Crystal Bridges Is Only U.S. Venue to Host “Picturing the Americas”

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville is the only U.S. venue to host the new exhibition, Picturing the Americas, which explores landscape painting across the Western Hemisphere.

Picturing the Americas: Landscape Painting from Tierra del Fuego to the Arctic, is on view now through Jan. 18. General admission is $10 and the exhibition is free for members and youth ages 18 and under. Throughout the gallery, text is in both English and Spanish.

This exhibition is the first to explore the evolution of landscape painting from the early 19th century to the early 20th century in an inclusive, hemispheric context, according to a museum press release. Picturing the Americas was organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and the Terra Foundation for American Art. The exhibition arrives at Crystal Bridges from the Art Gallery of Ontario and will then travel to the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

It was co-curated by Peter John Brownlee, Curator of the Terra Foundation for American Art; Valéria Piccoli, Chief Curator of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; and Georgiana Uhlyarik, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Associate Curator of Canadian Art.

“This exhibition gives visitors a platform to go beyond territorial boundaries and expand conversations and connections to landscape painting across the Americas,” says Rod Bigelow, Crystal Bridges Executive Director. “It’s an honor to be the only U.S. museum where visitors can see this stunning exhibition, which connects deeply with the mission of Crystal Bridges to celebrate art and nature.”

Viewers can traverse a vast and magnificent land mass that extends from Canada’s Arctic to the icy tip of Argentina and Chile to see the landscape anew through more than 100 oil paintings, watercolors, and prints. The exhibition includes works by well-known American landscape painters, Frederic E. Church, Martin Johnson Heade, and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as masters from both North and South America, such as Jose Maria Velasco (Mexico), Juan Manuel Blanes (Uruguay), Lawren Harris (Canada), and Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil).

Highlights include, from South America, a depiction of Rio de Janiero, Félix-Émile Taunay’s Baia de Guanabara Vista da Ilha das Cobras, c. 1830; from the U.S., Albert Bierstadt’s Yosemite Valley, 1868; and Emily Carr’s Inside a Forest II, 1929-1930, from Canada.

Crystal Bridges curators invited Candessa Teehee, PhD, Executive Director of the Cherokee Heritage Center in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to add a Native American perspective to the exhibition, presented throughout the gallery in instructive material.