Exploring Horizon Line: Icons of a New Eden 19th-Century American Landscape Painting

Thomas Cole (American, 1801 - 1848), Untitled Landscape, undated. On loan from the Hickory Museum of Art. Museum Purchase 1954.3.12 Photo: Josh White. About the program: In early-nineteenth century America, citizens of the young country began to seek out accurate depictions of places. They had a real sense of the specialness of their new country—its wide expanse and its seemingly limitless natural resources. As the century progressed, members of the Hudson River School, a loosely affiliated art movement based in New York City, began producing expressive, Romantic interpretations of the landscape.  They traveled across the country and to other continents in search of wild and pristine places to paint. Along the way, they explored spiritual, political, and ecological themes in their work, often on a grand scale. In this talk, Allison Slaby, curator at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, will present and discuss several stunning landscape paintings depicting America as a New Eden. About the Speaker: Allison Slaby Allison Slaby is the curator at Reynolda House Museum of American Art in Winston- Salem, North Carolina. She joined the Reynolda House staff in September 2005. At Reynolda, she has curated over fifty exhibitions, including (as co-curator with William L. Coleman, Brandywine Museum), Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth, with an essay in the accompanying catalogue of the same name published by Rizzoli Electa in 2025. Other major exhibitions include Chrome Dreams and Infinite Reflections: American Photorealism and the Fall 2016 exhibition, Grant Wood and the American Farm. In 2016, she published a paper entitled “Grant Wood’s Agrarian Landscapes: Myth, Memory, and Control” in Formations of Identity: Society, Politics and Landscape (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016). Ms. Slaby is a graduate of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. In 2002, she earned her master’s degree in art history, specializing in American art, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Previously, she held positions at the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, at Harvard University, and at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library in Washington, D.C. This program is presented free to the public through the generosity of the Bryant and Nancy Hanley Foundation.