Synopsis
Shifting Shorelines, published in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition, brings together historical and contemporary art, material culture, and environmental science to engage in an interdisciplinary critical dialogue. Through visual, ecological, and material evidence the authors demonstrate the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation. In so doing, the publication offers a counter reading of the received art historical narratives about the "scenic Hudson" - narratives overwhelmingly grounded on the work of white male artists - and aims for a rich and complex understanding of the legacy, lives, and livelihoods along the river informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators. By focusing deeply on a specific place, this richly illustrated collection of essays offers a story of human and more-than-human history that reverberated across the country on other industrialized rivers such as the Mississippi, Ohio, and Columbia.
About the Authors
Annette Blaugrund, former director of the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts (1997–2007), has published and lectured widely on American art and culture. She was the Andrew W. Mellon senior curator at the New-York Historical Society and a curator at the Brooklyn Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. She has written sixteen books about American art, including Paris 1889: American Artists at the Universal Exposition (1989), The Tenth Street Studio Building (1997), John James Audubon (1999), and Thomas Cole: The Artist as Architect (2016). In 1992 she was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government and in 2008 received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design. She has a Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University (1987), where she taught American art (1996–2001). She is consulting curator at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, sits on Columbia University Art History Department’s Advisory Council, and is co-curator and project manager for this exhibition and catalogue.
Betti-Sue Hertz became Director and Chief Curator at Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery in 2019. Her curatorial and scholarly work focuses on the intersection of critical visual culture, transnational exchange, and socially relevant issues. Hertz was Director, Longwood Arts Project, Bronx (1992–98); Curator of Contemporary Art, San Diego Museum of Art (2000–2008); Director of Visual Arts, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (2008–15); and Public Arts Consultant, TLS Landscape Architecture (2015–20). Hertz has organized more than sixty exhibitions during her career. She was a member of Stanford Art Institute’s Creative Cities Working Group (2016–19) and a founding member of RepoHistory (1989–2000). Hertz received a B.A. from Goddard College, an M.F.A. from Hunter College, and a Ph.D. in Art History from the City University of New York. She has taught social art history and theory at Stanford University, San Francisco Art Institute, and University of California, Berkeley.
Dorothy M. Peteet is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA/Goddard Institute for Space
Studies and Adjunct Professor, Columbia University. She directs the Paleoecology Division of the New Core Lab at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia and in collaboration with GISS climate modelers is studying the Late Pleistocene and Holocene archives of lakes and
wetlands. Peteet has written over 100 publications and has received grant support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Her recent research focuses on human impact documented by forest decline, pollution history, invasive species, and carbon storage in Hudson River marshes.
Elizabeth W. Hutchinson is Tow Associate Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her research is centered on the relationship between the visual culture of various North American groups and its viewers. Key issues motivating her work include visuality and modernity, transculturation in the arts of the Americas, and comparative analyses of the visual culture of the United States and other colonial cultures. She has written extensively on how Native Americans used “modern” art to negotiate a place for themselves within industrial culture at the turn of the twentieth century. She is the author of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism and Transculturation in Native American Art, 1890–1915 (2009). She has received support for her work from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Winterthur.
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