Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River
Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University | New York, NY
October 5, 2024 – January 12, 2025
Featuring Courtney M. Leonard
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
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.
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.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication as well as academic and public programming.
ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION
Henry Ary • Victor Gifford Audubon • Alvin Baltrop • Gifford Reynolds Beal • Julie Hart Beers • George Bellows • Daniel Putnam Brinley • Johann Hermann Carmienke • Frederic Edwin Church • Thomas Cole • Glenn O. Coleman • Samuel Colman • Thomas Commeraw • John V. Cornell • Jasper F. Cropsey • Henry Golden Dearth • Aaron Douglas • Joellyn Duesberry • Ernest Fiene • Kryn Frederycks • Reva Fuhrman • Emil Ganso • Marie-François-Régis Gignoux • Shi Guorui • David Hammons • Joost Hartgersz • Palmer Hayden • Edward Hopper • Donna Hogerhuis • Every Ocean Hughes • William Henry Jackson • Yvonne Jacquette • David Johnson • Abraham Leon Kroll • Athena LaTocha • Ernest Lawson • An-My Lê • Courtney M. Leonard • Marie Lorenz • George Benjamin Luks • John Marin • Reginald Marsh • Gordon Matta-Clark • Alex Matthew • Alan Michelson • Charles Frederick William Mielatz • Jacques Gerard Milbert • Thomas Moran • William H. Moschett • Ruth Orkin • Anthony Papa • Lisa Sanditz • Henry Schnakenberg • Jean-Marc Superville Sovak • Alfred Stieglitz • Joseph Vollmering • John Ferguson Weir • Worthington Whittredge
ABOUT COURTNEY M. LEONARD
Courtney Leonard Artist Portrait
Courtney M. Leonard is an artist and filmmaker, who has contributed to the Offshore Art movement. Leonard’s current work embodies the multiple definitions of “breach”, an exploration and documentation of historical ties to water, whale and material sustainability.
In collaboration with national and international museums, cultural institutions, and indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and the United States Embassies, Leonard’s practice investigates narratives of cultural viability as a reflection of environmental record.
