Join us on January 11th from 6:00 to 7:00pm as Dr. Keri Watson shares a lecture titled, “Westward Ho!: Manifest Destiny and the American Landscape” at Mennello Museum of American Art.
Art and the environment work hand-in-hand, as art has played a key role in both the development and protection of the nation’s scenic landscapes. During the nineteenth century, artists working in the Hudson River Valley created paintings of the region’s lakes, rivers, and mountains to protect and preserve them, and the paintings of Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt and Yellowstone by Thomas Moran helped establish the National Park Service. At the same time, images of the landscape have contributed to settler colonialism, displacement, and over-development. Taking inspiration from In Nature’s Studio: Two Centuries of American Landscape
Paintings, this presentation explores the interconnectedness of art, nature, and politics.
Keri Watson is Assistant Director of the School of Visual Arts and Design, Associate Professor of Art History, and Director of the Florida Prison Education Project at the University of Central Florida. She serves as a Board Member for the Association of Historians of American Art, Co-Executive Editor and Finance and Grants Manager for Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, and is the author of Florida’s New Deal Parks and Post Office Murals (forthcoming), and co-author (with Julia Listengarten) of Visual and Performing Arts Collaborations In Higher Education: Transdisciplinary Practices (2023), and co-author (with Keidra Daniels Navaroli) of This is America: Re-Viewing the Art of the United States (2023). She is the co-editor (with Timothy Hiles) of the Routledge Companion to Art and Disability (2022).
🎟️ Regular museum admission is required upon entry. RSVP via ticket link!