Northshore Magazine

Northshore April 2019

Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.

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NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 44 APRIL 2019 Driving to view the latest exhibition at Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, I hap- pened to tune in to Margery Egan and Jim Braude on WGBH, who were discussing the pros and cons of the Green New Deal—legisla- tion that sets some lofty goals to cut carbon emissions across the economy, from electricity generation to transportation to agriculture. is was a fitting, if serendipitous, prelude to "Nature's Nation: American Art and Environ- ment," a show with more than 100 works that originated at the Princeton University Museum of Art last year and will be on view at PEM through May 5. This is the first exhibition to examine how American and Native American artists have reflected and shaped our understand- ing of the environment (in its broadest sense) over the last 300 years. The featured works, including several from PEM's own collec- tion, are by artists such as Ansel Adams, John James Audubon, Winslow Homer, and Geor- gia O'Keefe, and are drawn from museums and private collections around the country. The show was co-curated by Karen Kramer, PEM's curator of Native American and Oceanic art and culture, and Austen Barron Bailly, PEM's curator of American Art. An extensive mixed-media installation on the museum's second floor, the exhibition does not shy away from environmental poli- tics, but it doesn't hit you over the head with them either, at least not at first. Viewers are drawn into this controversial territory by the more accessible mechanism of art through the ages and in myriad forms, including Mary McDonald is the owner of Tinkerhaus. The space has a variety of tools to create works of art such as sewing machines and 3-D printers. L I V E + P L AY paintings, photographs, works on paper, sculpture, and even video. After viewing the show, I dare even the least activist-minded among us to leave without considering the implications of how art comes about and the uses it's put to. Nature's Nation is divided into categories, such as "Portraiture," "Landscapes," "Cities," and "Ethics," that flow into one another more or less chronologically after the showstopping giant eyeball that ushers you, a bit ominously, into the exhibition. Representing a two-mile balloon installation called Repellent Fence, which was created on the United States and Mexico border by the artist group Postcommidity in 2015, the outsize scare eye is the first of several provocative pieces mixed in with the more traditional artwork that follows. For example, a selection of iconic landscape paintings, such as Thomas Moran's 19th-century Lower Falls, Yellowstone Park, portray American scenery as pristine, uninhabited, and abounding in A new exhibition at the Peabody Essex Museum examines how artists both past and current influence our understanding of the environment. BY JANICE RANDALL ROHLF THE NATURE OF ART Clockwise from top, Martin Johnson Heade, Orchid and Hummingbirds near a Mountain Lake, about 1875-90. Oil on canvas. Collection of Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch. Photography by Bob Packert/Peabody Essex Museum; Albert Bierstadt, Owens Valley, California, about 1872. Oil on panel. Collection of Carolyn A. and Peter S. Lynch. Photography by Bob Packert/Peabody Essex Museum; View of Dining Area, Peter Lynch Boston House. © Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Stephen Petegorsky.

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