The Hudson: Art, Industry and Ecology

How has the human material and imaginative relationship to the local natural world changed as we transformed that world through development and use?  How have artists from different backgrounds documented and responded to these changes?  How have they envisioned responses that healed the environmental and social wounds caused by this development?

In the nineteenth century, painters who depicted sites along the Hudson River helped establish New York City as the capital of America’s art world.  During the same decades painters and tourists traveled upriver on steamboats to visit New York’s sublime landscapes, industrialists were building factories, foundries and mines along the Hudson’s shores, taking advantage of those same steamboats to move their products to market.  The profound, transformative industrialization of the Hudson continued and expanded through the second half of the twentieth century, at which point a nascent environmentalist movement effected the passage of laws that began to address the environmental damage it caused. 

Although the Hudson River School is seen as focusing exclusively on natural subjects, the painters recorded this history and, at times, responded critically to it.  In fact, artists have played a vital role in calling attention to the Hudson’s history of industrialization and its potential for recovery throughout the past two centuries.  At the same time, the aesthetic value of the river has been essential to the passage of environmental regulations. This course traces that story by looking closely at works of art and visiting sites associated with this history.  In addition to studying works of art tracing from early landscape painting to realist depictions of the social tolls of industry from the turn of the century to the environmental critiques of land artists and others from recent decades.  In addition, we will look at objects produced by artisans and other workers which shed light on diverse groups’ experiences of the history of the Hudson, including Native Americans, African-Americans, and immigrant laborers.

The class will combine lecture, discussion, and several field trips.  Students will produce two short critical papers and one longer essay and participate in an industrial site mapping project.