Women Reframe Land: Contemporary Practices

This conversation with Kate Menconeri and Amanda Malmstrom, Thomas Cole National Historic Site curators, will explore the curatorial vision and contemporary artwork included in Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices, the two-part and transhistoric exhibition originating at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY. In conversation with the first retrospective of the nineteenth-century American landscape painter Susie M. Barstow (curated by Dr. Nancy Siegel), Menconeri and Malmstrom co-curated a contemporary presentation of 13 artists—Teresita Fernández, Guerrilla Girls, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Wendy Red Star, Jean Shin, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk—to recenter women in the canon of American landscape art and expand how we think about land and landscape today. Responding to and at times challenging historical narratives, many of the artists worked closely with the curators to create unique, site-responsive installations at the Thomas Cole Site’s 1815 Main House, 1830s studio, and outside. This talk will explore the organization of the exhibition, approached with an openness to possibility in a moment when the very terms in use—“landscape,” “American,” and “women artists”—feel inadequate, if not problematic, to fully represent the complexities of gender and our relationship with land and place. Menconeri and Malmstrom will also spotlight individual artists and their unique creative visions, which encourage a rethinking of landscape art in the United States as dynamic, multifaceted, and evolving, and as also created and interpreted by women.