…no landscape is more central to our obsession in the West with mythic places and historic destinations than Yosemite National Park. What began as a relatively straightforward concept— to assemble a major exhibition on this landscape
of artistic and historic consequence—soon evolved into a far reaching effort to reveal the ways that artists have shaped Yosemite’s cultural image and attendant value….
Orientation
You’ll find the exhibition installed in the Feature Gallery East and Feature Gallery South on the third floor, where you’ll see that the interior architecture of the gallery space has been altered to help facilitate the movement of people through the exhibition.
The exhibition is more or less chronological and organized into three broad categories—“Nature’s Cathedral,” “The People’s Playground,” and “Renewal,”—and it begins in the Feature Gallery East. Moving through the Feature Gallery East and then out through the new opening in the gallery wall, you’ll come to the Maurice Braun painting Yosemite Falls from the Valley (1918), where you should move to the right through the California Impressionism and Ansel Adams/Modernism sections. The remainder of the exhibition is still roughly chronological, but also organized thematically into the following areas: “Presence,” “Rocks,” “Water,” “Time,” and “Renewal”—these sections are somewhat looser, and require no commitment to a particular order or sequence.
The exhibition then concludes at the new wall near the elevator, where the kiosk and information about stereoscopic photography is located.
Relevant Vocabulary
Mammoth Plate is an oversize glass plate used to make a negative image in nineteenth-century photography
Albumen Print is a photographic print made on paper coated with albumen (egg white)
Ambrotype is a mid-nineteenth-century photographic type in which a positive image was recorded on collodion
wet plate.
Daguerreotype is an early photographic type in which an image is recorded on highly polished piece of metal coated with a light sensitive emulsion. Daguerreotypes
were one-of-a-kind images that could not be reproduced.
Wet Collodion is a nineteenth-century photographic type in which a piece of plate glass was coated with a silver halide emulsion and placed in a camera while still wet. A latent image was recorded, and then the wet plate was developed, fixed, and varnished to create a glass negative for production of stereograph and mammoth plate photographs.
Platinum Palladium Print is a kind of fine art photographic printing technique(see “Salt Dreams” blueprint for a detailed description).
Silver Gelatin Print is the most common form of twentieth-century black-and-white photographic print, in which a piece of paper is coated with a light-sensitive silver gelatin emulsion.
Stereograph is a popular nineteenth-century photograph in which two small, side-by-side images made using a special twin lens camera create the illusion of a three dimensional scene.
Sublime is a historical philosophical, literary, and art idea that contributed to Romanticism the notion of a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation. This greatness is often used when referring to nature and its vastness.
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, during the Industrial
Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature.
Hudson River School was a mid-19th century American art movement by a group of landscape painters, whose aesthetic vision was influenced by romanticism.
Pictorialism is an early twentieth-century photography
movement that was in vogue from around 1885 following the widespread introduction of the dry-plate process. It reached its height in the early years of the 20th century, and declined rapidly after 1914 after the widespread emergence of Modernism.
Pictorialism largely subscribed to the idea that art photography needed to emulate the painting and etching of the time.
Impressionism was a 19th century art movement that began as a loose association of Paris-based artists, who began exhibiting their art publicly in the 1860s. The name of the movement is derived from the title of a Claude Monet work, Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant), which provoked the critic Louis Leroy to coin the term in a satiric review published in Le Charivari
Modernism describes a series of reforming cultural movements in art and architecture, music, literature and the applied arts that emerged in the three decades
before 1914.
Manifest Destiny was a phrase that expressed the belief that the United States was destined to expand from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean; it has also been used to advocate for or justify other territorial acquisitions.
Nationalism is a term that refers to a doctrine or political movement that holds that a nation—usually defined in terms of ethnicity or culture—has the right to constitute an independent or autonomous political community based on a shared history and common destiny.
Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns.
Tour Framework—Introduction
Ask guests if they have ever been to Yosemite National Park, O’Shaughnessy Dam, Tuolumne Meadows, or the Mariposa Grove of Big Trees near Wawona, and about their experiences in and around the park.
Ask guests why they are interested in seeing the Yosemite exhibition—a good opportunity to explain that part of the purpose of the exhibition is to illustrate and document the many ways that Yosemite has been framed for viewing by so many different artists, many of whom have had a profound impact on the visual memory of Americans—e.g., Ansel Adams, Carleton Watkins, Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt, and Eadweard Muybridge.
Ask guests what images of Yosemite are prominent in their memories—is it perhaps either the Ansel Adams image of Clearing Winter Storm or Monolith: Half Dome? Or perhaps one of the great nineteenth-century paintings have created a sense of what the person expected to see the first time s/he visited Yosemite?
Thank guests for visiting, and explain that the exhibition is on loan to the NMA from the Autry National Center’s Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.
Explain to guests the basic layout of the exhibition, and that you plan to show them a variety of work in the exhibition, but that there isn’t time to see everything, so that you’ll be focusing on some specific pieces in your tour. Welcome guests to spend some time afterwards looking at things they you’re unable to get to in the tour. Or—welcome them to come back, maybe even several times!
Nature’s Cathedral
This first section of the exhibition contains the major portion of the historically significant (and famed) artwork in the show, including works by Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, Carleton Watkins, William Keith, and Eadweard Muybridge. The focusing ideas in this section of the exhibition have to do with nineteenth-century westward expansion, manifest destiny, romanticism, nationalism, the transcendentalist promise of spiritual renewal in nature, and the rise of the national park system idea.
Explain to guests that the first Euro-Americans to see the Yosemite region were probably part of the Walker party in 1833, but the first official entrants were part of the Mariposa Battalion, who, in 1851, were sent to forcibly remove the Indian inhabitants of Yosemite after the discovery of gold on John C. Frémont’s ranch in the Mariposa/Bear Valley area of the Sierra Nevada foothills. Shortly thereafter, in 1855, publisher James Mason Hutchings entered Yosemite with a party of men, including Thomas A. Ayres, who created the first drawing of Yosemite Falls ever made. Following this early drawing, such painters as Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith created grand, romantic, often very large landscape scenes of Yosemite—often rich in artistic metaphors about the American West generally (and Yosemite in particular). Yosemite was at one and the same time a new Eden, a source of nationalist pride in the New World for a young, and Civil War-embattled United States, and visual evidence of the rightness of Manifest Destiny.
As Kate Nearpass Ogden writes, “The romantic vision of Yosemite—timeless, simultaneously wild and pastoral, relatively unpeopled, suggestive of divine endorsement of American progress—became itself a historical force, shaping the valley’s development as a park, tourist destination, artistic subject, and icon of American wilderness generally” (24).
Thomas Ayres, The Yo-Hamite Falls, 1855
Explain that this lithograph is the first published image of Yosemite ever made.
James Mason Hutchings, a publisher and early Yosemite entrepreneur, commissioned Ayres to create the drawing used as the basis of lithograph, and he eventually used the image to promote Yosemite as destination for tourists through its publication in his magazine, Hutchings’ California Magazine.
Ask guests how many “sections” are visible in the Yosemite Falls image.
Explain that the distinctive three-tiered shape of the falls became, for nineteenth-century romantics like Bierstadt, Hill, and others, a powerful visual symbol that carried with it the symbolism of Christianity and manifest destiny.
Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, 1868
Ask guests what kind of feelings are conveyed by the Bierstadt’s representation of Yosemite Valley. Is the image tranquil or active? Warm or cold? Grand or ordinary? Frightful or happy? Peaceful or volatile? Is it a painting of a place that seems “new” or “old”? Why?
Explain that romantic paintings, such as this one by Bierstadt, were popular in the nineteenth century, particularly among the wealthy elite, for the artistic metaphors places like Yosemite could yield: the natural geology of Yosemite suggests Gothic cathedrals, making Yosemite a place of religious sanctity, and a place of far older importance than the cathedrals
of Europe. At the same time, the setting sunlight suggests a new golden era, notably to the west, with the promise of the future, and the ordained-by-God justification for American expansion—the basis of Manifest Destiny.
Enoch Wood Perry, Cathedral Rock, Yosemite Valley, 1866
Ask guests to reflect on the significance of the rock’s name, in light of ideas about manifest destiny and westward American expansion.
Ask guests to look closely at Perry’s painting.
Ask guests what “tricks,” tools, or techniques the artist uses to convey a sense of depth in the painting.
Hints: big shapes appear closer, smaller shapes appear more distant; subjects that appear closer are clearer and more detailed (the trees and water), while mountains in the distance appear hazier (such as the dome in the distant right, behind Cathedral Rock); the curving line of the waterfront leads the eye from the bottom edge of the painting back and to the right.
Can anyone see a deer running from a hunter? Where?
Virgil Williams, Along the Mariposa Trail, 1863
Explain that this artist, Virgil Williams, was a companion of both Bierstadt and Perry, the artists of the paintings on the wall to the left. All three traveled to Yosemite together, along with the writer Fitz Hugh Ludlow and geologist/metallurgist John Huston, in the summer of 1863.
Ask guests if they see any evidence in the painting that the figures represented in the lower right might be artists or writers. Any evidence that one of them is a scientist? Hints: the standing bearded figure holds an art portfolio or sketch pad, and the figure seated on the downed tree holds a chunk of rock and a hammer in his hands. Ask guests if anyone can see evidence that the men hunted for animals on their trip.
Antoine Claveau, Yosemite Falls, 1858
Explain that this painting may be the first painting ever made of Yosemite.
Ask guests to compare the feeling created by the painting to Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley. Is this painting tranquil and serene or volatile and menacing? How can you tell?
Ask guests who they think the figures in the painting might be? Are they members of the military? Politicians? Why or why not? Are they explorers or adventurers? Why or why not? What about tourists?
Explain that this painting, in addition to being thought the first painting of Yosemite ever made, also depicts tourists in Yosemite—an important element for the rise of the park system idea, and for the support of such artists as Bierstadt, Watkins, and others.
William Keith, Yosemite Valley, 1875
Hetch Hetchy, 1907-1910
Glacier Rock, 1869
Ask guests to compare the three paintings by William Keith, and see what kinds of words they use to describe the three different paintings.
Ask guests if they see evidence in the paintings of the artist’s style changing over time.
Explain that Keith took two trips to Europe, each bracketed by visits to the eastern United States, that had particularly strong effects on his artistic development. In 1869, 3 years after he first began exhibiting and selling paintings (and the same year as Glacier Rock, Yosemite was painted), he left San Francisco for visits to New York and Paris, and art study in Dusseldorf, Germany. By the time he returned to San Francisco in 1872 his painting style had changed considerably. The abundance of foreground detail typical of early works like Glacier Rock, Yosemite (1869) had been replaced by looser, sketchier brushstrokes as in Yosemite Valley (1875). Keith subscribed to the art critic and theorist John Ruskin’s ideas that art must be a faithful rendering of nature, but he became increasingly enthusiastic about a more "suggestive" approach to capturing the natural world on canvas. His European experience had consisted more of looking at art, talking with artists and painting on his own than of a formal art education. Keith's landscapes after 1885 generally became even looser in brushwork as well as moodier in effect as in Hetch Hetchy (1907-1910).
Explain that Keith first visited Yosemite in 1866, and that the earliest of the paintings by Keith were in the mold of the Hudson River School, in ways similar to Bierstadt and Thomas Hill.
Explain that Keith was also the artist most closely associated with John Muir, the writer and Yosemite devotee, who called Keith a “poet painter.”
Explain that in 1875, a few years after the completion of the transcontinental railroad, and the same year as Keith’s painting “Yosemite Valley,” Muir had complained about the “avalanche of tourists” coming to Yosemite.
Ask guests if they can see evidence of tourists in the painting.
Thomas Hill, Yosemite Valley (From Below Sentinel Dome, as Seen from Artist’s Point), 1876
Like many artists of his era, including William Keith nearby, Thomas Hill was influenced by the Hudson River School, and valued the practice of painting en plein-air. He created thousands of oil sketches in his lifetime, which are the basis of his larger, more famous works like Yosemite Valley,…
Hill moved to California in 1861, and from then on scenes of the California landscape, including Napa Valley, the Russian River, Lake Tahoe and Yosemite Valley make up the majority of his work. During his lifetime, Hill’s paintings were a huge success, and many of San Francisco’s millionaires of the period were his patrons, including business and railroad tycoons E.B. Crocker, William Ralston, William Sharon, D.O. Mills and Leland Stanford.
Explain that, unlike Bierstadt, Hill and William Keith were both based in California, where their fame grew rapidly. With improved access to Yosemite generating a larger tourist audience for his work, Hill’s reputation for painting Yosemite landscapes far outlasted his predecessors’.
Explain that Hill, along with Virgil Williams and Carleton Watkins, were consulted by the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead on aesthetic aspects of landscape management in Yosemite, when Olmstead was writing his 1865 “Preliminary Report.”
Explain that Hill is most well known for his monumental
landscapes, like Yosemite Valley,…, which was initially purchased by Leland Stanford, the former governor of California. By the 1880s, however, tourism in Yosemite was strong enough that Hill made the majority of his living selling smaller paintings to the park’s visitors.
William Hahn, Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, 1874
Remind guests that tourists have been featured in images of Yosemite they’ve already seen, but those figures have often offered only a narrative component to the paintings’ greater attention to the overwhelming scenery of Yosemite.
Explain that William Hahn’s painting of 1874 is the first to take tourism in Yosemite and the “emerging interest in Yosemite as a leisure destination” as a primary subject.
Ask guests how the painting portrays tourism in Yosemite.
Explain to guests that in 1872, just two years before the painting was made, the first horse trail to Glacier Point was opened.
Ask guests if the figures look as if they’re more ready for a leisurely outing or an adventure. Why?
Explain that “the inclusion of not only tourists, but also their trash makes Hahn’s [painting] the first Yosemite image to comment on the environmental implications of increasing visitation” (50).
Yosemite on Glass
The photographs in the “Yosemite on Glass” section are representative of the three most significant of Yosemite’s nineteenth-century photographers—Charles Leander Weed, Carleton E. Watkins, and Eadweard J. Muybridge—all of whom created photographs of Yosemite from glass negatives, using the wet plate collodion process, and printing them on paper using the albumen process. All three men were famed for their mammoth plates, unusually large, plate glass negatives designed to capture the large sweeping vistas of Yosemite (and other western sites). However, all three men also created numerous stereographs or stereoviews. These much smaller, side-by-side images were popular for armchair travelers after their invention in the 1840s, and they were comparatively inexpensive, which made them an increasingly popular tourist souvenir commemorating a visit to a wondrous place like Yosemite.
Charles Leander Weed, First View of the Falls, 1859, stereograph
The Yosemite Fall, 2634 Feet High, 1864, mammoth plate albumen print
Publisher and entrepreneur James Mason Hutchings made another visit to Yosemite in June, 1859, this time with photographer Charles Weed, rather than a painter or drawer, as he had in 1855 with Thomas Ayres. This was in part because Ayres’ drawings and lithographs, which had been published in Hutchings’ California Magazine in 1855, were deemed by readers to be fanciful—and Hutchings needed to prove that Yosemite Falls were indeed as dramatic as they had been earlier represented.
Explain that Weed took the first photograph of Yosemite in 1859, an imperial-sized (10x14-inch) salt print of Yosemite Falls. During this first visit, he made twenty imperial prints, and forty stereograph views of Yosemite, beginning what would become a game of one-upsmanship between the Yosemite photographers. Later, in 1864, Weed returned with a camera capable of holding 17x22-inch mammoth plates. Gold-toned albumen prints, a new technology that hadn’t been available in 1859, were made of these later negatives, which were richer and clearer than the earlier imperial salt prints.
Carleton E. Watkins
The four prints by Watkins included in the exhibition are all mammoth plate albumen prints from 1861-1865. He made his first visit to Yosemite in 1861, two years after Weed’s first visit, and three years before Weed’s second visit. This enabled him to make a name for himself as a Yosemite photographer, as his 18x22-inch mammoth plate images were very well received by the public, and by scientists such as Josiah D. Whitney, William Henry Brewer, and Clarence King. In a game of one-upsmanship, Charles Weed returned to the valley in 1864, and Watkins returned in 1865 with an even bigger camera with a higher quality lens.
Explain that the wet plate collodion process was an extraordinarily labor intensive photographic process. The artist would have to work quickly. First he had to clean a sheet of plate glass perfectly, removing any dust, lint, streaks, and so forth. Second, in the darkness of a tent, he coated the plate in a viscous, light-sensitive mixture of chemicals called collodion. Third, while the plate was still wet with collodion, the photographer would place the plate in a light-proof plate holder, slip it into the enormous cabinet of the large-format view camera, and remove a lens cap or board from the front of the lens or the front of the plate holder (he would have already trained and focused his lens on his subject), and make an exposure of a few seconds. The lens cap or board would be replaced, and the still-wet plate taken back to the dark tent, and developed, fixed, and varnished using a number of different chemical solutions.
Eadweard J. Muybridge
The three prints by Muybridge included in the exhibition are, like Watkins’, all mammoth plate albumen prints. The prints were made from the glass negatives (the negative-making process is described above) and then printed on albumen-coated paper. Photographic chemicals, namely silver salts, had to be bound to paper using albumen, or egg whites. The albumen printing process included the following steps: first, a piece of paper is coated with an emulsion of egg white (albumen) and table salt (sodium chloride), then dried. The albumen seals the paper and creates a slightly glossy surface. Second, the paper is dipped in a solution of silver nitrate and water which renders the surface light-sensitive. Third, the paper is dried in total darkness. Fourth, the dried, prepared paper is placed in a frame in direct contact under a negative, often a glass negative with collodion emulsion, and exposed to light until the image achieves the desired level of darkness. Fifth, a bath of sodium thiosulfate fixes the print’s exposure, preventing further darkening. Finally, optional gold or selenium toning improves the photograph’s
tone and stabilizes it against fading (e.g. the Weed photograph from 1864).
Explain to guests that all three of Yosemite’s nineteenth- century photographers created both mammoth plate photographs and smaller stereoviews. Like their painter counterparts, the photographers sold their mammoth plate prints to discerning collectors, often wealthy patrons including the likes of Leland Stanford, and their smaller stereoviews to tourists and armchair travelers elsewhere in the country.
Explain to guests that Muybridge’s images were differentiated from Watkins’ images by their frequently more unusual viewpoints, including from the top of the dried up Yosemite Falls.
Ask guests why people today get upset about photographs that might be “doctored” or “photoshopped.”
Ask guests to look closely at the Muybridge photograph, “Valley of the Yosemite from Union Point,” to see if they notice anything unusual about its appearance.
Explain that one of Muybridge’s tactics was to paint clouds directly on his negatives, or make separate negatives of clouds and then superimpose them on the landscape images to create a more dramatic, often more “painterly” approach in his photography—a direct manipulation of images not at all dissimilar from today’s “doctoring.”
Photography’s Workshop & California Impressions
After 1890, and with the official inclusion of Yosemite in the National Park System, more and more people came to Yosemite. Better roads made access by car possible; cheaper, lighter photography equipment made photography widely available; and the tourist trade in photography boomed.
Photographs by George Fiske, Herbert Gleason, William Dassonville, Anne Brigman, and Alfred Langdon Coburn; later images by Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston; and contemporary works by Bruce Davidson, Rondall Partridge, Ted Orland, Richard Misrach, John Divola, and Mark Klett lend themselves to a discussion of the twentieth century as the “photographic century.” The development of new technologies, especially gelatin silver, platinum, and digital printing ushered in multiple new versions of fine art photography.
Explain that the turn-of-the-century, neo-romantic movement of pictorialist photography yielded an entirely different kind of photography in Yosemite: soft focus, highly tonalist images were created to offer an alternative viewpoint from documentary-style photographs and the onslaught of snapshots made by less-than-discerning tourists. Pictorialist photographers such as Gleason, Brigman, and Dassonville “sought to infuse their images with spiritual and emotional meaning” (121). These photographers created images that were less about the place Yosemite than they were about the feelings and moods that could be evoked.
Ask guests to study one of the pictorialist photos (the Dassonville “Twilight, Yosemite Valley” and Coburn “California, Yosemite Falls” photographs are good places to start) and to comment on the moods or feelings evoked by the images.
Ask guests how theses moods and feelings compare to those evoked by the more documentary-style photographs of Weed, Watkins, and Muybridge.
Maurice Braun, Yosemite Falls from the Valley, 1918
Maurice Braun, Yosemite Evening from Glacier Point, 1918
Colin Campbell Cooper, Yosemite in Winter, 1916
Henry Sugimoto, Mirror Lake, Yosemite, 1930
Gunnar Widforss, Yosemite Valley, n.d.
These five paintings will yield a fruitful discussion of the staying power of impressionist styles of painting in California long after their popularity had waned in Europe.
Ask guests to consider what kinds of impressions of Yosemite are conveyed by the several different paintings.
Explain that Sugimoto was a Japanese immigrant artist, like the nearby Chiura Obata, who painted in a style influence by Cézanne and Van Gogh. He was interned in a relocation camp in Arkansas from 1942-1945.
Explain that Cooper made just one trip to Yosemite in 1916, despite the fact that he lived in Santa Barbara. Architecture and gardens were his most common subjects.
Ask guests if they can identify elements of Cooper’s architectural or garden interests in this, his one known painting of Yosemite.
Ask guests to compare the pictorialist photographs with those of Adams and Weston. In what ways are Adams’ and Weston’s photographs different from the pictorialist photographs.
Explain that Adams was originally influenced by romantic pictorialism, but that with Monolith: The Face of Half Dome, he experienced a breakthrough in his art. In preparing to make the photograph, Adams had a moment of clarity in which he envisioned the photograph he wished to take. He later called this epiphany his first “visualization,” where he realized that he could translate his feelings and thoughts to the finished print.
Explain that Adams worked with photographer Edward Weston, and that they and others founded F/64, a group of photographers who rejected the neo-romantic precepts of pictorialist photography.
Explain that F/64 refers to the smallest aperture opening on a view camera lens, the same aperture used to create the sharpest, clearest images with the greatest depth of field.
Ask guests to compare Weston’s and Adam’s photographs. In what ways are they similar? Different?
Ask guests to look closely at Chiura Obata’s sumi ink and watercolor paintings Snow, Merced River, New Moon, Eagle Peak, and Half Dome.
Explain that Obata spent six weeks in the summer of 1927 creating sumi ink and watercolor sketches that became the basis for a series of 35 woodblock prints called the “World Landscape Series.” Like Henry Sugimoto, who was interned in one of the relocation camps in Arizona, Obata was interned in Topaz, Utah, during WWII.
Revisiting Yosemite
Contemporary artists have responded to Yosemite’s multifaceted landscape in many ways. Though their work varies in style, several prominent themes have emerged since the 1970s that explore both the natural and artificial sides of the park. These include the ubiquitous presence of visitors, especially in the valley; the passage of time; Yosemite’s signature phenomena of rocks and water; and the notion that art can renew our interest in Yosemite and the park experience.
Presence
Bruce Davidson, Campground No. 4, Yosemite National Park,”1966, gelatin silver print
Ted Orland, One and a Half Domes, Yosemite, 1975, hand colored gelatin silver print
Roger Minick, Woman at Inspiration Point, Yosemite National Park, 1980, dye coupler photograph
Explain that these photographers, and others such as David Mussina, John Divola, Thomas Struth, and Brian Grogan, take different viewpoints from those photographers who preceded them.
Ask guests what kinds of messages are conveyed about Yosemite as a place, or about people’s experiences in Yosemite, by a photograph such as Struth’s “El Capitan.”
Explain that Struth has become an important photographer
because of his work examining people’s experiences in public places such as parks and museums.
Ask guests what kinds of responses that they have to Roger Minick’s photograph, “Woman at Inspiration Point.”
Rocks
Encourage guests to look closely at Richard Savini’s
series of drawings of Half Dome, Sunrise, Early Morning, Mid-Morning, and Late Morning.
Ask guests how the drawings are different from one another. How do the shadows change between the different times of the morning?
Ask guests to consider the messages of Richard Misrach’s photograph Burnt Forest and Half Dome, Yosemite, and compare them to those of Wanda Hammerbeck’s.
Water
Consider the Kristina Faragher media installation entitled Gaping Mouth.
Explain that “gaping mouth” is the meaning of the word given to the valley by its original residents.
Explain that the video installation contains 6-7 minutes of images of O’Shaughnessy Dam in Hetch Hetchy Valley, as well as images of El Capitan reflected
in the water, recalling the subjects of Carleton Watkins’ photographs.
Marina Moevs’s River”depicts a cabin on the river, overflowed and destroyed by the 1997 flooding of the rivers in Yosemite.
Ask guests how the painting’s warning about the destructive potential of the natural world compares to messages conveyed by its nineteenth-century predecessors’ such as Albert Bierstadt’s and Thomas Hill’s work?
Time
Take a few moments to study Above Lake Tenaya, Connecting Views from Edward Weston to Eadweard Muybridge, by Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe.
Explain that Klett is well known for his work rephotographing
sites in the American west, and that in this image, he brackets a number of images in a panorama. On the left is the 1937 Edward Weston image Juniper, Tenaya Lake, Sierra Nevada; and on the right, a historic photograph by Eadweard Muybridge. In between is a collage of Klett’s and Wolfe’s own photographs in contemporary times. What the photograph illustrates is that Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Weston stood within 150 feet of each other to frame their own individual photographs taken 70 years apart.
Conclusion
What distinguishes the contemporary art of Yosemite from its nineteenth-century prcedent [is] recognition of an animated, constantly changing landscape--natural and man-made--as well as our own power to affect that change. Where nineteenth-century artists saw a place of grand, static geology, contemporary artists see flux, both good and bad, with our own presence often as the driving force. In contemporary art we do not see Yosemite from afar but are brought into diret contact with the place and asked to face our role within it.