Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle / Contemporary Practices

by Nancy Siegel, Kate Menconeri, Amanda Malmstrom

Expands the canon of American landscape art to illuminate the contributions of women artists.
 
Illuminating the artistic contributions and perspectives of women, this book reinserts the important 19th-century American artist Susie Barstow into the history of the Hudson River School and presents contemporary artists who expand how we think about “land” and “landscape” today. Engaging multigenerational perspectives, it launches an expanded narrative that recenters women in the canon of American landscape art.

Well known during her lifetime, Susie Barstow (1836-1922) was widely celebrated and exhibited alongside Hudson River School artists Asher B. Durand and Albert Bierstadt but was later erased from American art history. It further explores how artists working today complicate and challenge landscape through multi-disciplinary artistic practices and diverse viewpoints. Featured contemporary artists include Teresita Fernández, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk.  

Women Reframe American Landscape , which accompanies an exhibition at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and the New Britain Museum of American Art, includes new research, original essays by the curators, and texts and plates by the artists. 

128 pages, Hardcover

Published July 1, 2023

About the author

Nancy Siegel is Professor of Art History and Culinary History at Towson University and specializes in American landscape studies, underrepresented women artists of the 19th century, print culture, and culinary history of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her most recent book Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School complements the 2023-2024 touring exhibition she is co-curating for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle/Contemporary Practices. This exhibit builds upon her 2010 exhibition, Remember the Ladies: Women of the Hudson River School. She is co-curating a 2025 exhibition, Curious Taste: The Appeal of British Satire and completing the manuscript, Political Appetites: Revolution, Taste, and Culinary Activism in the Early Republic which is in development as a documentary for PBS. She provides historical cooking demonstrations and lectures widely on landscape and culinary histories in addition to serving as a culinary consultant for museums and non-profit institutions. Dr. Siegel has also authored/edited publications such as The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting; River Views of the Hudson River School; Within the Landscape: Essays on Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture; Along the Juniata: Thomas Cole and the Dissemination of American Landscape Imagery; and The Morans: The Artistry of a Nineteenth-Century Family of Painter-Etchers. Her work has also appeared in Gastronomica, The Burlington Magazine, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide.
She has been the recipient of numerous research grants and fellowships including: the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library; the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture- Georgian Papers Programme Fellowship at Windsor Castle, Windsor, UK; Terra Foundation for American Art; New England Regional Fellowship Consortium: Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Massachusetts Historical Society, Connecticut Historical Society, Historic Deerfield; the Smithsonian American Art Museum; the American Antiquarian Society; Yale University; Winterthur Museum & Country Estate; the Massachusetts Historical Society; the Culinary Historians of Chicago; the New York Public Library; the Tavolozza Foundation, and the Furthermore Foundation.