Shifting Shorelines

Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River offers a transhistorical reading of human endeavors along the edges of the Hudson as depicted through the observations of artists. The exhibition addresses both the appreciation of the river landscape and the industrial damage wrought by industrialization. By calling attention to distinct periods in the historical conflict between production and environmentalism, Shifting Shorelines signals the urgency of remediating the degradation recorded in the exhibited works. 

The cycles of human existence, commerce, and industry along the Hudson estuary are engaged through the gathered historic and contemporary artworks, visual culture objects, and material from environmental science. Focusing on the river’s edges, the exhibition presents a counter narrative to the idealized landscapes by nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters, who erased, obscured, and distanced the complex realities of the river. The growth of industry and unequal structures of ownership and labor, propelled the rapid growth of manufacturing along the Hudson and impacted its land, water, and air. By the twentieth century, several artists changed course and began to foreground the industrial sites that increasingly dotted the shoreline. In 1908, George Belllows painted Rain on the River, which highlights the railway and its controversial proximity to the river’s edge. In the twenty-first century, environmentally sensitive artists focused on exposing the damage that had become a conspicuous aspect of American modernization and industrialization.  

To contrast the rapid transformation of the river in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shifting Shorelines takes into account the chronology of various industries. Throughout, nature and culture intersect with space and time to yield an ecological history. For example, the Indigenous cultural objects by members of the Mohican Nation Stockbridge-Munsee Band represent a sustainable model for harnessing the region’s resources, one that predated European colonialism by millennia. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the exhibition includes scientific evidence to reveal the impact of this human and industrial intrusion, while contemporary artists respond to the deterioration and reclamation through photographic and conceptual practices. These elements foster climate awareness by advancing a profound sense of the burden of history. As an introduction to the contemporary state of the landscape, the 84 sequential images that make up Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Up River: Man-Made Sites of Interest on the Hudson from the Battery to Troy (2006), represent the river as a coherent linear whole, revealing the extent of its industrialization that has spurred environmental activism.

Exhibition curators: Annette Blaugrund, Betti-Sue Hertz, Elizabeth Hutchinson, Dorothy M. Peteet. 

Participating artists: 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, Palmer Hayden, Donna Hogerhuis, Edward Hopper, 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.

On view through Sunday, January 12, 2025, Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology along the Hudson River is free and open to the public from noon to 6pm, Wednesday through Sunday.

For more information visit wallach.columbia.edu. 

Shifting Shorelines, and the accompanying publication, are made possible, in part, by the generous support of the Terra Foundation for American Art, Wyeth Foundation for American Art, Dr. Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation, The Lunder Foundation—Peter and Paula Lunder Family, and an anonymous donation in memory of Stanley M. Blaugrund, M.D. Wallach Art Gallery’s exhibition program is made possible with support from the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Endowment Fund and the gallery’s patrons.