Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River

Shifting Shorelines brings together historic and contemporary art, visual culture, and environmental science to engage the history of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary. Focusing on the river’s edges from Albany southward to its flow into the Atlantic Ocean, the exhibition foregrounds the impact of local industry on the natural environment, highlighting the history of the river's distinctive ecological features such as brackish and salt marshes, mudflats, and beaches, along with the docks, factories, and buildings that crowded them out. Through visual and material evidence, Shifting Shorelines demonstrates the various cycles of exploitation, damage, and reclamation.

SELECTED ARTWORKS IN THE EXHIBITION

Shifting Shorelines actively engages in a critical dialogue with images of the river as a natural paradise by showing these seemingly hegemonic portrayals alongside contrasting representations that consider the exploitation and environmental damage to the river that has accompanied many of the human endeavors along its shores. In so doing it offers a counter reading of the received art historical narratives—narratives overwhelmingly grounded on the work of white male artists—that aims for a rich and complex understanding of the legacy, life, and livelihoods along the river informed by the voices and experiences of a broad range of creators.

CURATORIAL TEAM

Annette Blaugrund, Former Director National Academy Museum, Consulting Curator Thomas Cole National Historic Site

Betti-Sue Hertz, Director and Chief Curator, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University

Elizabeth Hutchinson, Tow Associate Professor of American Art History, Barnard College/Columbia University

Dorothy Peteet, NASA/GISS and Adjunct Senior Research Scientist, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University Biology and Paleo Environment